Group items tagged

"Engineer who created Facebook 'like' button swears off social media apps"

"A virtual protest has taken place on China's heavily monitored social media platforms, where netizens took turns to keep a censored video called the Voice of April alive and overwhelm censors."

"This was not the first time I'd been contacted on social media from beyond the grave. Earlier this year, my best friend messaged me; that time, too, it was deeply unsettling, since the last time I'd seen him, he was smiling at me from his open casket. As terrible as these uncanny experiences were for me, what really broke my heart was thinking of how my friends' mothers were likely experiencing the same thing."

"A sleepy town in southern Spain is in shock after it emerged that AI-generated naked images of young local girls had been circulating on social media without their knowledge. The pictures were created using photos of the targeted girls fully clothed, many of them taken from their own social media accounts. These were then processed by an application that generates an imagined image of the person without clothes on."

"The collapse of SVB was the second-largest bank failure in the history of the United States. The largest, Washington Mutual in 2008, took place over the course of eight months. SVB's collapse played out in barely two days. Anxious Twitter posts and WhatsApp exchanges, coupled with the ease of access that online banking provides, are seen by analysts as a serious catalyst for the current crisis. Experts suggest that in the social media age, the psychological behaviour behind a bank run - mass fear from depositors of losing their savings - may be amplified and go viral quicker than bank officers and regulators can successfully respond."

"Already, artificially intelligent software can evolve false political and social constructs highly targeted to sway specific audiences. Users find themselves in highly individualized, algorithmically determined news and information feeds, intentionally designed to: isolate them from conflicting evidence or opinions, create self-reinforcing feedback loops of confirmation, and untether them from fact-based reality. And these are just early days. If memes and disinformation have been weaponized on social media, it is still in the musket stage."

"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."

"With just about four months until the 2022 midterm elections, misinformation experts, civil rights advocates and researchers are worried that social media companies are unprepared to deal with a potential onslaught of falsehoods about the election. "

"Jean Twenge blamed the iPhone and social media for a host of social problems in the post-millennial cohort. But the technology thesis hasn't performed well under critical examination, as the Times package notes. "

"For Bejar, the controls in place on social networks like Instagram are not sufficient because they turn "inherently human interactions into an objective assessment". There are too few options for users to hide content or flag comments and DMs and explain why it made them uncomfortable even if it doesn't violate Meta's specific policies, he said. "There's a question of how clearly bad does the content need to be to warrant removal? And that means you set a line somewhere and have to define a criterion where either a computer system or a human can evaluate a piece of content," Bejar said."

"The Chinese government is planning on implementing a system that connects citizens' financial, social, political, and legal credit ratings into one big social trustability score. The idea would be that if someone breaks trust in one area, they'd be adversely affected everywhere."

"The pictures, analyzed by HuffPost, show a picture of Biden had been edited to make him look older, by darkening his skin and emphasizing imperfections. On Monday the campaign's Trump War Room Twitter account tweeted a manipulated video that appeared to show Biden saying, "You won't be safe in Joe Biden's America." The video was labelled "manipulated media" by Twitter."

"The reasons for this "bot holiday", as Fisman calls it, are probably varied - but many of them point to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia's information war with western nations seems to be pivoting to new fronts, from vaccines to geopolitics."

"Caroline, the 28-year-old behind a popular TikTok account where she posts satirical skits, found herself dropping the comedic tone when the child of a family vlogger sent her a letter and asked Caroline to share it with her 2.3 million followers. "To any parents that are considering starting a family vlog or monetizing your children's lives on the public internet, here is my advice: you shouldn't do it," the letter read. "Any money you get will be greatly overshadowed by years of suffering… your child will never be normal… I never consented to being online.""

"The Details: The law requires people under 14 who have accounts to delete them. It also demands enhanced age verification for sites containing 'obscene' or 'harmful' content. The Debate: Supporters view this as a welcome step towards child safety. Critics question the law's enforceability, querying account detection methods, use of VPNs by children, and age verification standards."

"One of the problems with The Social Dilemma is that it supposes that tech did what it claims it did - that these are actually such incredible geniuses that they figured out how to use machine learning to control minds. And that's the problem - the mind control thing they designed to sell you fidget spinners got hijacked to make your uncle racist. But there's another possibility, which is that their claims are rubbish. They just overpromised in their sales material, and that what actually happened with that growth of monopolies and corruption in the public sphere made people cynical, angry, bitter and violent. In which case the problem isn't that their tools were misused. The problem is that the structures in which those tools were developed are intrinsically corrupt and corrupting."

New social network built inside iTunes fails to keep out the spammers, showing a curse of social media - even inside proprietorial walls

"In response to the letter's renewed spread, Guardian News and Media removed it on 15 November 2023, replacing it with the statement: "The transcript published on our website had been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualised it." In a statement on Thursday, the White House said: "There is never a justification for spreading the repugnant, evil, and antisemitic lies that the leader of al Qaeda issued just after committing the worst terrorist attack in American history"."

"But the reporters in those videos aren't real. Their names are Daren and Noah, and they're computer-generated avatars crafted by Synthesia, a London-based artificial intelligence company. The clips are from a YouTube channel called House of News, which presents itself as an English-language media outlet. Researchers say the videos are part of the Venezuelan government's attempts to spin the narrative on social media, considered one of the last bastions of free speech in a nation where outlets are censored and journalists are often persecuted. The incorporation of AI, experts told The Washington Post, seems to be a new addition to the government's disinformation campaigns, which range from incentivizing Twitter users to post specific talking points to using bots that spit out the regime's messaging."