Allow me to introduce the concept I call “Internet Fairy Dust”. Then I will discuss an instance where this magical dust was sprinkled upon a scandal in the UK that resulted in false accusations, ruined careers and imprisonment—until the IFD was wiped off and the truth discovered. I am talking about the British Post Office scandal, about which a TV series launched on January 1 called Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office. Can Internet Fairy Dust be poison? Let’s find out.

What is Internet Fairy Dust? I mentioned this concept most recently in a book called Army of Liars, scheduled for publication in September of this year. Internet Fairy Dust is an imaginary but powerful powder that when sprinkled upon any problem occurring on the Internet, makes that problem disappear without a trace. It tends to result in any number of online behaviors that are tolerated on the Internet that would never, ever be tolerated in what we still have the temerity to call “the real world”. I refer most importantly about content theft, but also about the presumption of nonliability for murderous diatribes widely disseminated (and monetized) by social media platforms.

In our British Post Office case, the effect of Internet Fairy Dust was not only about how the IFD forced everyone to believe, erroneously, that computer software ought not be questioned, but that the integrity of hardworking professionals could be punished for what they never did, rather than bother to wipe off the thick coating of IFD to find the flaw in the software.

This is another aspect of Internet Fairy Dust. It has created an atmosphere where the Internet itself, and software more generally, has become a shibboleth. Which means the Internet and all SAAS offerings must ceremoniously remain unquestioned, sort of like a stone idol that sits in judgment of the tribe even as the tribe’s entire way of life has been eroded by forces that don’t recognize nor care about the tribe.

According to the New York Times, the new TV show “dramatizes the fate of hundreds of people who ran branches of the Post Office across Britain, and who were wrongly accused of theft after a faulty IT system. . .created false shortfalls in their accounting”. The article goes on to say that between 1999 and 2015, many of these unfortunates were “jailed. . .driven to financial hardship” and that many “suffered mental health issues” and that some even “took their lives”. During this period, over 900 people were falsely accused of theft. The conclusion is easy: Internet Fairy Dust can be poison.

In other forms, it poisons us today. With a dramatic rise in hate, outrage and discord in the US apropos of nothing except the presence of tailored, targeted, nefarious messaging, we can see that the Internet lies at the heart of our outrage-industrial complex. This manufactured outrage has been driven to a fever pitch by cynical manipulators on social media. And yet the sprinkling of IFD upon the social media platforms and upon the Internet in general makes most of us blind to the fact that it does not have to be this way.

In the US we have not, unfortunately, hit bottom yet in the trenches of disinformation. We remain blinded by IFD to the dangers posed by serial liars on powerful media platforms. But for some observers in the UK, they have at least learned that Internet Fairy Dust is the real deal; and that blindness to software-related problems can destroy real people in the process. Since 2020, the UK has paid out more than $188 million in compensatory damages to victims of the Post Office scandal.

At least we can say that justice was served, although late and for some, clearly insufficient.

According the Associated Press, Paul Patterson, a representative of Fujitsu, the corporate owner of the software that failed to function properly before many suffered, testified recently before British Parliament. Patterson said, “I think there is a moral obligation for the company to contribute. To the sub-postmasters and their families, Fujitsu would like to apologize for our part in this appalling miscarriage of justice.” Having been caught failing repeatedly and without remorse, now they are sorry and want to make it right. This does little to explain the selective myopia involved in failing to take responsibility when it might have mattered. It does little to explain why no one, anywhere, for probably ten years or more, thought it was even a possibility that one software bug might be the problem, rather than perfidy and theft on a grand scale all across the Kingdom.

I have the explanation, though, and I think you know what it is. It’s Internet Fairy Dust.

Because when IFD is sprinkled—as it is always and automatically sprinkled—all sense of right and wrong go out the window. None of the standard rules apply. Perhaps we all know (or believe with enough fervor to make it seem like knowledge) that what happens on the Internet is not the real world anyway, and that stuff that happens there only matters there. Or at least this is the helpful idiocy that keeps social media companies very obviously in command, even as the real-world-harms that stem from on line extremism are glaring, and getting worse.

In the case of the software product that lies at the heart of the UK Post Office scandal, it looks like Fujitsu has at last yielded to pressure that they help compensate the many victims of their malfeasance. The story goes all the way back to the 1990s, when the UK sought to clamp down on social security fraud, which they blamed on the nation’s paper-based system. Of course it was assumed that the only thing missing was software. To be fair, software has not succeeded over the decades by failing to provide value. But the problem is not with the upside possibility resident in software, but in the refusal to acknowledge that there could ever be a downside to any particular piece of software as compared to a non-software way of doing things.

So the UK asked a company called International Computers Limited (ICL) to develop a product to fix the fraud and streamline operations. It never worked out, though. Once deployed, it was immediately seen that accounting records did not balance properly. Usually a loss was shown where the sub-postmasters (who ran the post offices) knew there wasn’t. They even reported it. But no one listened. Instead, it was widely assumed that the software could not possibly be incorrect, and that many folks were, instead, turning to a criminal frame of mind.

Eventually Japanese conglomerate Fujitsu acquired ICL and continued to develop the product, now called Horizon, despite claims it was making a mess out of Post Office accounting. Horizon continued to be used as a sales terminal in over 17,000 post offices throughout Great Britain, including Scotland and Northern Ireland. According the Financial Times, “more than 4,000 individuals were pursued for shortfalls”. In addition, “the Post Office blocked request for disclosure of ‘known error logs’ held by Fujitsu”. Legislation even provided a way for prosecutors to say that software in general was deemed legally “infallible” without external proof otherwise. And without access to known existing error logs, the victims could not mount a defense in court.

Moreover, the prosecution (and Fujitsu) relied on so-called “industry experts” to parrot that the Horizon software must be right and a thousand dedicated humans must have turned criminal as soon as they started using the software. The mere assumption that one must, by law, accept the output of a mindless borg over the protestations of innocent humans, is evidence enough that Internet Fairy Dust is perhaps even more powerful than anyone might have imagined. In the end, the official myopia was considered so undermining that a minister in charge of the Post Office was forced to return an award that had been bestowed in honor of good government. However, they were not forced to resign–presumably a residual effect of the expansive power of Internet Fairy Dust. In addition, Horizon is still in use today by the Post Office, and the software is characterized by the PO as “robust”, which is not the same as “error free”. And as anyone who has ever been in the business of buying or selling enterprise software platforms knows, there are no software products not also called “robust” by their developers. Some synonyms for “robust” include “bloated”, “over-engineered”, “expensive” and “superannuated”.

What have we learned about Internet Fairy Dust? I have given only one example of how our collective blindness to the pitfalls associated with SAAS-based platforms can generate enormous challenges for large numbers of humans. As demonstrated by Fujitsu’s late willingness to pay out compensation, we know the software was at fault, and also we know it was not to be questioned despite probably one thousand or more red flags waving over the Horizon for about fifteen years.

Today, Internet Fairy Dust in general leads us to accept too many ill-advised trends and behaviors on the Internet that we would not tolerate in the physical world. I will give one further example. Consider the case of Gonzalez vs. Google, a case that appeared before the United States Supreme Court in May of 2023. In brief, the plaintiff sued Google for damages in the case of the Gonzalez daughter’s wrongful death. She was murdered in the infamous Paris nightclub attack, when ISIS madmen attacked a room full of revelers and murdered many of them to promote their narrow world view; and to fulfill their holy mission to destroy infidels. One of the perpetrators was radicalized—so says the plaintiff—by having seen a number of ISIS recruitment videos on Google’s YouTube. In fact, the plaintiff points out that it was Google’s own recommendation engine that promoted the hateful, violent videos; and contends further that the murderer might never have seen the videos at all, and might never have shot anyone, had he not been looking at YouTube’s recommendations. The plaintiff argued that the manner in which Google aided ISIS in their radicalization techniques created a liability due to what is called “proximate cause”, or in other words: they had a hand in the murder.

The Supreme Court ruled against the plaintiff.

They cited a provision in the 1996 Communications Decency Act called Section 230. Section 230 provides that social media platforms cannot be held accountable for anything anyone posts to their platform. So Gonzalez, having lost a daughter to the algorithms that promoted violent videos (and the bullets of ISIS), now lost again in the highest court in the land.

Let’s wrap up by considering how this might have gone had Internet Fairy Dust not been available to the defendant. For instance, how would it have gone if Google/YouTube were a brick and mortar business not protected by the great reservoir of IFD known as Section 230?

Here’s how it would have gone: the brick and mortar company would have been held liable for its proximate causation—and here’s how it would have looked.

Using the New York Times as an example, let’s propose that the Times, which happens to be located not far from Times Square in New York, opened up a storefront and invited the public to type up whatever they felt like typing up (or uploading). The Times would promise the public that anything typed into the special terminal at the storefront would be published in the newspaper. And let’s propose that someone came in and typed up an article about how we had to kill Big Bird. Not only would the piece get published. The Times would go the extra step in sending town criers about, looking for random strangers who were particularly interested in killing generally and in killing Big Bird especially. They would give away the paper to these strangers and open the paper to the exact page where the Kill Big Bird article was. They might even send the criers out more than once, and show the article more than once to the same people. After about a week of these shenanigans, Big Bird turns up dead—murdered.

What are the chances that the Times might have something to answer for?

The chances are pretty good, because in the real world, you’re not allowed to publish advocacy of murder, and especially not if you are also hunting for potential murderers under the guise of a blinkered imperative to always show more of what the target audience “wants to see”. The Times would be sued into oblivion by the estate of Big Bird. But on the Internet, partly because of Section 230 and entirely because of Internet Fairy Dust, you can get away with exactly what you cannot get away with anywhere else. And Gonzalez vs. Google proves it.

There are any number of other important examples of the poisonous effects of Internet Fairy Dust. Among these are privacy violations on a scale we can scarcely imagine, scams like cryptocurrency that would fall flat if not liberally encrusted with IFD, massive content theft by search engines and large language models, trolling, harassment, and in general the rejection of what’s real for what’s on a flat screen. I’ll tackle some of these in future articles.

All of the above only goes to prove that Internet Fairy Dust rules. But that’s only because we are only just now taking off the blinders.

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(Photo credit: BBC)