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"But what about social media posts that offer stories of hope and recovery? Could these types of posts actually prevent suicide? For this experimental study, researchers in Austria created 10 suicide-prevention social media posts from a fictitious influencer. The posts offered stories about recovery from suicidal crises, mental health tips, and life-affirming messages. A total of 354 adult participants were randomly assigned to view these posts, or to view 10 posts totally unrelated to mental health. As expected, participants who were exposed to the suicide-prevention posts reported decreased suicidal thoughts and greater intentions to seek help (e.g., from friends, family, or a professional). This was especially true for those who were already struggling with suicidal thoughts."

"no dearth of posts related to vaccines, the top 50 Facebook pages ranked by the number of public posts they made about vaccines generated nearly half (46 percent) of the top 10,000 posts for or against vaccinations, as well as 38 percent of the total likes on those posts, from January 2016 to February of this year."

"This type of extreme racist post was frequently met with pushback from the community. Common responses included; "people should be treated as individuals not as part of a group" and "the Democrats are the ones who want to divide us up by race". Implicit or explicit gestures of antisemitism were strongly protested by evangelical Christians. Red-pill posts would rarely stay up long. In most cases, they were only intended to appear in one's Instagram feed and to vanish shortly after. The account would then resume posting popular content, wait another week and try it again. This process would continue for months, maybe a year. By posting mainstream conservative content most of the time, these extreme-right groups were able to build up an audience numbering in the range of 30,000 to 40,000, which they could then incrementally expose to radical content."

"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. "

"The announcement that Meta would be changing their approach to political content and discussions of gender is concerning, though it is unclear exactly what those changes are. Given that many product changes regarding those content areas were used in high-risk settings, a change intended to allay US free speech concerns could lead to violence incitement elsewhere. For example, per this post from Meta, reducing "content that has been shared by a chain of two or more people" was a content-neutral product change done to protect people in Ethiopia, where algorithms have been implicated in the spread of ethnic violence. A similar change - removing optimizations for reshared content - was discussed in this post concerning reductions in political content. Will those changes be undone? Globally? Such changes could also lead to increased amplification of attention getting discussions of gender. Per this report from Equimundo and Futures Without Violence, 40% of young men trust at least one "manosphere" influencer - who often exploit algorithmic incentives by posting increasingly extreme, attention-getting mixes of ideas about self-improvement, aggression, and traditional gender roles."

"Admiral Insurance will analyse the Facebook accounts of first-time car owners to look for personality traits that are linked to safe driving. For example, individuals who are identified as conscientious and well-organised will score well. Facebook forces Admiral to pull plan to price car insurance based on posts Read more The insurer will examine posts and likes by the Facebook user, although not photos, looking for habits that research shows are linked to these traits. These include writing in short concrete sentences, using lists, and arranging to meet friends at a set time and place, rather than just "tonight"."

"The Chinese government is fabricating almost 490m social media posts a year in order to distract the public from criticising or questioning its rule, according to a study. China's "Fifty Cent Party" - a legion of freelance online trolls so-named because they are believed to be paid 50 cents a post - has long been blamed for flooding the Chinese internet with pro-regime messages designed to defend and promote the ruling Communist party."

"The police are attempting to use YouTube's stringent copyright system to keep people from posting recordings of encounters with law enforcement. In a video posted Thursday by the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP), a community organization dedicated to defunding the Oakland Police Department, Alameda County Sheriff's deputy David Shelby pulled out his phone and began playing Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" during an encounter. He openly admitted, "it can't be posted to YouTube.""

""We have evidence that applying these informs to posts decreases their reshares by ~8%," a Facebook data scientist told BuzzFeed. "However given that Trump has SO many shares on any given post, the decrease is not going to change shares by orders of magnitude.""

"A total of 2.2m ads on Facebook and Instagram have been rejected and 120,000 posts withdrawn for attempting to "obstruct voting" in the upcoming US presidential election, Facebook's vice president Nick Clegg has said. In addition, warnings were posted on 150m examples of false information posted online, the former British deputy prime minister told French weekly Journal du Dimanche on Sunday."

"Facebook has said it will start labelling misinformation about the climate crisis in a small trial limited to the UK. Labels will be attached to certain posts directing users to Facebook's Climate Science Information Center, a repository of fact-checked claims about the environment. The company has not yet said how it will decide which posts receive the label, but the process is similar to that used in the US election when it attempted to algorithmically discern posts that shared common myths or misconceptions, and appended a link taking users to a "voting information centre"."

"Disappearing messages is a feature offered by apps like Signal and WhatsApp, giving users the option to have conversations that self-destruct. They're not the only platforms that have tapped into the allure of digital ephemerality. The very premise of Snapchat is that content is only viewable for a short window; Instagram stories similarly vanish after 24 hours. Those who are chronically online may remember the last day of X's own foray into expiring content called "fleets", when countless users threw whatever remaining posting-caution they had to the wind to share revealing, horny or outright unhinged posts for one final hurrah before the feature itself vanished. I can't tell you what people posted or link you to evidence of this because, well, it's gone."

"In the short term, generative AI will replace a lot of people because productivity increases while demand stays the same due to inertia. In the long term, the creation of new jobs compensates for the loss of old ones, resulting in a net positive outcome for humans who leave behind jobs no one wants to do. The most important aspect of any technological revolution is the transition from before to after. Timing and location matters: older people have a harder time reinventing themselves into a new trade or craft. Poor people and poor countries have less margin to react to a wave of unemployment. Digital automation is quicker and more aggressive than physical automation because it bypasses logistical constraints-while ChatGPT can be infinitely cloned, a metallic robot cannot. Writing and painting won't die because people care about the human factor first and foremost; there are already a lot of books we can't possibly read in one lifetime so we select them as a function of who's the author. Even if you hate OpenAI and ChatGPT for being responsible for the lack of job postings, I recommend you ally with them for now; learn to use ChatGPT before it's too late to keep your options open. Companies are choosing to reduce costs over increasing output because the sectors where generative AI is useful can't artificially increase demand in parallel to productivity. (Who needs more online content?) Our generation is reasonably angry at generative AI and will bravely fight it. Still, our offspring-and theirs-will be grateful for a transformed world whose painful transformation they didn't have to endure. Certifiable human-made creative output will reduce its quantity but multiply its value in the next years because demand specific for it will grow; automation can mimic 99% of what we do but never reaches 100%. The maxim "AI won't take your job, a person using AI will; yes, you using AI will replace yourself not using it" applies more in the long term than the

"Just like the Twitter experiment, and to nobody's surprise -- a Facebook account that copies and re-posts President Donald Trump's posts word-for-word is immediately flagged for inciting violence."

AI and machine learning, combined with the science of turning data into insightful information (aka data science), have become more important than ever in the "new normal" to guide innovation based on new market trends and consumer preferences This article was published in thejakartapost.com with the title "How artificial intelligence helps firms stay relevant amid pandemic - Opinion - The Jakarta Post". Click to read: https://www.thejakartapost.com/academia/2020/09/21/how-artificial-intelligence-helps-firms-stay-relevant-amid-pandemic.html. Download The Jakarta Post app for easier and faster news access: Android: http://bit.ly/tjp-android iOS: http://bit.ly/tjp-ios

"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."

"in the post-Snowden era, we can no longer address the "digital divide" just by providing access -- we also have to teach people how their online usage is spied on, how that will harm them, and what to do about it. "

"The agency has invested nearly $80 million to build a computer that could break "nearly every kind of encryption," according to a Washington Post report published online Thursday. Based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the Post reports the NSA is racing to build a "cryptologically useful quantum computer" research program called "Penetrating Hard Targets.""

"(And, in fact, anonymity apps have brought positives along with the negatives. Not long ago, a post on Secret reported that Google had acquired the poster's five-person company and had hired everyone but her. Later posts revealed that she was the only female at the company and had been there since it was founded. The thread became the talk of Silicon Valley, generating a lively debate about suppressed sexism in the start-up community. The poster's ability to remain anonymous was key to this information coming out. She could stand up to power, speak without embarrassment, and avoid alienating potential employers who might take a dim view of her controversial statements. That's exactly why the First Amendment protects anonymous speech, and that's why the value of anonymity apps like Yik Yak shouldn't be summarily dismissed. "

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced