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"People have been censored or blocked from the platform because their names sounded too fake. Ads for clothing disabled people we removed buy algorithms that believed they were breaking the rules and promoting medical devices. The Vienna Tourist Board had to move to adult content friendly site OnlyFans to share works of art from their museum after Facebook removed photos of paintings. Words that have rude popular meanings but other more specific definitions in certain circles - like "hoe" amongst gardeners, or "cock" amongst chicken farmers or gun enthusiasts - can land people in the so-called "Facebook jail" for days or even weeks."

"The intriguing echo of Eliza in thinking about ChatGPT is that people regard it as magical even though they know how it works - as a "stochastic parrot" (in the words of Timnit Gebru, a well-known researcher) or as a machine for "hi-tech plagiarism" (Noam Chomsky). But actually we do not know the half of it yet - not the CO2 emissions incurred in training its underlying language model or the carbon footprint of all those delighted interactions people are having with it. Or, pace Chomsky, that the technology only exists because of its unauthorised appropriation of the creative work of millions of people that just happened to be lying around on the web? What's the business model behind these tools? And so on. Answer: we don't know."

"As Redditor actual_hacker said in a thread, the big point of this article: "The US has built a SIM-card kill list. They're shooting missiles at cell phones without caring about who is holding the phone. That is why so many innocent people keep getting killed. That is what this story is about. The next time someone says "it's just metadata," remember this story. Innocent people die because of NSA's use of metadata: the story cites 14 women and 21 children killed in just one operation. All because of metadata.""

"Telegram, a messaging app created by the reclusive Russian exile Pavel Durov, is suited to running protests for a number of reasons. It allows huge encrypted chat groups, making it easier to organise people, like a slicker version of WhatsApp. And its "channels" allow moderators to disseminate information quickly to large numbers of followers in a way that other messaging services do not; they combine the reach and immediacy of a Twitter feed, and the focus of an email newsletter. The combination of usability and privacy has made the app popular with protestors (it has been adopted by Extinction Rebellion) as well as people standing against authoritarian regimes (in Hong Kong and Iran, as well as Belarus); it is also used by terrorists and criminals. In the past five years, Telegram has grown at a remarkable speed, hitting 60 million users in 2015 and 400 million in April this year. "

"In the beginning, we thought anonymity was part of the problem - that people being able to hide behind their screens without being identified were willing to say more extreme things than people who are named. But now you see people don't care about being named. They're willing to go to a public white supremacist rally unmasked with their full identity showing. They're proud of it. It doesn't make me believe more in humanity."

"Anouk van Maris, a robot cognition specialist who is researching ethical human-robot interaction, has found that comfort levels with robots vary greatly depending on location and culture. "It depends on what you expect from it. Some people love it, others want to run away as soon as it starts moving," she says. "The advantage of a robot that looks human-like is that people feel more comfortable with it being close to them, and it is easier to communicate with it. The big disadvantage is that you expect it to be able to do human things and it often can't.""

""The AI will be trained to detect incidents such as people fighting, a group of agitated persons, people following someone else, and arguments or other abnormal behaviour," SMART lecturer and team lead Johan Barthelemy said. "It can also identify an unsafe environment, such as where there is a lack of lighting.The system will then alert a human operator who can quickly react if there is an issue.""

"For many, the surge in social media use in recent years has been an awful contradiction - rather than making people more friendly, it has tended to cut them off, cause division and fuel anger and resentment, not sociability. But as Europe adjusts to the reality of self-isolation, there are signs social media can bring out the best in people, not just the boastful or argumentative bits many decry."

"AIs do not need more intelligence than humans to transform the job market. They need only enough to do the task well. And that is not far off, Harari says. "Children alive today will face the consequences. Most of what people learn in school or in college will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50. If they want to continue to have a job, and to understand the world, and be relevant to what is happening, people will have to reinvent themselves again and again, and faster and faster.""

"Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments, with people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. Data from a large real-world social network, collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks [Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2008) BMJ 337:a2338], although the results are controversial. "

"As reported by The Independent this week, Microsoft has been granted a patent that allows the company "to make a chatbot using the personal information of deceased people." Under the patent, Microsoft can create an artificial intelligence bot "based on images, voice data, social media posts, electronic message, and more personal information" of a deceased person."

"One of the many policy-based projects I worked on at Meta was Engagement Bait, which is defined as "a tactic that urges people to interact with Facebook posts through likes, shares, comments, and other actions in order to artificially boost engagement and get greater reach." Accordingly, "Posts and Pages that use this tactic will be demoted." To do this, "models are built off of certain guidelines" trained using "hundreds of thousands of posts" that "teams at Facebook have reviewed and categorized." The examples provided are obvious (eg. a post saying "comment "Yes" if you love rock as much as I do"), but the problem is that there will always be far subtler ways to get people to engage with something artificially. As an example, psychology researchers have a long history of studying negativity bias, which has been shown to operate across a wide array of domains, and to lead to increased online engagement. "

"It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. "But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it-a broader impact on trust," he said. "Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can't trust anything, and other people are being misled about it-well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself." Nyhan had a similar reaction. "There are genuine questions that are really important, but there's a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There's so much focus on sweeping claims that aren't actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better." He added, "We're years into this, and we're still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It's totally wild.""

"EFF's Legal Director Corynne McSherry offers five lessons to keep in mind: 1. (Lots of) mistakes will be made: copyright takedowns result in the removal of tons of legitimate content. 2. Robots won't help: automated filtering tools like Content ID have been a disaster, and policing copyright with algorithms is a lot easier than policing "bad speech." 3. These systems need to be transparent and have due process. A system that allows for automated instant censorship and slow, manual review of censorship gives a huge advantage to people who want to abuse the system. 4. Punish abuse. The ability to censor other peoples' speech is no joke. If you're careless or malicious in your takedown requests, you should pay a consequence: maybe a fine, maybe being barred form using the takedown system. 5. Voluntary moderation quickly becomes mandatory. Every voluntary effort to stem copyright infringement has been followed by calls to make those efforts mandatory (and expand them)."

"From another perspective, the idea that people seem comfortable offloading their troubles not on to a sympathetic human, but a sympathetic-sounding computer program, might present an opportunity. Even before the pandemic, there were not enough mental health professionals to meet demand. In the UK, there are 7.6 psychiatrists per 100,000 people; in some low-income countries, the average is 0.1 per 100,000."

"In early December, Musk called ChatGPT "scary good" and warned, "We are not far from dangerously strong AI." But Altman has been warning the public just as much, if not more, even as he presses ahead with OpenAI's work. Last month, he worried about "how people of the future will view us" in a series of tweets. "We also need enough time for our institutions to figure out what to do," he wrote. "Regulation will be critical and will take time to figure out…having time to understand what's happening, how people want to use these tools, and how society can co-evolve is critical.""

"A draft government memo explaining how the NHS contact-tracing app could stem the spread of the coronavirus said ministers might be given the ability to order "de-anonymisation" to identify people from their smartphones, the Guardian can reveal. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced on Sunday that the UK planned to introduce an app that would enable people who developed Covid-19 symptoms to "anonymously" alert other users to whom they had been in close proximity. "All data will be handled according to the highest ethical and security standards, and would only be used for NHS care and research," he said."

"Inoculating people from misinformation and tackling the "infodemic" are key to fighting the coronavirus. Tang, Taiwan's first transgender government minister and a self-described "civic hacker", has done this by fostering digital democracy: using technology to encourage civic participation and build consensus. Tang has also quashed faked news by implementing a 2-2-2 "humour over rumour" strategy. A response to misinformation is provided within 20 minutes, in 200 words or fewer, alongside two fun images. Early in the pandemic, for example, people were panic-buying toilet paper because of a rumour that it was being used to manufacture face masks; supplies were running out. So, the Taiwanese premier, Su Tseng-chang, released a cartoon of him wiggling his bum, with a caption saying: "We only have one pair of buttocks." It sounds silly, but it went viral. Humour can be far more effective than serious fact-checking."

"y memory and recall are alarmingly good - borderline photographic. But when I used Instagram, I found it would short-circuit my recall in an alarming way. I'd be describing something mid-sentence and I'd just stop speaking, unable to finish. So I rarely use it. But my attention span - and my posture, eyes and sleep - are still being degraded by other technology and my dependence on it. In my pandemic life, technology is a lifeline - 90% of my social and work life happens on one of four screens."

"The possibility of digitally interacting with someone from beyond the grave is no longer the stuff of science fiction. The technology to create convincing digital surrogates of the dead is here, and it's rapidly evolving, with researchers predicting its mainstream viability within a decade. But what about the ethics of bereavement-and the privacy of the deceased? Speaking with a loved one evokes a powerful emotional response. The ability to do so in the wake of their death will inevitably affect the human process of grieving in ways we're only beginning to explore."