Facebook Upended by Digital-Age Social Governance
By: Creating Future Us June 30, 2020 Last week we wrote about Mark Zuckerberg’s intransigence with respect to arbitration (i.e. policing ads and content) on Facebook and the lack of proper governance at Facebook. We hope we contributed to the resulting boycott that has been gathering impressive pace since Friday. We appreciate how […]
Peers call for tougher regulation of digital and social media in UK
By: The Guardian June 29, 2020 Ministers are being urged to toughen up the regulation of digital and social media because “a pandemic of misinformation and disinformation” is eroding trust in politics and public institutions. A House of Lords committee on democracy and digital technologies, chaired by the film producer and Labour peer David Puttnam, […]
Expert: Online Disinformation Now Targeting COVID-19, Black Lives Matter
By: Futurism June 25, 2020 For years, Hany Farid has been warning Congress, the media, and anyone else who would listen that society is losing the battle against disinformation online. With the rise of sophisticated, hyper-realistic deepfakes and other forms of manipulated media and the approaching 2020 presidential election, his warnings seem more prescient than ever. Farid, a professor […]
The Arbiters of Truth in the Digital Age
There has been much ado recently about whether social media platforms are, or should be gatekeepers of information, thereby acting as arbiters of truth. Currently, platforms like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, WeChat, Weibo and Tiktok perform several functions that arguably do install them squarely in the gatekeeper seat: Content moderation – requires judgment by these platforms, […]
‘A big victory’: Zoom to provide end-to-end encryption after mounting privacy concerns
By: ABC News June 18, 2020 Zoom will now allow end-to-end encryption for all users after the videoconferencing platform came under fire for privacy concerns. Evan Greer, the deputy director of nonprofit digital rights group Fight for the Future, called the decision “a big victory for grassroots activists who fought hard to make sure that […]
Facebook closes political ads loophole ahead of US presidential election
By: Fox Business June 17, 2020 Facebook Inc said on Tuesday it would affix labels to political ads shared by users on their own feeds, closing what critics have said for years was a glaring loophole in the company’s election transparency measures. The world’s biggest social network has attached a “paid for by” disclaimer to political ads since […]
Not just nipples: how Facebook’s AI struggles to detect misinformation
By: The Guardian June 16, 2020 “It’s much easier to build an AI system that can detect a nipple than it is to determine what is linguistically hate speech.” The Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made that comment in 2018 when he was discussing how the company tackles content that is deemed inappropriate or, in Facebook […]
Amazon Halts Police Use Of Its Facial Recognition Technology
By: NPR June 12, 2020 Amazon announced on Wednesday a one-year moratorium on police use of its facial-recognition technology, yielding to pressure from police-reform advocates and civil rights groups. It is unclear how many law enforcement agencies in the U.S. deploy Amazon’s artificial intelligence tool, but an official with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon confirmed […]
The Global Implications of “Re-education” Technologies in Northwest China
By: Newlines Institute June 08, 2020 Since May 2014, when Chinese Communist Party Secretary Zhang Chunxian announced the People’s War on Terror in the Uighur region, Chinese technology firms have received billions of dollars in Chinese state capital to build a comprehensive Muslim “re-education” system in Northwest China. Over the same period of time they have created a […]