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"Why care? Because understanding manipulation is crucial in the current critical debate about digital technologies in moral philosophy and related disciplines."

"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 European Commission has asked X to hand over internal documents about its algorithms, as it steps up its investigation into whether Elon Musk's social media platform has breached EU rules on content moderation. The EU's executive branch told the company it wanted to see internal documentation about its "recommender system", which makes content suggestions to users, and any recent changes made to it, by 15 February. X has been under investigation since December 2023 under the EU's content law - known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) - over how it tackles the spread of illegal content and information manipulation. The company has been accused of manipulating the platform's systems to give far-right posts and politicians greater visibility over other political groups."

"Beth Hyland thought she had met the love of her life on Tinder.  In reality, the Michigan-based administrative assistant had been manipulated by an online scam artist who posed as a French man named 'Richard', used deepfake video on Skype calls and posted photos of another man to pull off his con. A 'deepfake' is manipulated video or audio made using artificial intelligence (AI) to look and sound real. They are often difficult to detect without specialised tools. In a matter of months, Hyland, 53, had taken out loans totalling $26,000, sent 'Richard' the money, and fallen prey to a classic case of romance baiting or pig butchering, named for the exploitative way in which scammers cultivate their victims."

"Researchers call these design and wording decisions "dark patterns," a term applied to UX that tries to manipulate your choices. When Instagram repeatedly nags you to "please turn on notifications," and doesn't present an option to decline? That's a dark pattern. When LinkedIn shows you part of an InMail message in your email, but forces you to visit the platform to read more? Also a dark pattern. When Facebook redirects you to "log out" when you try to deactivate or delete your account? That's a dark pattern too."

""This photo is a prime example of why 2024 is a crucial year for spotting - and stopping - manipulated media," says Shweta Singh, an assistant professor of information systems at Warwick Business School. "Whilst this may have been some low-level photoshopping, much of the edited media currently circulating can be more sinister. With elections in both the UK and the US this year, the importance of media being genuine has never been higher. Suspect photoshopping like this only undermines the faith of the public in the media they are presented with, and risks seriously damaging public trust.""

"Najjar told the Huffington Post that the error was most likely due to Bing's use of crowdsourced translations. The service can promote alternative translations to the top spot if they receive suggestions from about 1,000 people, which means that without manual correction it is possible to manipulate the system and substitute the correct translation for an alternative."

" In other words: get ready for an era when even the most plausible videos aren't safe from a little computer trickery."

"Big data is the advance in data management technology, which allows for an increase in the scale and manipulation of a company's data. It allows companies to know more about their customers, products and their own infrastructure. More recently, people have become increasingly focused on the monetization of that data."

"The response on Twitter was predictably splenetic. Suárez's supporters claimed the images were manipulated, their argument promoted by a rather well-done diptych which did the rounds. The left-hand image - which had been photoshopped to remove the marks - purported to be the "real" unaltered version, while the right hand side - Gentile's original image - was labelled the fake."

"The volunteer workforce that built the project's flagship, the English-language Wikipedia-and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation-has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. ..."

"However, there's a new breed of video and audio manipulation tools, made possible by advances in artificial intelligence and computer graphics, that will allow for the creation of realistic looking footage of public figures appearing to say, well, anything. Trump declaring his proclivity for water sports. Hillary Clinton describing the stolen children she keeps locked in her wine cellar. Tom Cruise finally admitting what we suspected all along … that he's a Brony."

"Where the researchers struck gold was by realising that a large (but not overly large pair of glasses) could act to "change the pixels" even in a real photo. By picking a pair of "geek" frames, with relatively large rims, the researchers were able to obscure about 6.5% of the pixels in any given facial picture. Printing a pattern over those frames then had the effect of manipulating the image."

"As such, there are certainly some sinister ways technology like this could be used-and the faces don't need to be attractive, they just need to look real. Any circumstances where it would be useful to have fake people-like profile photos for dummy social media accounts used to manipulate online discourse-are a ready target for technological treachery."

""The documents reveal a much clearer idea of what actually happened in the 2016 US presidential election, which has a huge bearing on what will happen in 2020. It's the same people involved who we know are building on these same techniques," she said."

"Our social media platforms are powered by a surveillance-based business model designed to mine, manipulate, and extract our human experiences at any cost, causing a breakdown of our information ecosystem and shared sense of truth worldwide. This extractive business model is not built for us but built to exploit us."

"Researchers showed detectors can be defeated by inserting inputs called adversarial examples into every video frame. The adversarial examples are slightly manipulated inputs which cause artificial intelligence systems such as machine learning models to make a mistake. In addition, the team showed that the attack still works after videos are compressed."

"The business, political and geopolitical mischief possible with manipulated data, audio or video is almost limitless; think manufactured video of Jeff Bezos-whose personal life has already apparently been the target of sophisticated adversaries and extortion plots-using a racial slur; grainy fake video or audio of Joe Biden admitting to assaulting Tara Reade; grainy video of Trump saying he plans to nuke Iran in one hour; or even Anthony Fauci saying that he's doctoring the Covid death tolls. "