All posts tagged: content moderation

No Fact-Checking and More Hate Speech: Meta Goes MAGA

No Fact-Checking and More Hate Speech: Meta Goes MAGA

Published by skeptic

Since Donald Trump won back the presidency on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries have been engaging in an unseemly grovel-fest, making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, shoveling million-dollar contributions to his inaugural fund, and meddling in the editorial departments of the publications they own in an apparent attempt to gain the new leader’s favor. Yesterday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “hold my beer.” In a five-minute Instagram video, rocking his new curly hairdo and a $900,000 Gruebal Forsey watch, Zuckerberg announced a series of drastic policy changes that could open the floodgates of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. His rationale parroted talking points that right-wing legislators, pundits, and Trump himself have been hammering for years. And Zuckerberg wasn’t coy about the timing, explicitly saying the new political regime was a factor in his thinking: “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” he said in the video. In Zuckerberg’s telling, the main impetus for the change is the desire to boost …

Microsoft goes from bad boy to top cop in the age of AI

Microsoft goes from bad boy to top cop in the age of AI

Published by skeptic

This article is part of a series, Bots and ballots: How artificial intelligence is reshaping elections worldwide, presented by Luminate. REDMOND, Wash. — In a shabby corner of Microsoft’s sprawling campus in this suburb of Seattle, Juan Lavista Ferres spun around in his chair and, with a mischievous grin, asked a simple question: “Do you want to play a game?” Microsoft’s chief data scientist — speaking at a frenetic pace, seemingly powered by unlimited free soft drinks and espressos from the building’s unkempt kitchen — pushed himself across his office and typed something into his computer. Within seconds, an image of former U.S. President Donald Trump popped up on the Uruguayan’s massive flatscreen monitor. “What do you think?” he asked, laughing. “Is this real or fake?” This is not just a game. (The Trump photo is an AI-generated forgery.) Lavista Ferres also runs the company’s AI For Good Lab in a converted warehouse here that still has the loading docks left over from when Microsoft used to ship floppy disks to customers worldwide. Alongside efforts to use …

Europe wields new tech law to protect EU election – POLITICO

Europe wields new tech law to protect EU election – POLITICO

Published by skeptic

Some large social media, including Facebook, have been singled out for lacking enough content moderation in less-spoken European languages like Slovak. X, which is already under formal investigation, has slashed its content moderation teams. Under the DSA, major online companies have to meet wide-ranging requirements to crack down on illegal and harmful content, including with detailed assessments and mitigations of major societal risks — like threats to elections. The guidelines are suggestions from the Commission on how to comply with the DSA rulebook. Companies are flexible in how they use them but those that do not follow the EU’s suggestions “must prove to the Commission that the measures undertaken are equally effective,” the EU executive said in a press release. The Commission also said it is planning to carry out so-called stress tests or a “wargaming scenario” at the end of April with some major platforms. Companies like Meta, TikTok and X previously asked for such voluntary exercises overseen by the Commission’s enforcement team to check if their operations complied with the DSA. EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT …

It’s Time to Give Up on Ending Social Media’s Misinformation Problem

It’s Time to Give Up on Ending Social Media’s Misinformation Problem

Published by skeptic

If you don’t trust social media, you should know you’re not alone. Most people surveyed around the world feel the same—in fact, they’ve been saying so for a decade. There is clearly a problem with misinformation and hazardous speech on platforms such as Facebook and X. And before the end of its term this year, the Supreme Court may redefine how that problem is treated. Over the past few weeks, the Court has heard arguments in three cases that deal with controlling political speech and misinformation online. In the first two, heard last month, lawmakers in Texas and Florida claim that platforms such as Facebook are selectively removing political content that its moderators deem harmful or otherwise against their terms of service; tech companies have argued that they have the right to curate what their users see. Meanwhile, some policy makers believe that content moderation hasn’t gone far enough, and that misinformation still flows too easily through social networks; whether (and how) government officials can directly communicate with tech platforms about removing such content is …

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni called to testify in deepfake porn case – POLITICO

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni called to testify in deepfake porn case – POLITICO

Published by skeptic

The lawsuit is meant to “send a message to women who are victims of this kind of abuse of power not to be afraid to press charges,” the lawyer added. A deepfake is an image or video that has been digitally manipulated to superimpose a person’s face onto another body. The technology has become increasingly common, raising concerns about its role in both political disinformation and online sexual harassment. Italy is set to present legislation to regulate AI later this month, hot on the heels of the EU’s landmark AI Act, which the European Parliament rubber-stamped last week. Deepfakes are not illegal in Europe under the EU’s new AI rulebook, but content creators must be transparent about their origins. The EU is also requiring large tech platforms, including TikTok, X and Facebook, to identify AI-generated content under its content moderation law, the Digital Services Act. Source link

Bluesky launches Ozone, a tool that lets users create and run their own independent moderation services

Bluesky launches Ozone, a tool that lets users create and run their own independent moderation services

Published by skeptic

Decentralized Twitter/X rival Bluesky announced today that it’s open sourcing Ozone, a tool that lets individuals and teams collaboratively review and label content on the network. The company plans to open up the ability for individuals and teams to run their own independent moderation services later this week, which means users will be able to subscribe to additional moderation services on top of Bluesky’s default moderation. In a blog post, Bluesky said the change will give users “unprecedented control” over their social media experience. The company’s vision for moderation is a stackable ecosystem of services, which is why it will start allowing users to install filters from independent moderation services on top of what Bluesky already requires. As a result, users will be able to create a customized experience tailored to their preferences. For example, someone could create a moderation service that blocks images of spiders on the network. If you’re someone who gets a jump scare when you see a spider, you could install the moderation service and have all labeled spider pictures disappear from …

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s Former Trust and Safety Chief, Is Trying to Clean Up Your Dating Apps

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s Former Trust and Safety Chief, Is Trying to Clean Up Your Dating Apps

Published by skeptic

There are things we can do. When our members tell us that they’ve had a negative interaction, whether it’s any type of physical safety risk, assault, financial fraud, we act on those reports immediately. That’s a lot of what my team is going to be doing. A second critical piece of that is working with law enforcement. In Colombia, around the world, we want to make sure that we are empowering local law enforcement to actually get bad guys off the streets and off of our apps as well. And we are proactively referring relevant information to law enforcement in cases where we think there’s a physical safety hazard. I really think the trust and safety industry, collectively, needs to start to approach these as shared problems rather than something that each company handles in isolation. If every company tries to solve a problem independently, you only have line of sight into what’s happening on your platform. We are much more effective when we come together as an industry to address risks. One of the …

The Dark Side of Open Source AI Image Generators

The Dark Side of Open Source AI Image Generators

Published by skeptic

Whether through the frowning high-definition face of a chimpanzee or a psychedelic, pink-and-red-hued doppelganger of himself, Reuven Cohen uses AI-generated images to catch people’s attention. “I’ve always been interested in art and design and video and enjoy pushing boundaries,” he says—but the Toronto-based consultant, who helps companies develop AI tools, also hopes to raise awareness of the technology’s darker uses. “It can also be specifically trained to be quite gruesome and bad in a whole variety of ways,” Cohen says. He’s a fan of the freewheeling experimentation that has been unleashed by open source image-generation technology. But that same freedom enables the creation of explicit images of women used for harassment. After nonconsensual images of Taylor Swift recently spread on X, Microsoft added new controls to its image generator. Open source models can be commandeered by just about anyone and generally come without guardrails. Despite the efforts of some hopeful community members to deter exploitative uses, the open source free-for-all is near-impossible to control, experts say. “Open source has powered fake image abuse and nonconsensual …

Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against a Group That Found Hate Speech on X Isn’t Going Well

Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against a Group That Found Hate Speech on X Isn’t Going Well

Published by skeptic

Soon after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, now called X, the platform faced a massive problem: Advertisers were fleeing. But that, the company alleges, was someone else’s fault. On Thursday that argument went before a federal judge, who seemed skeptical of the company’s allegations that a nonprofit’s research tracking hate speech on X had compromised user security, and that the group was responsible for the platform’s loss of advertisers. The dispute began in July when X filed suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that tracks hate speech on social platforms and had warned that the platform was seeing an increase in hateful content. Musk’s company alleged that CCDH’s reports cost it millions in advertising dollars by driving away business. It also claimed that the nonprofit’s research had violated the platform’s terms of service and endangered users’ security by scraping posts using the login of another nonprofit, the European Climate Foundation. In response, CCDH filed a motion to dismiss the case, alleging that it was an attempt to silence a critic …

The Supreme Court could decide the future of content moderation — or it could punt

The Supreme Court could decide the future of content moderation — or it could punt

Published by skeptic

The Supreme Court is considering the fate of two state laws that limit how social media companies can moderate the content on their platforms. In oral arguments on Monday, the justices grappled with a thorny set of questions that could reshape the internet, from social networks like Facebook and TikTok to apps like Yelp and Etsy. In October, the Supreme Court decided to hear the two parallel cases, one in Florida (Moody v. NetChoice, LLC) and one in Texas (NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton). In both instances, signed into law by Republican governors, a new state law instructed social media companies to stop removing certain kinds of content. Florida’s Senate Bill 7072 prevents social media companies from banning political candidates or putting restrictions on their content. In Texas, House Bill 20 told social media companies that they could no longer remove or demonetize content based on the “viewpoint represented in the user’s expression.” In Florida, a federal appeals court mostly ruled in favor of the tech companies, but in Texas the appeals court sided with the …