[Tech Thoughts] How bad actors weaponize copyright to silence journalism online

Bad actors use legitimate takedown mechanisms to remove journalistic content they don't want online

AT A GLANCE

• The author learns about how bad actors exploit copyright and social media moderation to silence investigative journalism.
• These bad actors use tactics such as cloning content, backdating it, and making false reports to social media companies to remove legitimate journalistic work.
• To combat this issue, journalists can seek help from organizations like Access Now and advocate for accountability from social media platforms regarding their takedown processes.

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As a journalist whose primary world is being online, I didn’t really think much about how social media impacted the reach of stories. My concerns were mostly about writing stories, leaving much of the amplification of my work to others in Rappler.

It wasn’t until I attended an online webinar this week that I learned more about how bad actors use copyright and weaponize social media moderation and website takedown mechanisms to silence journalists and weaken — or negate — the reach of investigative journalism.

Wait, bad actors can do that?

The webinar, hosted by the Global Investigative Journalist Network (GIJN), had experts speaking out about instances journalists from around the world had experienced being silenced.

This isn’t a physical access issue, like what would happen if a president barred a reporter or a group of reporters within a press pool from being able to be in the same room with the president.

Instead, the webinar shared experiences and case studies showing how rampant and far-reaching the effects of bad actors are when they undertake the process of copyright-striking legitimate pages to get them taken down or to otherwise negate the ability of an investigative journalism piece to be shared or read.

How does this happen?

There are a number of ways in which this takes shape, but in broad strokes, it’s basically stealing and backdating content or faking evidence to make it appear as if the bad actors are the originators of the content seeking to be taken down.

There is apparently a thriving industry of “reputation management groups,” whether legitimate businesses or just smaller unofficial outfits willing to do dirty work for money, that advertise specific services. like content removal, webpage removal, mass reporting, astroturfing, or similar tasks.

To silence journalists, these bad actors make false reports to social media companies and fake evidence against legitimate groups or posts to get the social media companies’ automated systems to do the work of taking down a page for them.

For instance, Bangladeshi-based networks were operating to take down content in Central Asia and Africa.

To get takedowns done on social media, they would clone videos or steal the text of reports — say from an African investigative report. The bad actors would then, in the case of videos, add Bengali voiceovers on top of videos to make it seem from their region.

For videos or text pieces, they would then falsify further by backdating the content on social media or on a legitimate-seeming website so that they could say the content came from them and request the takedown of posts from the automated systems handling moderation on social media platforms like Facebook or X.

In some other instances, bad actors abuse the memorialization feature of Facebook — the feature that creates a static memorial page for dead Facebook users — to disable the posting capabiltiies of specific journalists.

The memorialization trick is more involved, as it requires falsifying death certificates and submitting the fake death certificate and possibly other documents to Facebook so the page can be memorialized.

In other parts of the world, where investigative journalists or teams work together and have a website for their investigations, copyright abuse is the trick used to get legitimate sites taken down.

Similar to social media takedowns, copyright abuse see bad actors cloning content and making a false website that backdates the content.

They then make bogus copyright requests so legitimate sites can be taken down and their search results scrubbed from search engines through the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, even if the sites aren’t based in the United States.

What can be done?

While journalists are fighting the good fight of doing research and investigating anomalies, there are ways in which things could change to make this industry die out.

For victims of such actions, they can reach out to Access Now, a global nonprofit organization that helps get people back online by defending digital rights, or seek help from their local digital rights helpline, if a country has one.

Journalists may also want to investigate these malign actors, while digital advocacy groups can hold platforms — especially social media platforms frightened by intellectual property claims — accountable for offloading takedown requests to machines rather than humans. – Rappler.com