Group items tagged

"Of all the disturbing parts of this @CaseyNewton piece about Facebook content reviewers -- and there are many -- the one about people slowly coming to believe the conspiracy theories sticks with me https://t.co/ulDx3PEaWa"

"However, once technology is released it's like herding cats. Deepfakes are a moving feast and as soon as moderators find a way of detecting them, people will find a workaround."

"TikTok moderators were told to suppress videos from users who appeared too ugly, poor or disabled, as part of the company's efforts to curate an aspirational air in the videos it promotes, according to new documents published by the Intercept."

""But this is the lead, and I think it's going to be a very, very important game changer for our country. It will be a pivotal battle in the defense of the first amendment and, in the end, I am confident that we will achieve a historic victory for American freedom and at the same time, freedom of speech." The lawsuit faces tough odds. Under a law known as Section 230, internet companies are generally allowed to moderate their content by removing posts that, for instance, are obscene or violate the services' own standards, so long as they are acting in "good faith"."

"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. "

"The decision will be the most consequential yet made by Facebook's Oversight Board, a group of 20 members who range from humanitarian activists and religious experts to lawyers and a former prime minister. The board, which launched in late 2020, is meant to function as an independent arm of the social platform, making binding decisions on a selection of its thorniest content moderation issues."

"The type of device matters-some are associated with worse student outcomes. Geography matters-technology is associated with higher student outcomes in the United States than in other regions. Who is using the technology matters-technology in the hands of teachers is associated with higher scores than technology in the hands of students. Intensity matters-students who use technology intensely or not at all perform better than those with moderate use. A school system's current performance level matters-in lower-performing school systems, technology is associated with worse results."

"Tech companies around the world appeared to listen. The very public and very swift removal of Russian channels on social media represented a sea change from years of prior content moderation decisions, when government requests for removals were often done with less fanfare and were frequently met with ire from human rights groups."

"They join attempts by lawmakers to regulate the internet for kids. States have proposed and even passed laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all. Some efforts also try to control the content that children can be exposed to. Critics of such legislation point to privacy issues with age verification mechanisms and fears that forced content moderation will inevitably lead to censorship, preventing kids from seeing material that's helpful along with what's considered harmful."

"Astonishingly, even as the UK government praises end-to-end encryption abroad, it is undermining it at home. The Online Safety Bill, which continues to proceed through parliament after being mentioned in the Queen's Speech, will target platforms that use end-to-end encryption by "placing a duty of care on service providers within the scope of the draft bill to moderate illegal and harmful content on their platforms, with fines and penalties for those that fail to uphold this duty". "

"The Digital Services Act marks the end of the platforms' vast liability exemptions and their seeming impunity. It will impose more transparency on the platforms' content moderation and set rules on so-called dark patterns, design features that can trick users into doing things they didn't mean to."

"In a way, this is a powerful rhetorical move. Insisting that the conversation focus on the details is an insistence that people who dismiss client-side scanning on principle are wrong to do so: if you believe that privacy of private communications is and should be an inviolable right, then Levy and Robinson are effectively arguing that you be cut out of the conversation in favour of more moderate people who are willing to discuss trade-offs."

"This week, the tech giant announced it had begun rolling out automatic encryption for direct messages on its Facebook and Messenger platforms to more than 1 billion users. Under the changes, Meta will no longer have access to the contents of the messages that users send or receive unless one participant reports a message to the company. As a result, messages will not be subject to content moderation unless reported, which social media companies undertake to detect and report abusive and criminal activity. Encryption hides the contents of a message from anyone but the sender and the intended recipient by converting text and images into unreadable cyphers that are unscrambled on receipt."

"Word of the layoffs comes over a year after the company made a big hiring push, doubling its size to over 500 people. Stack Overflow did not elaborate on the reasons for the layoff, but its hiring push began near the start of a generative AI boom that has stuffed chatbots into every corner of the tech industry, including coding. That presents clear challenges for a personal coding help forum, as developers get comfortable with AI coding assistance and the very tools that do that are blended into products they use. AI-generated coding answers have also posed problems for the company over the past year. The company issued a temporary ban on users generating answers with the help of an AI chatbot in December last year, but its alleged under-enforcement led to a months-long strike among moderators that was resolved in August; the ban is still in place today. Stack Overflow also announced it would start charging AI companies to train on its site. "

"TikTok faces questions over safeguards for child users after a Guardian investigation found that moderators were being told to allow under-13s to stay on the platform if they claimed their parents were overseeing their accounts."

"We're deeply inspired by FPF, from its human, calm moderation model and design to its organic, sustainable growth and advertising model. We're awed by its incredible usefulness for services, connection, and disaster relief. There's a lot here that might be applicable to other local digital spaces. Ultimately, Front Porch Forum exemplifies the potential for social media to foster positive, engaged communities. It's a viable, real life model of a flourishing digital public space in use by hundreds of thousands of Americans. Now it's up to us to make it less of a rare phenomenon."

"The promise of Community Notes lies in its transparency and its ability to crowdsource moderation from across ideological divides. By emphasizing consensus, the system avoids the mistrust or perception of bias with platform-driven fact-checking or content removal. Last year YouTube adopted this approach, but as a complement to other products such as information panels, or their recent disclosure requirement when content is altered or synthetic."

"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."

"The online newspaper Nu.nl had been Facebook's only factchecking partner in the Netherlands since Leiden University dropped out of the programme last year. The website had sole responsibility for marking Facebook and Instagram news content for Dutch users as being false or misleading, in order to help power the social network's tools that suppress distribution of misinformation."

"acebook has come under fire this week after a hoax story about women being abducted in white vans went viral on its platform. The site's algorithms are thought to have perpetuated the circulation of the story."