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"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. "

"Staying on the subject of "we live in a dystopian digital hellscape": a Gizmodo investigation identified 32 data brokers selling access to the unique mobile IDs of people pegged as "actively pregnant" or "shopping for maternity products". At least one company was also offering access to a catalogue of people using the same sorts of emergency contraceptives that some Republican's want to outlaw or restrict."

"It comes as a Guardian investigation reveals the human stories behind scams that originate on Meta's platforms, with a nationwide estimate released this week predicting the tech firm's failure to stamp out fraud will cost UK households £250m during 2023. With someone in the UK said to fall victim to a purchase scam starting on either Facebook or Instagram every seven minutes, the Guardian asked people who had been defrauded on these sites as well as its WhatsApp platform to get in touch. One Facebook user told us she was defrauded of her life savings and got pulled into debt, losing a total of £70,000, after being duped by an investment scam. While some people lost large amounts of money, a stream of unsuspecting online shoppers reported being conned out of smaller amounts when they placed orders with bogus online shops advertised on Facebook and Instagram."

"Campaigners fear the face-scanning technology could be used against protesters, and that police have done so before. The Met insisted the technology would not be used to quell lawful protest or target activists. But campaign groups do not believe them. Britain's biggest force said: "It is not used to identify people who are linked to, or have been convicted of, being involved in protest activity." A leading academic expert said the number of people whose faces would be scanned would make it the largest deployment yet of live facial recognition (LFR) in the UK."

"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."

"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."

"But an analysis by the Office of Information Technology Services issued last month "acknowledges that the risks of the use of (facial recognition technology) in an educational setting may outweigh the benefits." The report, sought by the Legislature, noted "the potentially higher rate of false positives for people of color, non-binary and transgender people, women, the elderly, and children." It also cited research from the nonprofit Violence Project that found that 70% of school shooters from 1980 to 2019 were current students. The technology, the report said, "may only offer the appearance of safer schools.""

"Some of Britain's biggest retailers, including Tesco, John Lewis and Sainsbury's, have been urged to pull out of a new policing strategy amid warnings it risks wrongly criminalising people of colour, women and LGBTQ+ people. A coalition of 14 human rights groups has written to the main retailers - also including Marks & Spencer, the Co-op, Next, Boots and Primark - saying that their participation in a new government-backed scheme that relies heavily on facial recognition technology to combat shoplifting will "amplify existing inequalities in the criminal justice system"."

"In early December, Musk called ChatGPT "scary good" and warned, "We are not far from dangerously strong AI." But Altman has been warning the public just as much, if not more, even as he presses ahead with OpenAI's work. Last month, he worried about "how people of the future will view us" in a series of tweets. "We also need enough time for our institutions to figure out what to do," he wrote. "Regulation will be critical and will take time to figure out…having time to understand what's happening, how people want to use these tools, and how society can co-evolve is critical.""

"In the future, it may be possible to guard against this kind of photo misuse through technical means. For example, future AI image generators might be required by law to embed invisible watermarks into their outputs so that they can be read later, and people will know they're fakes. But people will need to be able to read the watermarks easily (and be educated on how they work) for that to have any effect. Even so, will it matter if an embarrassing fake photo of a kid shared with an entire school has an invisible watermark? The damage will have already been done."

"It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. "But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it-a broader impact on trust," he said. "Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can't trust anything, and other people are being misled about it-well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself." Nyhan had a similar reaction. "There are genuine questions that are really important, but there's a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There's so much focus on sweeping claims that aren't actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better." He added, "We're years into this, and we're still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It's totally wild.""

"Children are "saturated" with betting promotions and gambling-like content while using the internet, despite restrictions on ad campaigns targeting young people, new research reveals. GambleAware, the charity funded by donations from gambling firms, commissioned research that found the risks of online gambling were not understood by children because of the "blurred line" between betting ads and popular online casino-style games. It warns gambling ads with cartoon graphics are likely to be strongly appealing to children. Last week, one gambling firm was promoting a new online slots game on social media with three cartoon frogs, urging people to "take a dip" with the "ribbiting rascals"."

"Search for Common Ground designed BridgeBot together with TangibleAI after our research revealed that most people shy away - or turn away - from discussions online once they heat up. We learned that few people felt comfortable responding, and even fewer felt that they could be constructive. BridgeBot acts like a companion to help social media users think differently about how to deal with differences, by equipping them with skills and perspectives on empathy, identity, perception and non-violent communication."

"The document dump reveals that the spies hold data on millions of Britons who are suspected of no wrongdoing, including records on dead people who cannot possibly pose a threat to national security. These records, which include "private medical records, your correspondence with your doctor or lawyer, even what petitions you have signed, your financial data, and commercial activities," are safeguarded through self-regulating systems that are laughable in their tragic lack of seriousness. "

"A state judge in the Brazilian state of Sergipe has ordered all mobile phone operators in the country to block Facebook-owned WhatsApp for 72 hours, nationwide. Those five telecom providers put the ban into effect today, and it affects about 100 million people. In Brazil, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app."

"The device tracks a single person with an accuracy of plus or minus 10 centimeters - about the size of an adult hand. Apart from the ability to "see" through a wall, its main advantage is that the person being tracked isn't required to wear a transmitter. While other location systems depend on Wi-Fi, this device can track a person's movements within the radius of its radio waves."

""We have absolutely nothing against bricklayers," Pivac says. "The problem is the average age of bricklayers is going up and it's difficult to attract new young people to the trade." There's a debate on about the future of automation-what it means that machines may be able to match humans at virtually any task. For now, robots are nowhere near that advanced."

An interesting article, could affect alot of people also burn holes in your wallet.

Although companies have tried to interest more people with brain training games, it turns out they do not work.

""Robots can't deal with the degree of individualization and the many variants that we have today," Mercedes' head of production Markus Schaefer told Bloomberg. "We're saving money and safeguarding our future by employing more people.""