New story in Technology from Time: Facebook’s New Oversight Board Is Deciding Donald Trump’s Fate. Will It Also Define the Future of the Company?

The end of April will be a turning point for former President Donald Trump. That’s when he will learn whether he can regain control of his Facebook and Instagram accounts—and direct access to nearly 60 million followers on two of the world’s largest social media platforms.

It’s not publicly elected officials who will make this call, nor a judge, nor even Facebook itself. Instead, it will be the 20 members of the Facebook Oversight Board, a little-known panel of lawyers, journalists and former political leaders from 18 different countries that Facebook established less than one year ago.

Trump’s accounts have been suspended since Jan. 7—the day after he incited a violent mob of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol building in Washington. While Twitter permanently banned Trump, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook’s suspension (and Instagram’s) would last indefinitely, and at least until the end of Trump’s presidency. The news landed into polarized Americans’ feeds with predictable divisiveness: many said the decision had come too late; others—and not just supporters of the former President—derided it as unconscionable censorship. Then, the day after Trump left the White House, Facebook announced it was asking its newly created Oversight Board to decide whether to reinstate the 45th U.S. President.

Read More: Facebook’s Oversight Board Is Reviewing Its First Cases. Critics Say It Won’t Solve the Platform’s Biggest Problems

The Oversight Board’s ruling on the Trump case will be a defining moment for Facebook, perhaps the biggest test yet of whether the company’s attempts to regulate itself can gain legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary people and lawmakers around the world. The decision will be watched particularly closely in the U.S. and E.U., where legislative efforts to rein in Big Tech are on the cards. “The ambition for the Oversight Board is for it to have a quasi-judicial role, and the key thing about any judicial institution is it has to have legitimacy to earn deference,” says Daniel Weitzner, the director of MIT’s Internet Policy Research Initiative. “Over time, if this body makes decisions that are seen as reasonable, and Facebook follows them, I think they’ll become a part of the landscape.”

The question of Trump’s continued access to Facebook is especially thorny for the company, given the polarized political landscape. “We’re dealing with a significant proportion of registered Republicans who question the legitimacy of the Biden Administration,” says Weitzner, who served in the Obama White House. “They’re not going to accept the Facebook Oversight Board’s legitimacy if they don’t like the result.”

And in coming to its ruling on whether to uphold Trump’s suspension, the Oversight Board could also open the door to an even bigger decision than Trump’s future on the platform: whether Facebook should change its rules to allow other elected politicians to be banned. Up until now, that has been rare, thanks to an exemption that allows political leaders to break the rules if Facebook judges that the newsworthiness of a statement outweighs the risk of physical harm.

In referring Trump’s case to the Oversight Board, Facebook also asked for “policy recommendations” about how the company should deal with “suspensions when the user is a political leader.” But an Oversight Board spokesperson told TIME that any decision would not be binding—leaving the final say up to Facebook alone.

Michaela Handrek-Rehle—Bloomberg/Getty ImagesMark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook Inc., at the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, on Feb. 15, 2020.

Why Facebook created the Oversight Board

For years, Facebook has said it’s uncomfortable that it alone has the power to grant or deny access to one of the world’s information superhighways—and the attention that those kinds of decisions inevitably bring.

“I think everyone would benefit from greater clarity on how local governments expect content moderation to work in their countries,” Zuckerberg wrote in 2018. But in lots of places, government rules still aren’t tailored to legally enforce the removal of online threats, especially in countries like the U.S. where free speech is prized. “Those norms don’t exist, and in the meantime we can’t duck making decisions in real time,” Facebook’s vice president for global affairs, Nick Clegg, told the New York Times on Monday. (Facebook said Clegg was unavailable for an interview for this story.)

“Platforms have never wanted to be in a position of having to make controversial decisions,” says Weitzner, who in the 1990s was involved in drafting Section 230, the federal law that defines how platforms are held accountable for content. “They actually want to be told what to do.”

Read more: Big Tech’s Business Model Is a Threat to Democracy. Here’s How to Build a Fairer Digital Future

In 2018, Zuckerberg floated plans to set up a body that would be a kind of Supreme Court overseeing Facebook’s rules, staffed by an independent body of experts. In May 2020, that body came to life in the form of the Facebook Oversight Board. A co-chair, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, is a former Prime Minister of Denmark. Among the Board’s members are Tawakkol Karman, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning Yemeni activist, and Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of Britain’s Guardian newspaper. The Board is funded by a $130 million trust, set up by Facebook but legally independent, and pays each of its members a six figure sum, according to the New York Times. Facebook says its rulings will be both binding and transparent.

What the Oversight Board is doing

On Thursday, the Oversight Board announced rulings on its first five cases—a smattering of disputes about Facebook takedowns of controversial posts. In a sign that its members were prepared to overrule their progenitor, the Board overturned Facebook’s original decisions in four of the five cases, saying in a statement that its rulings “demonstrate our commitment to holding Facebook to account.” Facebook duly said it would enforce the decisions.

The Oversight Board’s public statement also hints at the bigger decision to come, on Trump. “Recent events in the United States and around the world have highlighted the enormous impact that content decisions taken by internet services have on human rights and free expression,” it said. The controversies created by those decisions, it went on, “draw attention to the value of independent oversight of the most consequential decisions by companies such as Facebook.”

There are early signs that the board’s members lean toward more permissive views on free speech—which could be a good omen for the former President. One of the five rulings the Oversight Board announced on Thursday overturned Facebook’s decision to take down an anti-Muslim post from Myanmar, where Facebook acknowledged in 2018 that it did not do enough to stop genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority the previous year.

The post that the Board called on Facebook to reinstate included images of a dead Muslim child and a caption stating that “there is something wrong with Muslims (or Muslim men) psychologically or with their mindset,” according to a summary of the case released by the Board. The post, which Facebook had removed for violating its hate speech policies, also “seems to imply the child may have grown up to be an extremist,” the Board’s summary said. But the Board overturned Facebook’s decision to remove the post, concluding that “while the post might be considered offensive, it did not reach the level of hate speech.”

The decision worried some activists. “Facebook’s Oversight Board bent over backwards to excuse hate in Myanmar—a county where Facebook has been complicit in a genocide against Muslims,” a spokesperson for the U.S.-based NGO Muslim Advocates said in a statement. “It is clear that the Oversight Board is here to launder responsibility for Zuckerberg and [Facebook COO] Sheryl Sandberg. Instead of taking meaningful action to curb dangerous hate speech on the platform, Facebook punted responsibility to a third party board that used laughable technicalities to protect anti-Muslim hate content that contributes to genocide.”

Photo-illustration by Lon Tweeten for TIME; Getty images

How Facebook’s critics are responding

To many critics of Facebook, the Oversight Board is a distraction from the real issues plaguing the company: misinformation at scale, hate speech, organized violence, and the ways Facebook’s algorithms amplify those kinds of content. One group of critics has set up an alternative panel of experts, called the Real Facebook Oversight Board, and issued a statement on Thursday rubbishing the Board’s first set of decisions. “This is a PR effort that obfuscates the urgent issues that Facebook continually fails to address: the continued proliferation of hate speech and disinformation on their platforms,” the statement said.

For critics, the Oversight Board is a spectacle aimed at preserving the broad status quo: taking controversial decisions on content out of Facebook’s hands, while avoiding harder questions that might harm Facebook’s business model, like tweaking its algorithms to reduce the rapid spread of harmful content. “I think any self-regulatory effort, because that’s essentially what this is, will always fall short of a firmly rule-of-law-anchored process,” says Marietje Schaake, the international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, who sits on the Real Facebook Oversight Board. “I just hope it doesn’t distract American lawmakers.”

Among the alternative board’s criticisms: the fact members of the Oversight Board were “hand-picked” by Facebook. (Facebook maintains that the Board is financially and operationally independent.) “They’re independent thinkers, but the process doesn’t set them up to be truly independent,” says Schaake. “The setup has a lot of baked-in limitations.”

One of those limitations, according to Schaake, is the Board’s jurisdiction. Currently, it can only pass rulings on whether certain posts should have been taken down by Facebook — not rule on posts that are allowed to remain online. It also cannot issue rulings on Facebook’s amplification algorithms, which many researchers say are instrumental in spreading and promoting divisive content online, or entire Facebook groups, which are a key vector for the rapid spread of harmful content like misinformation and incitement to violence. The Oversight Board says it hopes its remit will soon expand to cover posts that remain on the site, not just ones Facebook has already taken down.

Read More: Facebook’s “Oversight Board” Is a Sham. The Answer to the Capitol Riot Is Regulating Social Media

Given these limitations, the headline-grabbing matter of Trump’s account is little more than a distraction, critics say. “The fact that Donald Trump is unable to express himself on Facebook is less important than the fact that all of his followers and supporters continue to express themselves on Facebook,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, who is not affiliated with the alternative board. “The phenomenon that we should be worried about is the aggregate message that undermines democracy, divides societies, spreads hatred. That continues, and Facebook either can’t or won’t do anything about it.”

And even with Trump banned from Facebook, his supporters and right-wing commentators like Dan Bongino continue to dominate the list of top-performing posts on Facebook each day, according to data compiled by New York Times reporter Kevin Roose.

“Facebook continues to allow Steve Bannon to broadcast despite calling for the beheading of a government official and continuing to make claims the 2020 election was fraudulent,” wrote Roger McNamee and Maria Ressa—both members of the alternative board—in a column for TIME on Thursday. “Evidently,” they write, “we should not take Facebook’s commitment to stop hate at face value.”

What’s next for regulating Big Tech

There are no easy answers to questions of how to set binding, democratically-ordained standards for the newly-powerful social media platforms. While Facebook has received lots of criticism for the Oversight Board, no other company has established even a semi-independent body to interrogate and potentially overturn otherwise-unaccountable decisions by powerful executives.

Read More: Big Tech’s Crackdown on Donald Trump and Parler Won’t Fix the Real Problem With Social Media

Twitter has approached the problem differently. In a thread days after his company permanently suspended Trump, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he did “not celebrate or feel pride” in the move, and went on to discuss how the events of previous days had increased the imperative to “look at how our service might incentivize distraction and harm.” The thread seemed to acknowledge the broader dynamics of algorithmic amplification—which go well beyond Trump—but his proposed solution raised some eyebrows.

He said Twitter was funding the development of a new “decentralized standard for social media,” that might contribute to a future Internet “that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity.” Called Bluesky, the initiative left several unanswered questions about how the problems of algorithmic amplification and harmful content would be solved. “As a free expression advocate, there’s a lot of positives and benefits to decentralized models,” Emma Llansó, the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s free expression project, told the site Digital Trends. “But there are questions of, if someone posts something illegal, how will law enforcement respond?”

For Schaake and other critics of Big Tech, the only enduring solution is for governments to reclaim the powers of gatekeeping the public square that the tech companies usurped. But that will take time. During that time, projects like Facebook’s Oversight Board will have a chance to win—or lose—public approval.

New story in Technology from Time: The Capitol Attack, Impeachment and GameStop Make it Clear: 2021 Is Shaping Up to Be the Year of the Moderator

The first four Wednesdays in January have brought us four remarkable moments in American history. On Jan. 6, insurrectionists egged on by former President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, and only through the bravery of a few individual Capitol Police officers and sheer luck did we avoid what could’ve become a mass execution event. On Jan. 13, the House of Representatives impeached Trump for his role in the previous week’s events, making him the first U.S. President to be impeached twice. On Jan. 20, Trump, who lost a free and fair election despite his false claims otherwise, fled the White House before President Joe Biden was sworn in hours later. And on Jan. 27, shares of the company GameStop hit an intraday high of nearly $373—an approximately 2,000% increase from the day of the Capitol attack—after the heavily-shorted stock was targeted by Reddit day traders who rallied the masses into a buying frenzy that triggered a short squeeze.

Only three of these events share obvious connective tissue, in that they mark the anxious hours and days ahead of and following the end of a besieged and unpredictable President’s tenure. But all four share another bond, in that they’re battles in the escalating war between the masses and the moderators.

The Capitol attack, and Trump’s reaction to it, led social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to ban him (and many Qanon conspiracy theorists, some of whom were among the insurrectionists) from their platforms, finally exercising their immense moderation powers as many have long called on them to do. More than 100 of those involved in the act of insurrection have also been arrested, itself a form of moderation. When the House impeached Trump, it, too, was embracing its power as a moderator. Almost immediately after Biden was sworn in, he began reversing—moderating—some of Trump’s most controversial policies, like the so-called Muslim ban and Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Accord climate agreement (and what was Biden’s victory to begin with, if not the majority of American voters screaming “mods!!!!” in the face of Trump’s failures?). And as the bizarre GameStop rally continued on Jan. 28, popular stock-buying platform Robinhood, as well as others, stopped users from buying more GME (GameStop’s ticker symbol) in what first appeared to be a questionable bid to moderate users’ activity.

On the Internet, moderators wield immense power: on many of the most important sites and platforms, they set the rules for participation, they can delete objectionable posts, and, in the most extreme cases, ban users altogether. Of course, moderators have long existed in the offline world—lawmakers, police, and the courts can all be understood to be the executors of a kind of moderation power. But the degree to which the last four weeks can be distilled down to a fight between the mobs and the mods is nonetheless staggering, and to some degree feels like an inevitable result of the degree to which online life has bled into the “real world.”

Where you come down on this battle between the mobs and the mods depends on your perspective on any given issue being moderated. Trump supporters probably feel like the mods are stacked against them, which is why, for example, many have flocked from sites like Facebook and Twitter to upstart alternatives like Parler, which promise a (more or less) mod-free experience, for better or, more often, worse. But if you’re a Biden fan, you’re probably cheering on Facebook, Twitter and the impeachment process overall.

Meanwhile, many of the GameStop traders say they’re using Wall Street’s own tools against it in a kind of eat-the-rich populist uprising. Indeed, what they’re doing is inflicting a great deal of pain on major institutional investors, including hedge funds that were betting on GME’s demise. For the GameStop crowd, Robinhood’s buying limit was evidence that the company, which has built its brand around democratizing access to the stock market, was instead protecting Big Money and preventing the little guys from winning. Many quickly turned on Robinhood, with some leaving one-star reviews on the company’s app and even a small handful showing up for a protest outside its Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters. Robinhood now says the pause—which was partially lifted Friday—was necessary to ensure it had enough money to meet regulatory requirements. But it failed to explain that until several hours after it began moderating users’ activity, opening the door for a misunderstanding-fueled blowback.

Meanwhile, people who typically make a lot of money on Wall Street, like billionaire hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman, say the Reddit-fueled short squeeze is “bullshit.” Appearing on CNBC, Cooperman blamed the episode on a combination of near-zero interest rates, the low- or no-fee trading available on Robinhood and rival services, and people “sitting at home, getting their checks from the government,” a reference to Congress’ pandemic relief payments.

The moderators have not yet decided how to wield their power in the long term. Facebook and Twitter may eventually decide to let Trump have his accounts back—moderator bans are, of course, sometimes temporary. Meanwhile, Trump’s Senate impeachment trial is set to begin the week of Feb. 8. Some of his allies are already arguing the whole thing is moot because he’s already out of office. Conviction can mean Trump will no longer be allowed to run for public office in the U.S. again—it would be, in essence, the ultimate permaban, the most extreme act of moderation. With GameStop, trading regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—not just a moderator but an admin, with power over both individual traders and lesser moderators like Robinhood—are “actively monitoring” the situation. “The Commission will closely review actions taken by regulated entities that may disadvantage investors or otherwise unduly inhibit their ability to trade certain securities,” acting SEC Chair Allison Herren Lee said in a Jan. 29 statement. Individual GameStop traders are unlikely to get in any trouble. Existing securities rules are mostly designed to counter more traditional pump-and-dumps and other schemes, and are ill-suited to deal with the novel phenomenon of a Reddit-triggered short squeeze.

In any case, this week’s GameStop shenanigans are mostly a sideshow, for now (though there is a chance they could trigger a wider market downturn, which could hurt anyone with any money tied up in stocks, like the approximately 58 million Americans with 401(k) retirement plans). Short squeezes happen from time to time; this one just caught our collective attention because of the wackiness and extremity of it all, the semi-naive Robin Hood (two words) storyline, and our desperation for something to focus on other than unfathomable political strife or the ongoing pandemic, which is still killing thousands of Americans every day. Far more worrisome than a bunch of Redditors leaving one-star reviews on a trading app is how the most die-hard and the most violent Trump supporters react to his and their continued moderation. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—another moderator—warned on Jan. 27 that “a heightened threat environment across the United States” will persist at least for weeks. It’s a grim reminder that, even if Inauguration Day came and went peacefully enough, the mods have plenty of work to do to keep the rest of us safe.

New story in Technology from Time: Facebook’s “Oversight Board” Is a Sham. The Answer to the Capitol Riot Is Regulating Social Media

Online violence leads to real world violence. The January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol and the role of social media in helping coordinate the riots was not a surprise and the emerging details show this could have been mitigated, if not prevented, if Facebook had taken years of warnings seriously.

Buzzfeed reported that for weeks “Women for America First” were calling for violence on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. The Washington Post reported that dozens of organizations used Facebook to organize bus rides and transportation to the riots, contradicting Sheryl Sandberg’s claim that these events were “largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency.”

Facebook also continues to allow Steve Bannon to broadcast despite calling for the beheading of a government official and continuing to make claims the 2020 election was fraudulent. “Stop the Steal” groups perpetuated for months. Evidently, we should not take Facebook’s commitment to stop hate at face value.

This is the context for Facebook’s latest PR offensive, touting the new Facebook Oversight Board, specifically the news that at the Oversight Board will rule on Facebook’s January 7^th indefinite ban of Donald Trump.

We applauded the decision to ban Trump. Last September, we joined a statement calling on Mark Zuckerberg to ban President Trump and asked asked if blood needed to be spilled before he took action to stop hate and disinformation on his platforms. Sadly, America got its answer: five people died at the insurrection on January 6, some of whom stewed for month in hate speech on Facebook. Activists and dissidents have died in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, India and Pakistan in part because of Facebook’s inaction. An additional 400,000 plus have died from COVID-19 in the U.S., many of them influenced by disinformation amplified by social media.

It’s clear that self-regulation has failed, and governments can no longer shirk responsibility for protecting citizens from harmful technology platforms. We recommend regulation along three dimensions: safety, privacy, and competition. To change incentives and make tech safe, there should be personal liability for tech engineers and executives who cause harm. To restore privacy and self-determination, there need to much greater limits on the ownership and exploitation of personal data by businesses. And it is past time to break up tech monopolies and encourage business models that empower, rather than exploit users.

The reality is that Facebook failed for years to take action over Donald Trump’s repeated use of its platform to incite violence, spread disinformation, and ultimately try to subvert the election. The organization we represent, the Real Facebook Oversight Board, was formed because our members—leading civil rights leaders, experts and academics— feared Facebook was being used to organize a coup in real time. Our fears became reality.

Shouldn’t we celebrate the ban, then, and tout Facebook’s referral of Trump’s “case” to their Oversight Board for deliberation? Sadly, no. The ban may be temporary, and the Oversight Board is an effort to cloak harmful decisions in a veil of legitimacy.

There are four reasons why.

First, mandate. The Oversight Board has a quasi-legal structure and will make judgments based on arguments of legality with a bias towards Facebook’s extreme interpretation of free speech. The Trump ban is a matter of public safety, a perfect example of the limits of free speech. If the First Amendment is the only consideration, as is likely to be the case, the Oversight Board will recommend reinstating Trump. This is likely Facebook’s preferred outcome, as Trump is good for their business. The Oversight Board will provide cover for Facebook to do what it wants to do.

Second, lack of independence. Only one entity can refer cases to the Oversight Board and guarantee their review—Facebook. Cases are heard in private, by a hand-picked, paid board which reports findings back to Facebook for action. It gives the appearance of oversight, but the process is ultimately controlled by Facebook itself.

Third, structure. There are millions of problematic posts on Facebook every day, the vast majority of which leave the victims without recourse. The Oversight Board can take on only a handful of cases, always with a significant delay. The board is powerless by design to step in and address the constant churn of disinformation, hate speech or questionable content that’s live on the site. The sad truth is that harmful content is highly engaging and serves as a lubricant for Facebook’s core business.

Fourth, lack of legitimacy. Governments have failed to protect their citizens from harmful technology. Some authoritarian leaders, like Trump in the U.S. and Duterte in the Philippines, have harnessed Facebook to gain and consolidate their power. Despite terms of service to the contrary, Facebook permits harmful content to pervade its sites. Enforcement is inconsistent, when it happens at all. The Oversight Board has been structured to deal with individual posts, rather than the systemic flaws of Facebook. It is an illusion disguised as a remedy.

Facebook’s strategy appears to be alignment with winners, which may explain why the leaders of India and Brazil are not held to the same benchmark as Donald Trump and, even now, are using the Facebook group of companies to incite violence and spread disinformation.

Trump and his enablers remain unrepentant, which means they are still a threat to public safety. For that reason, we believe Facebook should permanently ban Trump and his enablers from all of its platforms.

Facebook’s business model harms public health, democracy, privacy, and competition. Its management refuses to acknowledge responsibility for these harms, much less a willingness to make necessary changes. We should not pretend that the Facebook Oversight Board is more than a McGuffin designed to distract us from serious issues. As citizens, we must demand that our leaders take action.

Roger McNamee is an early Facebook investor and author of the New York Times bestseller Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe; Maria Ressa is a 2018 Time Person of the Year and co-founder of Rappler in the Philippines. Both are founding members of the Real Facebook Oversight Board.

New story in Technology from Time: ‘Revenge Tactic:’ GameStop’s Massive Stock Surge Isn’t Only About Making Money

If you’ve been anywhere close to the financial markets this week, you’ve no doubt seen that the flailing brick and mortar video game retailer GameStop has rocketed in valuation.

You’ve probably learned that this steep uptick for a business thought by many to be dead was brought about largely by Reddit users in a coordinated move to push up the stock price—and to punish hedge funds shorting the stock on the expectation of the company’s decline. But, as antithetical as it may seem, the huge jump in GameStop stock was not only to make money. The collective push by hyper-online investors also sought to fight back against a system that they feel deserves a reckoning and to unleash general chaos.

“This has nothing to do with actual money,” Jamie Cohen, a digital culture expert with a PhD in cultural and media studies, told TIME. “I’ve been tracking it since last Friday, but at the beginning it was likely a game. And then when people start having these back channels of conversations, they start posting secondary information being like, ‘yeah, screw them, we’ve been disenfranchised.’”

Last fall, GameStop announced that it would soon be closing hundreds more of its stores and at the beginning of the year, a share in the company was worth roughly $18 USD. As of Jan. 27, coming as an alarming surprise to those who don’t frequent the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, the stock rose as high as $370 per share. Essentially, users on that subreddit community discovered that many investors were “shorting” GameStop by betting on it to fail, so late last week, WallStreetBets convinced enough people to buy stock in the seemingly-doomed retail store to increase its valuation. The trend caught and spiraled and the stock has boomed against all expectations and reason.

Even though no laws appear to have been broken, the rally has shaken financial overseers with investment firms unsure of how to adjust for the influx. Broker Ameritrade announced that they were putting “several restrictions” on transactions involving GameStop.

*BIDEN TEAM IS 'MONITORING THE SITUATION' WITH GAMESTOP: PSAKI https://t.co/62Bv6RYnfO pic.twitter.com/hSSFEB9RtI

— Bloomberg (@business) January 27, 2021

While making money is at the heart of the activity, the motivation for it doesn’t stop there. As evidenced by a multitude of posts on r/WallStreetBets, investing in GameStop has become a way to spread a message about the power of that community against a system rigged against them.

“This has to do with ‘can we collectively engage small amounts of money to enforce a power to prove that we have power collectively over a system that we are literally disenfranchised from,’” Cohen says. “And so in order for them to regain agency, they play these games and the games are very similar to the meme economy that was on Reddit for many years. But now they’re playing with actual money. They’re literally affecting the reality of a potentially not-great industry known as short selling. They feel like they have some sort of control over what they feel is the enemy.“

Cohen’s diagnosis is seen throughout the subreddit, like this post from user Hungry_Freaks_Daddy:

“There isn’t a single thing you can say or do to change my position,” they say about selling their GameStop stock. “I risk my money happily. I am not the least bit scared or worried. You might be a financial expert, I am a survival master. Power to the people.”

We let a half-million people die because a mass disease shutdown would have crashed the all-important stock-market, which is so stupid that it’s currently being gamified by Reddit users to blow up a hedge fund worth billions. Anyway probably nothing bad about our economic system

— Jerry Iannelli (@jerryiannelli) January 27, 2021

 

“I YOLO’d my life savings”

While some Reddit users have already claimed that they’ve made a life-changing sum of money from the push, the actual financial opportunity of the move seems largely in the background. Instead, what’s come to the forefront on Reddit is to get the world’s attention on their power over an unjust financial reality.

A manifesto of sorts was posted on r/WallStreetBets on Friday by user u/cevin_kahn as an altered clip from the 2019 movie Joker. The altered clip tells the story of the GameStop raid from the Joker’s perspective as if he were WallStreetBets made flesh.

“All you fucking Boomers enjoyed the golden age of America, when high school students could work for a summer and buy a car or a factory worker on a single income could buy a house and start a family. Nobody my age has anything like that,” the altered seven-minute video reads. “I YOLO’d my life savings because I was never going to retire anyway. Half the people I know live from paycheck to paycheck.”

At the time of this writing, the post had received over 27,000 upvotes.

twitter right now: pic.twitter.com/Hclezfy5Th

— penne benne (@pasta_ben) January 27, 2021

Cohen sees the use of the Joker movie as a potent one, explaining the perspective of the investors rallying around a spiraling business.

“The Joker itself is a nihilistic approach to disenfranchisement. In other words, rather than take collective action to create a real shift, or find some sort of strategies for a usable future, you use the tools at hand in the exact moment,” Cohen says. “‘Because that is the end of the cable, when you’ve tethered that thing down to where nothing’s left.”

Generational anger seems to be a heavily motivating force behind this market upturn. Millennial and younger generations have had their youths marred by two recessions. Studies have shown jumps in “deaths of despair” among the nations’ young adults as they face an uncertain financial situation, made only worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There’s a generational divide that has only become wider, the wealth divide has become wider,” Cohen said. “Their idea of what they do with their stocks is shifting anger. And if shifting anger is done by memes, then they feel that they are doing their work. The OK Boomer meme was like… ‘you guys don’t get us.’ It was like, ‘by not getting us, you’re going to use us for your personal value.’ So [Reddit investors] see it as their revenge tactic.”

The supposed youth of this activism also ties into an outsider mentality against the financial system in which they’re meddling. And Reddit investors, many of them admitted Robinhood app users, identify with the spirit of the Robin Hood character; many posts on the subreddit tout the strength of the “little guy” besting the financial market behemoth. These younger investors espouse a proud disconnection from a system that explicitly serves “Boomers” and exploits young adults. They’re fighting against a financial “Deep State.”

“There’s no insider trading, because they’re not insiders, which is kind of the joy of it. And right now there is this anarchic feeling of like, ‘oh, man, we’re gonna do it,’” Ryan Broderick, author of Garbage Day, a newsletter based around web culture, told TIME. “I was told this morning that my dad has stock in GameStop because he’s a Robinhood user. And he’s like, 70 something and he has no idea what’s going on.”

‘People are angry’

It’s difficult not to see Cohen’s “revenge tactic” in this week’s events, specifically when you look at the stocks the users targeted. Reddit is a longtime haven for video game fans; its r/gaming subreddit has over 28 million subscribers. The idea that investors there would take offense to short sellers betting against the success of GameStop is easy to understand.

Nostalgia, and its defense, may also play a very big role in the financial activism. Feeling targeted by predatory short sellers like Melvin Capital, Reddit users are trying to make them literally pay. And as of Wednesday, Reddit investment rallies have been formed to prop up AMC Theaters and the ghost of video rental stores Blockbuster.

The objects of the stock rallies exist in a “a nostalgia space,” Cohen said. In the 2010s, he argues, the culture has only been given nostalgia. “We haven’t been really given any sense of reality, and so that nostalgia becomes a reason to do these things… They see this as like the last gasp of a troll. You can’t save a Gamestop, you can’t probably save Blockbuster, but what you could do is kind of play around with it before it expires.”

my retirement plan is simple: four days ago I started trading exactly one stock

— ☕netw3rk (@netw3rk) January 27, 2021

 

The movement is also explained by what many of us in continued coronavirus lockdowns perpetually feel: boredom.

“I do think we’re seeing a lot of bottled up energy right now because people are bored,” Broderick said. “People are angry. You know, you’re hearing every day about different theater chains closing down or different companies shutting and I definitely think that’s part of it.”

No matter where you divine the source of WallStreetBets’ anger, it’s difficult not to see remnants of other, often far right, meme movements. The reveling in chaos, the delight in upsetting a system, the pride in being inscrutable to mainstream media, it all reflects many of the alt-right meme campaigns that were used in 2016 to tout Donald Trump’s candidacy.

“They use the memes of the far right,” Broderick said about the WallStreetBets community. “I don’t want to go so far as to say that there’s like a fascist or authoritarian bent here. But they’re using the tools that these groups have built. Like it’s the same playbook. They’re just doing it on the stock market, as opposed to the Trump campaign.”

NYSE: IRL

It’s been evident over the past decade that the line separating internet existence and real life is rapidly shrinking, and the GameStop rally should underline that. As the pandemic has kept us home and on screens more than ever before, it’s only hurried the convergence of online and actual life.

Broderick said that the GameStop market manipulation, at its core, is another example of internet trolling that slipped out of web pages and onto Wall Street.

“This started completely as a petty trolling thing,” Broderick said. “But what happens with the internet is that as things get bigger, they have to mean something. Because what the subreddit has, like 2 million people in it. So, if 2 million people are going to do something together, it can’t just be stupid, because it’ll fall apart.”

What Cohen describes as online communities’ need to created agency in the real world has been growing in impact over the past decade. He says the meme campaigns of 2016, and the election of Trump helped online communities believe “that they had some sort of control.” And this actualization of memeing has only become more pronounced.

Before this, perhaps the largest example of bringing a meme to life occurred in the summer of 2019. Then, thousands of people set their energy on storming the Area 51 military base. Hundreds of thousands signed a Facebook pledge, which led to many physically showing up to the base in Nevada, leading to two arrests and an actual Alienstock festival.

For Broderick, the GameStop rally is something different all together.

cant believe im saying this but i made a meme about stocks pic.twitter.com/qePznhVDD9

— sara david (@SaraQDavid) January 27, 2021

 

“It’s the first time that we’ve seen a large internet community mobilize effectively to make this much money,” Broderick said. He compared it to the creation of the Occupy Wall Street movement, only turned inside out. “This is on a whole other level, because this is people on the internet just being like, we’re going to manifest money now and then they’re doing it. And when you get to that level of like, reality breakdown, like the internet’s a very interesting thing, because it’s creating value where there just wasn’t any and it’s glitching.”

For Cohen, it’s a series of exploits that is being manipulated, both the semi-democratization of stock trading through apps and the ignorance of the financial system on the potential of internet mobilization. Both of which must be address, he said.

“I talked to people who are traditional stock market people, a couple of my friends who work in finance and then a couple of people who are just meme lords and I think the biggest thing here is the misunderstanding of each. That there’s not enough financial literacy given to the public and there’s definitely not enough internet literacy given to the public,” Cohen said. “I think even in 2021, we still assume the internet is a separate space than IRL. And they are combined, they are a combined environment.”

Without that literacy training and education, he sees it as a model that will be replicated, maybe on different stocks, maybe on another industry.

Broderick finds it difficult to know where this will lead either internet culture or real life, only that this isn’t the end of internet activism.

“It has reached a level where I’m like, it has to go somewhere like this energy has to go somewhere,” Broderick says. “It could be the GameStop isn’t the end of this… I was at Zuccotti Park, I remember Occupy Wall Street. That same thrill was there, I can tell you, it doesn’t stick around. We’re gonna find out what happens pretty soon.”

New story in Technology from Time: In the Fight Against Extremism, Don’t Demonize Surveillance-Busting Tools like Signal and Bitcoin

In the past few weeks, millions of Americans have joined Signal, a free open-source encrypted chat app. Users are fleeing from WhatsApp in droves, sparked by a pop-up disclosing that the messenger will share personal data with Facebook, and by broader concerns over big tech in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

But just as encryption is seeing its biggest breakthrough yet, a counter-narrative is rising up again: that we should be wary of privacy-protecting platforms because they can help extremists and criminals.

Read More: Big Tech’s Business Model Is a Threat to Democracy. Here’s How to Build a Fairer Digital Future

Top media outlets ranging from The New York Times to the Associated Press are running articles about how mass surveillance-busting tools like Signal and Bitcoin are being used by domestic extremists. Joe Biden’s U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that cryptocurrencies are “a particular concern” for terrorism and money laundering. Dozens of stories warning of the dangers of privacy tools have been published in the last few weeks.

This isn’t the first time these arguments have filled the news cycle. In the early 1990s, the Clinton Administration opposed widespread strong encryption on grounds that it would help terrorists and pedophiles. The Justice Department investigated Phil Zimmerman, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy, for exporting software illegally as “PGP” made it easy for PC users to exchange encrypted messages. The administration even tried to push the “Clipper Chip,” which would give them a backdoor into consumer devices. Eventually the Clipper Chip and anti-privacy restrictions were defeated by a coalition of civil liberties activists, tech businesses, and the cypherpunks: a group of coders who gave their unstoppable tools away for free.

Privacy came under state attack again after 9/11 in the name of fighting terrorism, and has since been repeatedly breached in the service of surveillance capitalism, but Americans continue to fight back through software. Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 prompted citizens across the political spectrum to consider the prospect of government surveillance; the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018, and the more recent threats of cops spying on racial justice protesters and the increased scrutiny of big tech are just the latest incentives for ordinary people to adopt privacy tools.

Read More: The Inside Story of How Signal Became the Private Messaging App for an Age of Fear and Distrust

Celebrities like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey are tweeting about Signal. On Capitol Hill, the app has been used by Senate members since 2017, and the Biden campaign used it for official correspondence. Black Lives Matter protesters have adopted Signal as a way to stay safe from police surveillance. Musicians are spreading the word: “don’t be texting my phone unless you hit me on Signal.” The privacy-focused browser DuckDuckGo just recorded its first day with more than 100 million searches, and Telegram, another chat app with privacy features, passed 500 million users. Even former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden has argued that Americans are safer with privacy tools.

The culture war over encrypted messaging might finally be ending. But the fight for privacy isn’t finished, it’s just moving to the next medium: money.

Most Americans may not yet grasp that financial privacy is just as important as communications privacy for our democracy—that your spending habits say more about you than your words. In an open society, the ability to buy political books, have discreet medical procedures, and build communities without government surveillance is essential.

Cash has traditionally served this purpose, but is in decline and now accounts for less than 30% of American financial transactions. We use corporate money like Apple Pay or Visa for almost everything. And soon cash may be replaced by Central Bank Digital Currencies: electronic Fed liabilities held in phone wallets. Corporate and government digital money will need to meet an increasing number of “anti-money laundering” laws and will be, in effect, surveillance tools.

To understand why citizens need financial privacy to defend democracy, look to Hong Kong. When protests broke out in 2019, students used cash to buy metro tickets so that their demonstrations couldn’t be linked to their ID. In 2020, many who donated to protesters had their bank accounts frozen. Meanwhile, in Belarus, Russia, and Nigeria, pro-democracy movements have been flustered by the state’s ability to monitor and freeze bank accounts. In all three cases, journalists and pro-democracy organizers including Alexei Navalny turned away from corporate and government money to the decentralized Bitcoin network to raise funds and keep the pressure on their regimes.

Bitcoin is neutral like cash, and can’t discriminate between good and bad. Authorities will blame extremism not just on Signal and Telegram, but also on Bitcoin and anything they can’t control. We should push back. Yes, some extremists use these tools. They also use mobile phones, email, and the internet.

Read More: ‘We Need a Fundamental Reset.’ Shoshana Zuboff on Building an Internet That Lets Democracy Flourish

The way to fight extremism isn’t to crack down on innovation and expand the surveillance state. Those are the tactics of tyrants. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, mass surveillance ends up hurting the most vulnerable, and disproportionately targets minorities. The main superspreaders of extremist content remain centralized corporate platforms like Facebook and YouTube, not open-source privacy platforms. Rather than expand spying, we can fight domestic extremism through better national leadership, citizen journalism and police reform.

In Congress, some already agree. On January 19, in the aftermath of the Capitol Hill riots, 10 officials led by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib expressed “strong opposition to the expansion of the… surveillance powers of the United States government.” They warned, “we have been here before and we have seen where that road leads.”

As you read more articles demonizing identity-guarding tools like Signal and Bitcoin, think about the police state that awaits if we shun them and turn to mass surveillance to fight extremism. As anyone who lives in a dictatorship will say, that’s when you’ll need privacy the most.

New story in Technology from Time: E-Bikes Are Taking Off—But We Need to Make Space for Them

This year has been a boon for bikes of all sorts. With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing many Americans to reconsider how they get around, it’s no surprise people turned to bikes—and e-bikes, which use electric motors to do all or most of the work for riders, have been a popular option for those looking to get into cycling without breaking a sweat. As someone who spent a few weeks this summer on VanMoof’s X3, weaving through obstructed bike lanes and past slower traditional cyclists, I learned something about the future of mobility here in New York: the city is far from ready for the e-bike revolution, and that’s true of most other cities, too.

In New York, the recently legalized battery-powered two wheelers were most often used by delivery workers. Now electric motors are available on consumer-facing bikes as well as shared options, like Citi Bikes. Folding bike manufacturer Gocycle says it sold out of its electric bikes it produced in 2020, while Dutch e-bike maker VanMoof announced the largest jump in sales it’s seen this past year. It makes sense: e-bikes are faster, more convenient, have better security features, and can give inexperienced riders the extra power they need to get over the next hill or avoid a nasty accident.

But urban biking, especially in New York, isn’t easy, as riders face roads blocked by delivery trucks and cop cars, unprotected lanes on narrow streets, bumbling tourists opening cab doors at the most inopportune times, and traffic laws that favor drivers. In order to encourage safer, more accessible biking, Dr. Brian Doucet, a professor of urban geography at the University of Waterloo, suggests building lanes with better protection for cyclists—putting the onus on designers rather than cyclists when it comes to rider safety.

“The real test should be if a six-year-old can ride side-by-side with their parents,” Doucet says. “Most bike lanes in North America don’t do that.” Wider, protected, continuous bike lanes and intersections would benefit all riders, not just those on e-bikes. Using car parking and more sturdy dividers as barriers, building bike parking corrals at intersections, and adjusting traffic light timing to give cyclists priority could all discourage the use of automobiles while accommodating cyclists.

Other cities are far ahead of New York and other American metropolises. In 2017, Beijing saw its first uptick in shared bike traffic, with an average of 6 million shared rides per day. In 2019, the Chinese capital opened its first cycling highway, an eight-mile protected bike lane designed to connect multiple cities. A major rollout of e-bike-friendly bike lanes is currently underway in Berlin, where leaders plan to build 10 new bicycle highways to spur commuter biking and reduce travel time by eliminating obstacles like stop signs and cars. The newly designed lanes will be wider for easier overtaking, illuminated at night, and protected from cars and pedestrians alike. Such lanes could be used not just by commuters but also delivery services using cargo bikes, as they are in famously bike-friendly Amsterdam.

Back in New York, city officials added 28 miles of bike lanes in 2020, bringing the total number to over 1,300 miles. But taken as a whole, much of the city’s cycling infrastructure can be seen as woefully incomplete when compared to the adjacent roads—over 6,000 miles of which criss-cross the five boroughs. “From the perspective of a map, it actually looks like a full network [of bike lanes],” says Doucet. “But when you actually cycle that space … you’re experiencing a very disjointed, disconnected network.”

Even if you don’t mind sharing the road with cars, many urbanites live above the first floor, and big elevators are a luxury—so an e-bike, which are often heavier than their powerless cousins, may leave you sweating when you have to wrangle it up to your apartment. The X3 I tried over the summer weighs as much as 50 pounds, and carrying that up three apartment floors was even worse than I thought it would be. Foldable e-bikes, like the Gocycle GXi, are somewhat easier to lug around, but generally don’t ride as well.

Then there’s the matter of parking while you’re out and about. In New York, where there’s little by way of secure bike parking to speak of, most riders—including delivery drivers and people in areas underserved by public transit—lock up their e-bike on the street and hope for the best. With a 27% increase in bike thefts but fewer arrests for bike larceny compared to last year, bikers can’t expect to recover their stolen wheels, and bike theft can be both discouraging and costly. Safe parking has only grown in importance as more people rely on more expensive e-bikes to get to and from places like work or school. But in a report detailing the state of bicycle parking in New York City, bicycle advocacy organization Transportation Alternatives found more than one vehicle parking spot per car registered in the city, while only one bike parking spot for every 116 bikes.

In 2020—when bike sales rose by 50%, according to the NPD Group, and bike use increased despite the pandemic-triggered drop in overall commuting—New York City failed to install a single new bike corral, according to public records. Installations of the publicly-shared Citi Bike system have helped encourage short-distance trips, with over 100 added over the past year, for 1,081 stations in total. But that doesn’t solve the problem for people like delivery workers, who use e-bikes constantly to get around the city, or people who own their own bicycles. “Not everybody wants to ride a Citi Bike, because they’re big and heavy,” says Jon Orcutt, head of cycling advocacy group Bike NYC. “And it definitely doesn’t solve the [parking] problem in your neighborhood.”

Bike parking startup Oonee is trying to solve that issue with its Pod system—a modular, security-focused parking structure that can be set up in a day and outfitted with security cameras, lights, and amenities like benches and green roofing. Oonee’s goal of improving bike parking for everyone is rooted in helping the city’s most vulnerable cyclists feel safe and secure whenever they have to leave their bike outside, says CEO Shabazz Stuart. “If you want people to ride bikes, it can’t just be about safety,” says Stuart. “You also have to make sure that riding a bike is as, or more convenient, than riding a car. And right now? Riding a bike is like the wild west.”

With the pandemic amplifying existing economic disparities between communities, adding bike lanes and parking— especially in low-income communities lacking other forms of safe or public transit—seems like an easy fix. Indeed, Stuart views the bike parking shortage as yet another problem exacerbated by race and class.

“65% of our user base is non-white, and 50% is below area median income,” says Stuart, noting that bike thefts primarily affect people in low-income areas as well as delivery cyclists, who are often people of color. “When you ask working cyclists, ‘what’s it like to have your bicycle stolen?’ They say ‘it’s not just a setback, it’s going to cost me my job.'”

New story in Technology from Time: We Need a Fundamental Reset.’ Shoshana Zuboff on Building an Internet That Lets Democracy Flourish

Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, argues the threat to our democracy won’t recede unless we address the fundamental flaws of the business model that companies like Google and Facebook have ridden to market dominance—a model built on extracting data about our behaviors, and using the insights from those data to manipulate us. Zuboff spoke to TIME on what to expect from the next 10 years.

The details of the algorithms used by big tech platforms are known to nobody outside the companies that operate them. How do you begin to regulate something like that?

We have backed ourselves into an untenable social framework, where a few giant companies own and operate the Internet. The companies are black boxes, outside of societal influence and democratic control. Their surveillance economics compel them to extract data from our lives at a massive scale. They simply claimed the right to treat our private lives as raw material for their profit. The data come from us, but they are not for us. The more they track us and engage us, the more data they gather, the better they can target, manipulate, and predict future behavior— insights that they sell to lucrative markets of business customers. Algorithms are engineered to amplify the most extreme, angry, toxic content, drawing people in to maximize data extraction.

These operations undermine human autonomy and create huge societal asymmetries of knowledge and power—a whole new dimension of inequality. We are learning the hard way about their destructive effects on society and democracy. These systems can be regulated, but the fact is that we’ve barely even tried so far. Important new legislative proposals in the E.U. and the U.K. would for the first time insist that the largest tech platforms are accountable to audit and oversight, the rule of law and the established rights of citizens. The message is that democracy is finally on the move after two decades of surveillance capitalism having all the power.

Casting your gaze forward to 2030: What do democracy, society and our social platforms look like if we embark upon a new course?

Conversations about democracy, technology and the economic dominance of surveillance capitalism are now inseparable. Looking ahead to the year 2030, I put my bet on democracy because it’s the best idea humanity has ever had, despite all of its obvious imperfections. When I wake up every morning I’m thinking about what I can do to contribute to this, so that our societies mobilize to double down on democracy.

This begins with saying out loud that the current state of affairs is intolerable. Massive commercial surveillance for the sake of a few companies is disfiguring our societies. Intolerable. My kids discuss encryption software and how to hide in their own lives from invasive tracking and data extraction. Intolerable. Our public discourse is ruled by a handful of people for the sake of their profits. We never voted for them and cannot influence them.

Intolerable. We are relegated to bystander status in our own societies. Intolerable. As citizens we begin by joining together in our communities, organizations, associations, political networks to demand an end to commercial surveillance. Our lawmakers hear from the tech lobbyists every day. They need to feel us at their backs instead. We are poised at a new beginning, and not a moment too late. If we do that, 2030 will be fundamentally different than the horrors that we’re experiencing today.

Tech platforms hold so many promises for connections across boundaries. What benefits can they still bring to the world?

Facebook entered our lives with great promise. We want to be connected. Just as a century ago we embraced the telephone, we embraced Facebook. Then surveillance capitalism was invented and the whole project turned extractive and adversarial. It’s no longer about connection, but about exploiting personal information for profit. That’s what leads to amplification of extremism and all the rest. So, let’s go back to the original promise and do it right. The boundaries between the virtual and real worlds have melted, and therefore the laws and rights that protect us must govern both.

People should have the rights to decide what becomes data and what remains private. We must have the rights to decide how those data are shared, and for what purpose. We will need new institutions and pathways so that data can be used to enhance our lives, communities, and societies. This was the original promise of the digital age, and it remains within our reach. We’ve been hijacked, but we can change the trajectory.

Instead of massive concentrations of data to manipulate our commercial and political behavior, data becomes a critical resource for people and society. We use it to enhance our cities, towns, and neighborhoods; to make sure everybody’s got food; everybody’s got a doctor and a teacher. We cure diseases and work on the climate crisis. We clear the space for new kinds of businesses that actually care about people and want to solve our problems. There’s no tweaking any of this to get us where we need to go. We need a fundamental reset.

If any of this sounds impossibly idealistic, I offer two thoughts. First, we learned in the 20th century how to tether industrial capitalism to democracy and create a more equal and prosperous society. We’ve strayed from that vision, but we are on our way back to it, now for a digital century. Second, our sense of the possible has been crippled by two decades of helplessness and resignation under the thumb of the tech giants. That too is changing as we come to understand the wizard behind the curtain. Right now, we are eager for change, and every path forward leads through democracy guided by a shared vision of a democratic digital future.