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"In one case, a government campaign aimed at helping young people off benefits was targeted at Facebook users with interests including "afro-textured hair" and the "West Indies cricket team". Other campaigns have targeted LGBTQ+ content at people interested in "genderqueer" issues and the TV show RuPaul's Drag Race; council support services at people interested in "hijabs" and "Islamic dietary requirements"; and an appeal for witnesses to a murder in Manchester aimed at people interested in "hip-hop", "rapping", Kim Kardashian and Usain Bolt. The "microtargeting" is revealed in analysis of more than 12,000 ads which ran on Facebook and Instagram between late 2020 and 2023. Supplied to UK academics by Facebook's parent company Meta, and shared with the Observer, the data gives an insight into the use of targeted advertising by the state based on profiling by the world's biggest social media company. In 2021, Facebook announced a ban on targeting based on race, religion and sexual orientation amid concerns about discrimination, which led to the removal of several interest categories that had been used by advertisers to reach and exclude minority groups."

"This all presents big questions for which we don't yet have answers. "At what point should kids know better?" asked David Dockterman, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "When should a person's 'permanent digital record' start recording, if ever? To what extent should social media be a space for trial-and-error exploration around identity and social behavior?" "These are fantastically difficult moral dilemmas for teenagers who act impulsively, using tools that are not fully under their control, leading to consequences that perhaps none of us can anticipate," said Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "This is the first time we've had a society in which almost by default, everything is recorded and shared and aggregated in ways that create a lifelong profile. Children should have the right to make mistakes.""

"So if we put those three findings together, what do we get? * Small groups of * ageing * right-wingers * on their desktop computers (because this study wasn't-couldn't be-carried out on mobile, only desktop) ..get their information from unreliable, partisan news sites. The study doesn't say whether they then go on to share it on Facebook or on their Twitter account grumpyboomer032945231, but it's not hard to imagine that's what happens. This isn't to let the search algorithms off the hook either, but does go to show that the real problem, as ever, lies with the humans."

"Second Life's endurance demonstrates that, whatever the configuration, a metaverse's success can only be founded on human qualities of social interaction and self-expression. "I obviously don't feel as excited now as when I started roaming around Second Life," Aufwie says. "But I still feel gratitude towards this apparently everlasting pioneering metaverse that allowed me to express myself, make friends, learn and share thoughts and all the good things humanity has within it.""

"Most social media users know to self-regulate when violent events such as terror attacks occur: don't share distressing footage; don't spread unfounded rumours. But in the aftermath of the Annecy attack some inevitably acted without restraint. Bystander footage of a man attacking children in a park in south-east France appeared online after the attack on Thursday and was still available, on Twitter and TikTok, on Friday. The distressing footage has been used by TV networks but is heavily edited. The raw versions seen by the Guardian show the attacker dodging a member of the public and running around the playground before appearing to stab a toddler in a pushchair."

"The campaign's most organized form involves a database set up by anonymous activists that lists targets in the military, their photos, their locations, and how they have offended. Offenders are ranked by "traitor level," from "elite" to "low." Individuals have also taken social punishment into their own hands by creating Facebook groups and viral posts that share the identities of military family members or supporters. For the anti-coup population living abroad, the main objective is to get generals' family members living outside the country deported and their assets frozen. Within Myanmar, the goal is social and economic pressure, with boycotts on businesses and brands, and hopes that social shaming will convince military affiliates to work against their families and support the Civil Disobedience Movement."

"Here's how the program, which has been developed in partnership with SWGfL, a UK-based non-profit behind the Revenge Porn Helpline, works. If you've shared an intimate image with someone and are worried that that person might do something nefarious with it, you can send the images to content moderators at Facebook to be "hashed"- essentially the image is assigned a digital fingerprint. If someone then tries to upload that image to Facebook it can be quickly identified and blocked. It's obviously not a silver bullet for stopping revenge porn, and it requires putting a lot of trust in Facebook and accepting that a random content moderator is going to be looking at your naked photos, but it gives people a little bit of control over their images."

"Twitter has proved a cherished forum for climate scientists to share research, as well as for activists seeking to rally action to halt oil pipelines or decry politicians' failure to cut pollution. But many are now fleeing Twitter due to a surge in climate misinformation, spam and even threats that have upended their relationship with the platform."

"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. "

"Will this AI take jobs from artists? Where does copyright law land? Can machines ever truly produce something original? Should I feel guilty for making a picture of Tony Soprano having a cappuccino with Shrek and sharing it with my group chat?"

"The constitutional right to safe, legal abortion has evaporated following the recent Supreme Court decision. Some states with so-called "trigger bans" have immediately criminalized abortion. Next, Congress may seek to criminalize abortion in all 50 states, putting the government in control of peoples' bodies. Google is fully complicit in the criminalization of people seeking abortion care. That's because Google stores historical location data about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies through "geofence" orders that unmask the identities of anyone who traveled to a specific place at a specific time-like an abortion clinic on a specific day. Google received 11,554 such geofence warrants in 2020."

"Racists on the notorious troll site 4chan are using a powerful new and free AI-powered image generator service offered by Microsoft to create antisemitic propaganda, according to posts reviewed by Bellingcat. Users of 4chan, which has frequently hosted hate speech and played home to posts by mass shooters, tasked Bing Image Creator to create photo-realistic antisemitic caricatures of Jews and, in recent days, shared images created by the platform depicting Orthodox men preparing to eat a baby, carrying migrants across the US border (the latter a nod to the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory), and committing the 9/11 attacks."

"Nepal has said it will ban TikTok, citing negative effects on the country's "social harmony". The popular video-sharing platform, which has around a billion monthly users, has faced restrictions in many countries for alleged breaches of data rules and for the potentially harmful impact on youth of some content. "The decision to ban was made today, and relevant authorities are currently addressing the technical issues," the minister for communications and information technology, Rekha Sharma, said on Monday."

"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"."

"AI tool GNoME finds 2.2 million new crystals, including 380,000 stable materials that could power future technologies Modern technologies from computer chips and batteries to solar panels rely on inorganic crystals. To enable new technologies, crystals must be stable otherwise they can decompose, and behind each new, stable crystal can be months of painstaking experimentation. Today, in a paper published in Nature, we share the discovery of 2.2 million new crystals - equivalent to nearly 800 years' worth of knowledge. We introduce Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), our new deep learning tool that dramatically increases the speed and efficiency of discovery by predicting the stability of new materials."

"U.K.-based startup Yepic AI claims to use "deepfakes for good" and promises to "never reenact someone without their consent." But the company did exactly what it claimed it never would. In an unsolicited email pitch to a TechCrunch reporter, a representative for Yepic AI shared two "deepfaked" videos of the reporter, who had not given consent to having their likeness reproduced. Yepic AI said in the pitch email that it "used a publicly available photo" of the reporter to produce two deepfaked videos of them speaking in different languages. The reporter requested that Yepic AI delete the deepfaked videos it created without permission."

"Truth Social allows users to post and share a "truth" the same way they would with a tweet. There are no ads, according to Willis and a second source familiar with TMTG. Users choose who they follow and the feed is a mix of individual posts and an RSS-like news feed. They will be alerted if someone mentions or begins following them."

"A Google employee named Blake Lemoine was put on leave recently after claiming that one of Google's artificial-intelligence language models, called LaMDA (Language Models for Dialogue Applications), is sentient. He went public with his concerns, sharing his text conversations with LaMDA. At one point, Lemoine asks, "What does the word 'soul' mean to you?" LaMDA answers, "To me, the soul is a concept of the animating force behind consciousness and life itself." "I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt," Lemoine explained, citing his religious beliefs. "Who am I to tell God where he can and can't put souls?""

"Kellin Pelrine, an American player who is one level below the top amateur ranking, beat the machine by taking advantage of a previously unknown flaw that had been identified by another computer. But the head-to-head confrontation in which he won 14 of 15 games was undertaken without direct computer support. The triumph, which has not previously been reported, highlighted a weakness in the best Go computer programs that is shared by most of today's widely used AI systems, including the ChatGPT chatbot created by San Francisco-based OpenAI. The tactics that put a human back on top on the Go board were suggested by a computer program that had probed the AI systems looking for weaknesses. The suggested plan was then ruthlessly delivered by Pelrine."

"Especially at voting time, fears grow of TikTok 'disinformation' threatening democracy. Politicians and their paymasters are terrified that they can no longer control the supply of information to the public, thanks to platforms like Facebook and TikTok. With Thailand's general election only a few months away, the Election Commission of Thailand (ECT) is battling to take back control of information through self-censorship of the TikTok video-sharing platform. Ostensibly, this is to keep young voters on the government's straight and narrow path."