Christchurch Call pushes against the algorithms

New Zealand is leading a bid to break open social media’s secret algorithms as part of The Christchurch Call  response, with backing from some big tech outfits. But without input from the biggest ones, will it undercut the extremism on social media platforms?  Mediawatch asks a social media pioneer who founded the forerunner of Twitter, but now wants to break the power of the big platforms.

The Christchurch Call was kickstarted in Paris two years ago with a hiss and a roar, but the latest developments last week didn't make so many headlines. 

This time Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and France’s President Macron launched an initiative backed by Microsoft and Twitter to research the social media algorithms that amplify misinformation.

Ardern also told the UN General Assembly that online platforms had become “a weapon of war.” 

“What if that lie, told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others to take up arms? To threaten the security of others. To turn a blind eye to atrocities, or worse, to become complicit in them. What then?” she asked. 

“This is no longer a hypothetical. The weapons of war have changed, they are upon us and require the same level of action and activity that we put into the weapons of old.”

"I think it's very hard for governments to say they are going to step in and regulate something that is so poorly understood,” Ardern told reporters later.  

But Meta - the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - and TikTok’s Chinese parent company Bytedance are not taking part in this Christchurch Call project. 

And the fast growing platforms most likely to host the misinformation that plays a role in radicalizing people - like Rumble or the messaging app Telegram - were never part of the plan in the first place. 

Can the Christchurch Call’s bid to crack open algorithms actually make social media safer without compromising fundamental freedoms? 

Evan Henshaw-Plath is a social media innovator who helped create the platform Odeo in the mid 2000s, which later morphed into Twitter in 2006. 

Twitter went on to lead the pack in micro-blogging and his former colleague Jack Dorsey became Silicon Valley aristocracy. 

“It is fine if ... there is some Nazi propaganda on the Internet. If you want to know about what the Nazis thought in the 1930s and 40s, it's fine to read about that. [But] if you want to see a whole bunch of disinformation that's about recruiting people, and take them from one video to the next video to the next video to next video to all of a sudden things that are white supremacist ... this is what the algorithm does,” Evan Henshaw-Plath told Mediawatch.

“It's not about controlling what information is available. It's about understanding the way engagement works and how people are going through it. It's complicated and it's easy to get the regulation wrong. But the regulation is the only thing that's going to change the behavior of these corporations,” said Henshaw-Plath, who left the US for Wellington this year to work on on social media platforms that cannot grow to the scale of Twitter, Facebook or TikTok - or do the kind of harm that the huge platforms are now in the gun for. 

Those algorithms are private property of some of the biggest companies in the world. Is the Christchurch Call’s research going to help? 

“They're considered trade secrets, but that doesn't have to be the way. There's a bunch of movements - including the Algorithmic Justice League, where people are - we need to be able to see what these algorithms are and how they're designed. And we need to be able to compare them,” Henshaw-Plath told Mediawatch.

Users of his own service, Planetary, can choose the algorithms they want to use - and amend them. 

“If you're a programmer, you could actually see how we implement the algorithms - and contribute to that so they get algorithms for what they want and not what the platforms want.

Henshaw-Plath said it was in the big platforms' own interests to understand the impact of their algorithms. 

“Facebook has put a bunch of funding, ironically enough, into privacy research. At Planetary, we’re using a bunch of research through Oxford (University) that's been funded by Facebook."

People mocked the juvenile way Mark Zuckerberg launched the Metaverse concept. But if this much more immersive and intense online experience is as popular as Facebook, will that further amplify the impact of bad things? 

“We always worry about emerging media. You can find essays about how dangerous the novel is because it was keeping people inside. And same thing with the telephone and the radio and television and newspapers and web and email and now  . . . social media,” Henshaw-Plath said. 

“Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini couldn't come to power without the radio. We couldn't have that kind of unified, totalitarian authoritarian state without radio. 

“But it's important to remember that, for example, trans people were all in the closet 10 years ago, but they were able to see themselves represented in social media, whereas the media before that never gave them a voice.

“And then once they saw each other represented, they were able to come out of the closet.

“But what we have now is fundamentally different. With the Metaverse, augmented reality and virtual reality, an immersive world is going to transform different forums - but we don't know where. 

“What we need to do is look at which spaces and which activities encourage this kind of authoritarian, strong leader behavior; encourage this kind of strong in-group and out-group behavior, especially (in) alienated young men who don't feel like they have community. 

“To me, it's a very exciting moment when we see something like Facebook, finally, dying - but Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus (also owned by Meta) are surviving.

“When these dominant platforms go away, then there's space for new things to be created. And we can decide what those things are and what the values behind them are, and what kind of society we want them to help us bring forward."  

This week Facebook’s parent company Meta arranged an online briefing for New Zealand journalists with Meta policy and strategy executive Andy O’Connell. 

He was in New Zealand briefly after meeting South Korea’s communications regulator in Seoul last week.

It was a ‘background only’ briefing, to tell us how Meta ranks, moderates and monitors content already - and the anti-extremism initiatives they support globally and here in New Zealand to that end, such as a Code of Conduct recently published by Netsafe. 

Journalists were also told Meta submits itself to scrutiny too, such as having the reporting of Meta’s own enforcement of community standards (effectively the codes of conduct for users of its own platforms) audited externally. 

Mediawatch has requested an on-the-record interview with O’Connell about Meta’s algorithmic transparency - and the Christchurch Call. No luck so far.