Digit_al Society

"The report cited a recent academic analysis of studies on how people interpret moods from facial expressions. That paper found that the previous scholarship showed such perceptions are unreliable for multiple reasons."

"On inbuilt bias in algorithms, Sharkey said: "There are so many biases happening now, from job interviews to welfare to determining who should get bail and who should go to jail. It is quite clear that we really have to stop using decision algorithms, and I am someone who has always been very light on regulation and always believed that it stifles innovation."

"Half a century ago, before the first Apple computer was even sold, climate scientists started making computer-generated forecasts of how Earth would warm as carbon emissions saturated the atmosphere (the atmosphere is now brimming with carbon). It turns out these decades-old climate models - which used math equations to predict how much greenhouse gases would heat the planet - were pretty darn accurate. Climate scientists gauged how well early models predicted Earth's relentless warming trend and published their research Wednesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters."

"That tacit acceptance is actually buying into the tech-deterministic narrative, though. The question we should be asking - as the legal scholar Frank Pasquale says - is whether some of these technologies should be outlawed, or at least licensed for socially productive uses, like, say, radioactive isotopes are for medical purposes."

"Game players-like drivers-often have to reach conclusions without full understanding of what the other players-or drivers-are doing. So more researchers are applying game theory to train self-driving cars how to act in uncertain situations."

"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."

""If everything that people are seeing is via social media - who is accountable? There is very little human intelligence or decision-making behind it, no attempt to give a balanced view. That seems to leave all responsibility on the reader.""

"In a recent test of Amazon's facial recognition software, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California revealed that it mistook 26 California lawmakers as people arrested for crimes. "

"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."

"An American teenager who is using makeup tutorials on TikTok to spread awareness of China's detention of at least a million Muslims in internment camps in Xinjiang has claimed her videos are being censored by the platform."

"Under the oxymoronic rubric of "self-regulation", Facebook, Twitter and Google are already considering ways to appear responsible and protective of the integrity of those two elections. Twitter has pledged to stop running political ads, and both Google and Facebook are considering suspending precise targeting of political ads."

""Ultimately, we need a global movement for the web like we now have for the environment, so that governments and companies are far more responsive to citizens than they are today. The contract lays the foundations for that movement.""

"Fighting the creep of government use of face surveillance and the related risks can seem overwhelming. Police agencies, and the spy tech vendors that profit from the growth of a surveillance state, have much to gain by deploying this invasive spying technology. "

"These ranged from the mundane (Facebook may change its terms of service at any time) to a reminder that Facebook may store and process your data anywhere in the world, meaning it might be subject to different data protection laws. When scanning license agreements from Google, Do Not Sign told me the company reserves the right to stop providing its services at any time and that its services are used at the users' sole risk."

"The greatest propaganda machine in history. Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others - they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged - stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It's why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It's why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it's no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history - the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, "Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook.""

"The internet-freedom group Access Now recorded 75 internet outages in 2016, which more than doubled to 196 last year. "The tactic has been around for a while, but the rate at which it is being applied now is extremely alarming," says Berhan Taye, of the UK-based organisation."

"It's a useful and insightful perspective, particularly for a time when Facebook is cowering under the pressure of conservative conspiracy theorists, while Twitter took the approach and ended up empowering oil companies by throttling climate activists."