Jonathan Zittrain

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. Twenty years after it was first litigated in earnest, the U.S. Communications Decency Act’s §230 remains both obscure and vital. Section 230 nearly entirely eliminated the liability of Internet content platforms under state common law for bad acts, such as defamation, occasioned by their users. The platforms were free to structure their moderation and editing of comments as they pleased, without a traditional newspaper’s framework in which to undertake editing was to bear responsibility for what was published. If the New York Times included a letter to the editor that defamed someone, the Times would be vulnerable to a lawsuit (to be sure, so would the letter’s author, whose wallet size would likely make for a less tempting target). Not so for online content portals that welcome comments from anywhere—including the online version of the New York Times.

Executives of Facebook, Twitter and Google pledged to Congress this week to do more to prevent the fakery that has polluted their sites. “We understand that the people you represent expect authentic experiences when they come to our platform,” Colin Stretch, the general counsel of Facebook, told the Senate Intelligence Committee...Jonathan L. Zittrain, who studies the internet and society at Harvard, said the companies are reluctant to aggressively purge bogus users and deceptive content because of their business model, which is built on signing up more and more people. “These platforms are oriented to maximize user growth and retention,” Mr. Zittrain said. “That means not throwing up even tiny hurdles along the sign-up runway, and not closing accounts without significant cause. I suspect they figure there are enough accounts that are the subject of complaints to review without looking for more to assess.”

In the media world, as in so many other realms, there is a sharp discontinuity in the timeline: before the 2016 election, and after. Things we thought we understood—narratives, data, software, news events—have had to be reinterpreted in light of Donald Trump’s surprising win as well as the continuing questions about the role that misinformation and disinformation played in his election...In June 2014, Harvard Law scholar Jonathan Zittrain wrote an essay in New Republic called, “Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out,” in which he called attention to the possibility of Facebook selectively depressing voter turnout. (He also suggested that Facebook be seen as an “information fiduciary,” charged with certain special roles and responsibilities because it controls so much personal data.)

What if the algorithm is racist? As computers shift from being helpmates that tackle the drudgery of dense calculations and data handling to smart machines informing decisions, their potential for bias is increasingly an area of concern...Christopher Griffin, research director of the Law School’s Access to Justice Lab, described pretrial detention systems that calculate a person’s risk of flight or committing another crime — particularly a violent crime — in making bail recommendations...Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law and faculty chair of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, which sponsored the event, said the danger of these systems is that the output of even a well-designed algorithm becomes biased when biased data is used as an input.

Should sophisticated computer models help judges predict which defendants are safe enough to release before trial? Or should judges rely on their own wisdom, discretion, and experience to make those decisions?...Jonathan L. Zittrain, a Harvard law professor, pointed out that computerized risk scores assigned to criminal defendants could be based on data that is biased because it comes from a criminal justice system in which people of color are disproportionately stopped and arrested...But Christopher L. Griffin, Jr., research director at Harvard Law’s Access to Justice Lab, said predictive models could be helpful in guiding judges by adding to the range of data available to them when they decide whether to jail or release defendants before trial. “We like to think of these tools as not necessarily de-biasing mechanisms, but information-enhancing ones that increase the signal-to-noise ratio,” he said.

Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election...The revelations come at a moment when investigators are widening their probe into how Russian operatives used Facebook, Twitter, Google and other technology platforms to widen fissures in the United States and spread disinformation during election season...“There’s been some thought that the Internet was a goose laying golden eggs, but now there’s a sense that all the eggs are not golden,” said Jonathan Zittrain, faculty director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Donald Trump has maintained for seven months that he cannot release his tax returns because he is being audited by the Internal Revenue Service, making him the first major-party nominee for president since Gerald Ford to withhold such records from the public...“The courts could say, if the public thinks the tax returns are so important, let it demand that the candidate authorize the IRS to release them on pain of losing votes,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a privacy expert and professor at Harvard Law School.

Facebook lives and dies by its algorithms. They decide the order of posts in your News Feed, the ads you see when you open the app, and which which news topics are trending. Algorithms make its vast platform possible, and Facebook can often seem to trust them completely—or at least thoughtlessly. On Thursday, a pitfall of that approach became clear. ProPublica revealed that people who buy ads on Facebook can choose to target them at self-described anti-Semites...To Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law at Harvard University, that story suggests the entire way that tech companies currently sell ads online might need an overhaul. “For categories with tiny audiences, with titles drawn from data that Facebook users themselves enter—such as education and interests—it may amount to a tree falling in a forest that no one hears,” he said.

Billions of internet-connected things like smart light bulbs are expected to pop up in our homes and businesses in the coming years. And a group of senators wants to help make them more secure. The bipartisan group introduced a bill on Tuesday to address some concerns regarding the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). It would require any companies that provide the federal government with internet-enabled devices to meet basic security requirements...Also included in the bill is a provision that some security researchers should be able to look for vulnerabilities in smart devices without the threat of a lawsuit. Currently, researchers are hamstrung by certain laws. "It's an important step in vindicating the principal that one of the best ways to understand the vulnerabilities of something is to be able to tinker with it," said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law professor.

U.S. lawmakers unveiled a bill this week that, if passed, would set basic security standards for connected devices from wearables to environmental sensors purchased by federal agencies. The bill, called the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2017, would require devices to have software that can be patched and passwords that can be altered before being sold to the U.S. government...While the legislation will provide companies with a set of guidelines, it does little to directly regulate security, said Jonathan Zittrain, a founder of Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. But it could motivate companies eyeing sales to the government, which has a $95 billion technology war chest under President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for next year. “This bill deftly uses the power of the Federal procurement market, rather than direct regulation, to encourage Internet-aware device makers to employ some basic security measures in their products,” Zittrain said in a statement.

...Now, a small group of scientists and thinkers believes there could be an alternative, a way to save the president—and the rest of us—from him- or herself. As soon as technology advances far enough, they think we should put a computer in charge of the country...Jonathan Zittrain, an internet law professor at Harvard Law School, thinks that even with A.I.’s flaws, computers could serve as checks against human biases. “A.I., properly trained, offers the prospect of more systematically identifying bias in particular and unfairness in general,” he wrote in a recent blog post.

What has come to be called “fake news” is a hard problem to solve, if indeed it is solvable at all. This is because it is created by the interaction of human psychology with several forces: the affordances of digital technology, the business models of giant internet companies and the populist revolt against globalisation. But that hasn’t stopped people trying to solve the problem...Wikipedia, like any social organisation, has many flaws and problems, but it’s still better than any of us ever expected. Some years ago, a Harvard scholar, Jonathan Zittrain, published a remarkably prescient book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, in which he accurately predicted much of what would happen to the internet in the years following the invention of the smartphone. At the time, many readers were puzzled by the fact that Professor Zittrain devoted a chapter of the book to an extensive discussion of Wikipedia’s governance processes. In fact, it was a mark of his prescience.

United States and elsewhere shouldn’t be able to read them, either, ordering Facebook to erase the postings from its networks around the world. Austria is, in effect, declaring that its hate-speech laws can be enforced globally, against any online entity. So if an Internet service publishes something nasty enough to offend an Austrian, the judge’s reasoning is that Austrian law should apply — regardless of where the content was published. And if Austria can bring Facebook to heel anywhere in the world, so can any other country. It’s easy to see why Facebook is digging in for a hard fight. The news didn’t shock Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain, who foresaw this problem in a 2003 research paper. “I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner,” he said to me.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. There are two big problems with America’s news and information landscape: concentration of media, and new ways for the powerful to game it. First, we increasingly turn to only a few aggregators like Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s going on the world, which makes their decisions about what to show us impossibly fraught. Those aggregators draw—opaquely while consistently—from largely undifferentiated sources to figure out what to show us. They are, they often remind regulators, only aggregators rather than content originators or editors. Second, the opacity by which these platforms offer us news and set our information agendas means that we don’t have cues about whether what we see is representative of sentiment at large, or for that matter of anything, including expert consensus.