An Italian court convicted three Google executives of privacy violations Wednesday because they did not act quickly enough to remove an online video that showed sadistic teen bullies pummeling and mocking an autistic boy.
The case was being closely watched around the world due to its implications for Internet freedom.
In the first such criminal trial of its kind, Judge Oscar Magi sentenced the three in absentia to a six-month suspended sentence and absolved them of defamation charges. A fourth defendant, charged only with defamation, was acquitted.
Google called the decision “astonishing.”
“We will appeal this astonishing decision,” Google spokesman Bill Echikson said at the courthouse. “We are deeply troubled by this decision. It attacks the principles of freedom on which the Internet was built.”
Those convicted were Google’s global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer, its senior vice president and chief legal officer David Drummond and retired chief financial officer George Reyes. Senior product marketing manager Arvind Desikan, based in London, was acquitted. All four had denied wrongdoing.
“The judge has decided I’m primarily responsible for the actions of some teenagers who uploaded a reprehensible video to Google video,” Fleischer, who is based in Paris, said in a statement.
He noted with irony that he was convicted for privacy violations despite devoting his career to “preserving and protecting personal privacy rights.”
Drummond said he was “outraged” that he was found criminally responsible for the video, noting that both European Union and Italian law recognized that Internet service providers like Google are not required to monitor content that they host.
“This verdict sets a dangerous precedent,” Drummond said in a statement. “(It also) imperils the powerful tool that an open and free Internet has become for social advocacy and change.”
In the United States, the Communications Decency Act of 1996 generally gives Internet service providers immunity in cases like this, but no such protections exist in Europe.
The verdict could help define whether the Internet in Italy — and perhaps beyond — is an open, self-regulating platform or if content must be better monitored for abusive material. It comes as Google already is facing regulatory challenges in Italy, where a draft bill would require Internet sites to control content the same way television stations do. Google has lobbied for changes to the bill.
Google, based in Mountain View, California, had called the trial a threat to freedom on the Internet because it could force providers to attempt an impossible task — prescreening the thousands of hours of footage uploaded every day onto sites like YouTube.
Prosecutors had insisted the case wasn’t about censorship but about balancing the freedom of expression with the rights of an individual.
Prosecutor Alfredo Robledo said he was satisfied with the decision because it upheld the principal of privacy and put the rights of the individual ahead of those of a business. It could force Google, and any other hosting platform, to better monitor its video, he added.
“This is the big principal affirmed by this verdict,” Robledo said. “It is fundamental, because identity is a primary good. If we give that up, anything can happen and that is not OK.”
The charges were sought by Vivi Down, an advocacy group for people with Down syndrome. The group alerted prosecutors to the 2006 video showing an autistic student in Turin being pushed, pummeled with items, and insulted by bullies at school, who called him a “mongoloid” in a mock telephone call to Vivi Down.
“Unfortunately, in Italy, the term ‘mongoloid’ is used as an insult, which we don’t like,” Edoardo Censi, president of Vivi Down, said outside the courtroom. “Our problem is the defense of our children, of the disabled … when we learned of the video, our first concern was to remove it.”
Google Italy, which is based in Milan, said it took down the video two hours after being notified by police, as is required by law. Prosecutors argued that viewers had flagged it well before police contacted Google, and the fact that it shot to the top of a “most entertaining videos” list on the Italian site, had 5,500 views and 800 comments during the two months it was online meant it should have been noticed sooner.
Thanks to the footage and Google’s cooperation, the four bullies were identified and sentenced by a juvenile court to community service. The events shortly preceded Google’s 2006 acquisition of YouTube.
In another setback Wednesday for Google, the European Commission in Brussels said it had asked Google to comment on allegations by rivals that it demotes their sites in its search rankings.
EU spokeswoman Amelia Torres declined to name the three rivals and stressed that the EU hadn’t yet opened a formal investigation.
Google said it would provide “feedback and additional information on these complaints,” but stressed it was not violating any EU antitrust rules. It said those complaining were Foundem, a British price comparison site, the French legal search engine ejustice.fr and Microsoft Corp’s Ciao! from Bing.
The low rankings complaint is significant because high rankings in Google searches drive higher volumes of traffic to Web sites.
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AP Correspondent Robert Wielaard contributed from Brussels.
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On the Net:
http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/
Facebook Inc. said Wednesday it is teaming with a Middle Eastern digital advertising company as the online meet-up site looks to capitalize on rapid growth in the Arab world.
Facebook said it hopes the deal with Connect Ads will give it better exposure to advertisers in a socially conservative region where online marketing is in its early stages. The Cairo-based advertising booker already handles sales for Microsoft Corp.’s MSN regional portals and other local sites.
“They have the reach and … they have the connections,” said Trevor Johnson, Facebook’s head of strategy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The tie-up with an outside ad sales provider mirrors a strategy Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook has used in other emerging markets, such as Eastern Europe and Asia, Johnson said in an interview.
It also signals the potential the social networking site sees for the young and growing Arab market, where it counts 10 million regular users.
The company expects Mideast user numbers to shoot significantly higher in the coming months, as it has in other markets, as more members follow their friends onto the site.
“The opportunity is massive … we’re very much at a tipping point,” Johnson said. “Now is the time where there are enough people where it makes brands sit up and listen.”
For now though, the Middle East represents a small fraction of Facebook’s business. The company has more than 400 million active users worldwide. It says about 70 percent of those are outside the United States.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The initial partnership lasts for three years.
The companies said it was too early to discuss sales targets. Connect Ads managing director Mohamed el-Mehairy said only that he expects “high revenues” from the deal given the site’s explosive growth.
Partnering with an established Arabic firm also could help Facebook find its way in a region where authorities typically maintain strict controls on the flow of online information.
Censors in countries such as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia routinely block Web sites based on political, religious and moral grounds. Those countries are also home to the bulk of Facebook’s Middle Eastern users.
“It’s whether or not we can continue to deliver on the local market experience people expect, but within the rules and regulations” imposed by governments and society, Johnson said. “That’s one of the biggest challenges, is building that side of things.”
Other major Internet companies are also ramping up their operations in the Arab world.
In August, Yahoo Inc. bought one of the region’s largest online portals, Maktoob, for an undisclosed sum.
Two weeks later, Google Inc. launched an online question-and-answer tool it said was designed to boost the amount of Web content available in Arabic. It already offers Arabic-language search pages, and its Blogger publishing platform is popular in the region.
I smoke, I drink, I talk waaaay too much and think even more than that, I swear like a longshoreman, I’m usually covered in dog hair, I do not order salad as a full meal, I always want to Talk About It, I might be funnier than you, I want to be taken care of but hate feeling weak, I’m completely disorganized, I will keep cuddling until you pry me off you (and so will my dogs), I say “awesome” a lot, I don’t lie even if it’s easier, I tell my girlfriends everything, I expect to come, and I’ve been told repeatedly that I scare the crap out of men. If that sounds like your kind of girl, awesome.
That’s the last ad I ever ran on an online dating site, starting two months before I met the man who would become my husband. When I shared it with a trusted girlfriend (whose immediate critique was, “Well, I guess you only need to find one“), she tried to gently lecture me on selling myself, but I cut her off: “I am selling myself. Just to a very small niche market.”
I’d already proven I could attract a large number of responses by appealing to the lowest common denominator. At 19, I won a contest among my dorm-mates to see who could get the most replies to a free 25-word ad in a local alternative weekly, the only restriction being that you couldn’t lie. My ad was eight words long and included my age, bra size and the phrases “lapsed Catholic” and “needs excitement.” More than 200 men responded. But of course I didn’t pursue any of them; oddly enough, I wasn’t really interested in the kind of guy who would answer an ad that essentially said: “I am a busty, barely legal teenager, and I have no standards worth mentioning.” (My sole objective that time was winning a case of Milwaukee’s Best from the losers.)
Twelve years later, when I was actually hoping to meet someone I could fall in love with, I wasn’t particularly keen on the kind of responses I’d get with a garden-variety “Urban professional, 31, animal-lover” ad, either. At that point, after more than a decade of experience with dating and long-term relationships, I was far more interested in weeding out obvious Mr. Wrongs — guys who’d balk at the word “feminist,” or describe 5’2″, excessively cuddly me as “scary,” or interpret conflicting desires as hypocrisy — than in casting a wide net. What I was looking for above all was someone who recognized that a lover’s flaws only remain quirky and adorable for so long, but the right person is still well worth it. (Also, someone who would never characterize that nod to reality as “settling.“)
To the extent that one can take the London Review of Books’ famous personal ads section seriously at all, that type of thinking seems to be its raison d’etre. Although LRB advertising director David Rose — who recently published his second collection of personals, “Sexually, I’m More of a Switzerland” — told GQ he originally envisioned the section merely as a place for people interested in the same books to connect, it quickly became something much funnier, darker and possibly even more successful at matchmaking. As one would expect from the LRB’s audience, the ads were witty and erudite — but also frequently self-deprecating to the point of absurdity, sometimes circling all the way back around to arrogance (at least of the infuriatingly charming sort that makes you picture George Clooney instead of a guy who just told you up front he’s ugly and lives with his mother). Consider the man who begins with a list of eyebrow-raising sexual conquests and past romances, including “2003-2006 — Evil Satanic Bitch Whore,” then concludes, “Don’t pretend your relationships have been any less incongruous and unsatisfying. Write to probably the most normal guy you’ll ever see in a lonely heart advert and maybe we’ll end up friends or lovers or despising each other and wincing every time we remember our awful one-night stand or maybe we’ll get married and have children.” Admit it: You kind of want to call that guy.
In a review of Rose’s first collection, “They Call Me Naughty Lola,” for Salon, Buzzy Jackson compared the London Review of Books style of self-promotion (“Things I won’t do for love include replacing corroding soil pipes and trepanning at home. Everything else is A-OK. Eager-to-please woman [36] seeks domineering man to take advantage of her flagging confidence. Tell me I’m pretty, then watch me cling” ) to the truly shameless sort found in its New York counterpart — e.g., “LITHE, LOVELY. Vivacious, passionate, successful concert singer (Lincoln Center, Carnegie) … Cool (but not cold) blonde with an enviably high metabolism — witty, classy, quick to smile — a mix of Angelica Huston/Cameron Diaz. Argentina-born, Paris (Sorbonne) educated and fluent in six languages…” Seriously, who would you rather date? If you’d pick a woman whose humorless, self-important ad describes her as “witty” over one who says she won’t debase herself for love by trepanning at home, well… you wouldn’t be the partner for me. Or for that woman, surely, which is the whole point.
“Those other personals are like resumes, and who’s ever turned on by a resume?” says Rose. “In the few words the lonely hearts advertisers have in the LRB, they still manage to capture a more complete essence of that person than anything you could find on Match.” Some ads, Rose points out, use quite sophisticated comedic and literary techniques in such a small space. Some brilliantly satirize the more expected type of ad. And as a bonus, “because they’re from that British intellectual class, you get a lot of Monty Python. There’s an awful lot of silly and outrageous and full on non-sequiturs.” What’s not to love — at least if already you love that sort of thing? And if you do, would you want to be with someone who didn’t?
If you don’t, then you can always go to one of the sites where people market themselves with all the humility and attention to detail of a used car salesman, as they’re often advised to do by what Rose calls “Dear Abby types.” Accentuate the positive! Conveniently forget the negative! There will be plenty of time for the other person to find out how fucked up you are – why would you give that away before the first date?
Maybe because after a certain point, you have a pretty good idea of what your worst yet most enduring qualities are, and you’re sick of wasting time with people who can’t handle them. The LRB’s average reader is fiftysomething, after all, and many of the ad buyers mention their divorces; these are people who’ve been around the block. They know what their dealbreakers are – both in the sense of what they won’t accept in a partner, and what other people are likely to find unacceptable in them. Rose suggests that part of the motivation for writing such silly ads is “lowering the stakes” – building in a plausible reason for rejection that isn’t directly related to your looks or, say, your very soul – and there’s probably a lot of truth to that. But as someone who published a much less witty variation on the same theme a few years ago, I can also tell you I was just plain sick of guys who would either react negatively to qualities I’m not ashamed of (Talking About It; telling my own jokes instead of just laughing at his; “pathological honesty,” in the words of one boyfriend) or try to shame me into changing qualities so entrenched that, even if I wasn’t proud of them, I knew anyone who might live with me someday had best get used to them (pottymouth, dog hair, disorganization, indiscretion, use of “awesome”). I figured I’d rather put it all out there and get no responses than be coy and end up dating a guy who hated half of what makes me me.
And it worked; I was introduced to my husband by a mutual friend, as it turned out, but in the interim, I fielded a couple dozen responses to that ad and went on several dates, some of which were even fun. Writing a self-deprecating personal may let potential partners know you’re imperfect (gasp!), but it also tells them you know who you are and have the confidence to say, “Take it or leave it.” And if you go far enough over the top (“Join me in my 36-bedroom mansion on my Gloucestershire estate, set in 400 acres of wild-stag populated woodland” writes an LRB reader who also notes he’s been called a pathological liar), it can even invert the usual concern about how truthful a personal ad is. Instead of wondering how much worse this guy is than he claims, you’re wondering how much better.
So, even if one of those “Dear Abby types” told Rose “This is not good! You’re ruining these people’s lives!” and the LRB’s own editor says they’re “not [her] thing,” the goofy, charming little personals section – not to mention the spin-off books and Twitter feed — continues to thrive. Partly because it works — it’s reportedly been responsible for at least a few marriages – and partly because it’s hilarious reading, whether you’re looking for love or not. (“Most partners cite the importance of having a loved one who will listen and understand them. I’m here to rubbish this theory. F, 38.”) If nothing else, it’s hard to get depressed about being single when you’re laughing so hard.
When a gang member was released from jail soon after his arrest for selling methamphetamine, friends and associates assumed he had cut a deal with authorities and become a police informant.
They sent a warning on Twitter that went like this: We have a snitch in our midst.
Unbeknownst to them, that tweet and the traffic it generated were being closely followed by investigators, who had been tracking the San Francisco Bay Area gang for months. Officials sat back and watched as others joined the conversation and left behind incriminating information.
Law enforcement officials say gangs are making greater use of Twitter and Facebook, where they sometimes post information that helps agents identify gang associates and learn more about their organizations.
“You find out about people you never would have known about before,” said Dean Johnston with the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, which helps police investigate gangs. “You build this little tree of people.”
In the case involving the suspected informant, tweets alerted investigators to three other gang members who were ultimately arrested on drug charges.
Tech-savvy gangsters have long been at home in chatrooms and on Web sites like MySpace, but they appear to be gravitating toward Twitter and Facebook, where they can make threats, boast about crimes, share intelligence on rivals and network with people across the country.
“We are seeing a lot more of it,” Johnston said. “They will even go out and brag about doing shootings.”
In another California case involving a different gang, much of the information gathered by investigators came from members’ Facebook accounts. Authorities expect to make arrests in the coming months.
“Once you get into a Facebook group, it’s relatively easy,” Johnston said. “You have a rolling commentary.”
And gang members sometimes turn the tables, asking contacts across their extended networks for help identifying undercover police officers.
It’s hard to know exactly how many gang members are turning to Twitter and Facebook. Many police agencies are reluctant to discuss the phenomenon for fear of revealing their investigative techniques.
Capt. Walt Myer, director of the Riverside County regional gang task force, said gang activity often “mirrors general society. When any kind of new technology comes along, they are going to use it.”
Representatives from Twitter and Facebook say they regularly cooperate with police and supply information on account holders when presented with a search warrant. Neither company would discuss specifics.
Gang use of Twitter and Facebook still lags behind use of the much-older MySpace, which remains gang members’ online venue of choice.
The Crips, Bloods, Florencia 13, MS-13 and other gangs have long used MySpace to display potentially incriminating photos and videos of people holding guns and making hand gestures. They also post messages about rivals.
Last week, officials in Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, announced the arrest of 50 people in a crackdown of a Latino gang they say was engaged in drug sales and hate crimes against black residents. Prosecutors say some of the evidence was pulled from MySpace and YouTube, including rap videos taunting police with violent messages.
While some members are wising up to the police attention such postings can bring, gang information remains publicly viewable online.
Dozens of Facebook accounts are dedicated to the deadly MS-13 gang, with followers from around the globe. At one site, a video displays pictures of dead members of the rival 18th Street gang, and some users have left disrespectful comments.
The toughest part about tracking someone on Twitter is finding the alias or screen name they are posting under. And many tweets are nonsensical or pointless, so cutting through the clutter can be difficult.
“It’s tricky,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy David Anguiano. “If you find out what they go by, you are good to go.”
Anguiano tracks the online activity of graffiti vandals — the so-called tagging crews that sometimes morph into gangs. They post tweets saying they are heading out to spray paint and sometimes post links to photographs of their work.
Often, they cannot resist bragging about their handiwork, and the electronic trail they leave is frequently used as evidence.
“They talk about it too much,” Anguiano said. “You want the fame so you’ve got to go out there and talk about it. That’s when your mouth gets you in trouble.”
Who is to blame for the fall of MySpace?
The site’s disastrous spiral into irrelevance can’t be argued. From Matthew Garrahan’s long feature in the Financial Times: (Found via Felix Salmon.)
Since then, MySpace has shed 40 percent of its staff, closed many of its international offices and publicly given up trying to match Facebook in the race to become the world’s biggest social network. (MySpace has more than 100 million regular users, Facebook more than 300 million.) A move by MySpace and other News Corp digital businesses into the biggest new office development in Los Angeles was scrapped — after the $350m, 12-year lease had been signed — leaving the company paying more than $1m a month for an empty building. The number of people using the site has also dropped precipitously this year: MySpace’s share of the social networking market has tumbled from 66 percent a year ago to 30 percent, according to the online research company Hitwise. The situation is so dire that MySpace recently revealed that it had failed to attract enough online traffic to meet targets set in its advertising deal with Google and as a result would lose $100m this year. An acquisition that had initially covered Murdoch in glory and offered so much promise was becoming an embarrassment to the News Corp chairman and a liability for his company.
Garrahan points fingers at everyone from Rupert Murdoch to MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe. Former executives recite a litany of strategic errors while spreading blame liberally around. But the real lesson here seems a lot simpler. MySpace always had a cheesy feel. Facebook offered a better user experience, and for the fundamentally fickle Internet masses, that’s all it took.
With all the angst about broken newspaper business models and the threat the Internet poses to all aspects of the traditional entertainment industry, we often forget that it’s no easier for the upstarts to hold onto whatever ground they’ve gathered than it is for the dinosaurs to avoid extinction. Today, every empire is built on shifting sand. Yesterday’s Titan is tomorrow’s Ozymandias. Facebook could melt away as easily as MySpace, or Friendster. And not just because Facebook executives made some missteps. But because somebody else came up with something a little better.
The point that traditional media barons should be mulling is that anything that makes the user experience worse — like paywalls blocking formerly freely accessible content — is the surest-fire way to send the Internet hordes surging in the other direction. Their options are unlimited.
Dr Tracy Alloway of Scotland’s University of Stirling has a theory, pithily summarized by Australia’s news.com.au: “Facebook makes you sharper but Twitter makes you thicker.”
Alloway studies what she calls “working memory” — “the new IQ” or “our ability to remember and manipulate information.”
Staying abreast of all your Facebook action, theorizes Alloway, is like playing strategy games or solving puzzles — “It hones the ability to remember information and to use it.”
But text messaging, micro-blogging on Twitter and watching YouTube were likely to weaken “working memory”.
“On Twitter you receive an endless stream of information, but it’s also very succinct,” Dr Alloway said.
“You don’t have to process that information. Your attention span is being reduced and you’re not engaging your brain and improving nerve connections.”
Dr. Alloway is the director of The Centre for Memory & Learning in the Lifespan at the University of Stirling and is the author of a long list of academic articles on the topic of “working memory.” But the neuroscience of Facebook and Twitter addiction still appears to be in its infancy, and Alloway’s theories raise some important additional research questions.
- What happens to people who are avid users of both Twitter and Facebook? Do the effects cancel each other out, leaving us just as dumb as when we started?
- What about people who pipe their tweets into Facebook? Are they making all their Facebook friends stupider? Or are they getting stupider while their friends smarten up?
- And finally, how much dumber do we become after reading a blog post about a psychologist’s theories as to how Facebook and Twitter make us smarter or dumber?
HTWW intends to start thinking about the global economy at some point today, but first I have to tweet this post, write about it on Facebook, text some friends and watch some YouTube videos about zany cyclists. If any brain cells remain functional after that point, maybe we’ll learn something about what the crash of Lehman Brothers did to financial markets almost exactly one year ago.
News Corporation Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch 
