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Javier E

Psych, Lies, and Audiotape: The Tarnished Legacy of the Milgram Shock Experiments | - 2 views

lareviewofbooks.org/...-the-milgram-shock-experiments

research psychology authority experiment

shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • subjects — 780 New Haven residents who volunteered — helped make an untenured assistant professor named Stanley Milgram a national celebrity. Over the next five decades, his obedience experiments provided the inspiration for films, fiction, plays, documentaries, pop music, prime-time dramas, and reality television. Today, the Milgram experiments are considered among the most famous and most controversial experiments of all time. They are also often used in expert testimony in cases where situational obedience leads to crime
  • Perry’s evidence raises larger questions regarding a study that is still firmly entrenched in American scientific and popular culture: if Milgram lied once about his compromised neutrality, to what extent can we trust anything he said? And how could a blatant breach in objectivity in one of the most analyzed experiments in history go undetected for so long?
  • the debate has never addressed this question: to what extent can we trust his raw data in the first place? In her riveting new book, Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments, Australian psychologist Gina Perry tackles this very topic, taking nothing for granted
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  • Her chilling investigation of the experiments and their aftereffects suggests that Milgram manipulated results, misled the public, and flat out lied in order to deflect criticism and further the thesis for which he would become famous
  • She contends that serious factual inaccuracies cloud our understanding of Milgram’s work, inaccuracies which she believes arose “partly because of Milgram’s presentation of his findings — his downplaying of contradictions and inconsistencies — and partly because it was the heart-attack variation that was embraced by the popular media
  • Perry reveals that Milgram massaged the facts in order to deliver the outcome he sought. When Milgram presented his finding — namely, high levels of obedience — both in early papers and in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority, he stated that if the subject refused the lab coat’s commands more than four times, the subject would be classified as disobedient. But Perry finds that this isn’t what really happened. The further Milgram got in his research, the more he pushed participants to obey.
  • Milgram’s studies — which suggest that nearly two-thirds of subjects will, under certain conditions, administer dangerously powerful electrical shocks to a stranger when commanded to do so by an authority figure — have become a staple of psychology departments around the world. They have even helped shape the rules that govern experiments on human subjects. Along with Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford prison experiment, which showed that college students assigned the role of “prison guard” quickly started abusing college students assigned the role of “prisoner,” Milgram’s experiments are the starting point for any meaningful discussion of the “I was only following orders” defense, and for determining how the relationship between situational factors and obedience can lead seemingly good people to do horrible things.
  • If the Milgram of Obedience to Authority were the narrator in a novel, I wouldn’t have found him terribly reliable. So why had I believed such a narrator in a work of nonfiction?
  • The answer, I found, was disturbingly simple: I trust scientists
  • I do trust them not to lie about the rules or results of their experiments. And if a scientist does lie, especially in such a famous experiment, I trust that another scientist will quickly uncover the deception. Or at least I used to.
  • At the time, Milgram was 27, fresh out of grad school and needing to make a name for himself in a hyper-competitive department, and Perry suggests that his “career depended on [the subjects’] obedience; all his preparations were aimed at making them obey.”
  • only after criticism of his ethics surfaced, and long after the completion of the studies, did Milgram claim that “a careful post-experimental treatment was administered to all subjects,” in which “at the very least all subjects were told that the victim had not received dangerous electric shocks.” This was, quite simply, a lie. Milgram didn’t want word to spread through New Haven that he was duping his subjects, which could taint the results of his future trials.
  • While Milgram’s defenders point to subsequent recreations of his experiments that have replicated his findings, the unethical nature, not to mention the scope and cost, of the original version have not allowed for full duplications.
Adam Clark

False Memory's Fantastic Four - 1 views

www.skepticink.com/...false-memorys-fantastic-four

knowledge memory Personal Knowledge

shared by Adam Clark on 24 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Adam Clark on 24 Apr 14
     
    "Next time you tell a story to someone, don't be upset if they don't believe you, because what you may not know, is that occasionally you can't even believe your own memories!  Yes, that's correct, even your own memories can deceive you.  The concept of false memories is well supported in scientific research.  People generally think of their memories as something like an accurate recording that documents and stores everything that happens with perfect accuracy.  In reality, human memory is very prone to inaccuracies."
Javier E

Jonah Lehrer plagiarism in Wired.com: An investigation into plagiarism, quotes, and fac... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...tual_inaccuracies_.single.html

Plagiarism Journalism ethics truth values cultural science

shared by Javier E on 03 Sep 12 - Cached
  • I am convinced that Lehrer has a cavalier attitude about truth and falsehood. This shows not only in his attitude toward quotations but in some of the other details of his writing. And a journalist who repeatedly fails to correct errors when they're pointed out is, in my opinion, exhibiting reckless disregard for the truth. It is thus my opinion that Lehrer plagiarized others' work, published inaccurate quotations, printed narrative details that were factually incorrect, and failed to address errors when they were pointed out.
  • Lehrer's transgressions are inexcusable—but I can't help but think that the industry he (and I) work for share a some of the blame for his failure. I'm 10 years older than Lehrer, and unlike him, my contemporaries and I had all of our work scrutinized by layers upon layers of editors, top editors, copy editors, fact checkers and even (heaven help us!) subeditors before a single word got published. When we screwed up, there was likely someone to catch it and save us (public) embarrassment. And if someone violated journalistic ethics, it was more likely to be caught early in his career—allowing him the chance either to reform and recover or to slink off to another career without being humiliated on the national stage. No such luck for Lehrer; he rose to the very top in a flash, and despite having his work published by major media companies, he was    operating, most of the time, without a safety net. Nobody noticed that something was amiss until it was too late to save him.
Javier E

How Memory Works: Interview with Psychologist Daniel L. Schacter | History News Network - 2 views

hnn.us/...interview-dr-daniel-l-schacter

memory history interview reliability

shared by Javier E on 26 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • knowledge from a scientific perspective of how human memory works can be instructive to historians.
  • Memory is much more than a simple retrieval system, as Dr. Schacter has demonstrated in his research. Rather, the nature of memory is constructive and influenced by a person’s current state as well as intervening emotions, beliefs, events and other factors since a recalled event.
  • Dr. Schacter is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His books include Searching for Memory: The Brain, The Mind, and The Past, and The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, both winners of the American Psychological Association’s William James Book Award, and Forgotten Ideas, Neglected Pioneers: Richard Semon and the Story of Memory. He also has written hundreds of articles on memory and related matters. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.
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  • that memory is not a video recorder [but that] it’s a constructive activity that is in many ways accurate but prone to interesting errors and distortions. It’s the constructive side of memory that is most relevant to historians.
  • Is it the case then that our memories constantly change every time we access them?
  • That certainly can happen depending on how you recount a memory. What you emphasize. What you exaggerate. What you don’t talk about. All of those things will shape and sculpt the memory for future use. Certainly the potential is there.
  • Research on memory shows that the more distant in time the event, the more prone to inaccuracy the memory. There are several experiments when subjects recorded impressions of an event soon afterward, then a year later and then a few years later, and the memory changed.Yes. It’s not that the information is lost but, as the memory weakens, you become more prone to incorporating other kinds of information or mixing up elements of other events. This has been seen, for example, in the study of flashbulb memories. Where were you when Kennedy was shot? Where were you when you heard about 9/11?
  • Isn’t there a tendency to add details or information that may make the story more convincing or interesting later?Yes. That’s more a social function of memory. It may be that you draw on your general knowledge and probable information from your memory in a social context where there may be social demands that lead you distort the memory.
  • What are the different memory systems?
  • What is the difference between working memory and permanent memory?Working memory is really a temporary memory buffer where you hold onto information, manipulate information, use it, and it’s partly a gateway to long-term memory and also a buffer that you use when you’re retrieving information from long-term memory and that information temporarily resides in working memory, so to speak.
  • Your discussion of the testimony of White House Counsel John Dean about Watergate is illuminating. There was a perception that Dean had a photographic memory and he testified in rich detail about events. Yet later studies of White House tape recordings revealed that he was often inaccurate.
  • He was perceived because of all the detail with which he reported events and the great confidence to be something analogous to a human tape recorder. Yet there was interesting work done by psychologist Ulric Neisser who went back and analyzed what Dean said at the hearings as compared to available information on the White House taping system and basically found many and significant discrepancies between what Dean remembered and what was actually said. He usually had the gist and the meaning and overall significance right, but the exact details were often quite different in his memory than what actually was said.
  • That seems to get into the area of false memories and how they present problems in the legal system.We know from DNA exonerations of people wrongfully convicted of crimes that a large majority of those cases -- one of the more recent estimates is that in the first 250 cases of 2011 DNA exonerations, roughly 70 to 75 percent of those individuals were convicted on the basis of faulty eyewitness memory.
  • One of the interesting recent lines of research that my lab has been involved in over the past few years has been looking at similarities between what goes on between the brain and mind when we remember past events on the one hand and imagine events that might occur in the future or might have occurred in the past. What we have found, particularly with brain scanning studies, is that you get very similar brain networks coming online when you remember past events and imagine future events, for example. Many of the same brain regions or network of structures come online, and this has helped us understand more why, for example, imagining events that might have occurred can be so harmful to memory accuracy because when you imagine, you’re recruiting many of the same brain regions as accessed when you actually remember. So it’s not surprising that some of these imagined events can actually turn into false memories under the right circumstances.
  • One reasonably well accepted distinction involves episodic memory, the memory for personal experience; semantic memory, the memory for general knowledge; and procedural memory, the memory for skills and unconscious forms of memory.Those are three of the major kinds of memory and they all have different neural substrates.
  • One of the points from that Ross Perot study is that his supporters often misremembered what they felt like at the time he reported he had dropped out of the race. The nature of that misremembering depended on their state at the time they were remembering and what decisions they had made about Perot in the interim affected how they reconstructed their earlier memories.Again, that makes nicely the point that our current emotions and current appraisals of a situation can feed back into our reconstruction of the past and sometimes lead us to distort our memories so that they better support our current emotions and our current selves. We’re often using memories to justify what we currently know, believe and feel.
  • memory doesn’t work like a video camera or tape recorder.That is the main point. Our latest thinking on this is the idea that one of the major functions of memory is to support our ability to plan for the future, to imagine the future, and to use our past experiences in a flexible way to simulate different outcomes of events.
  • flexibility of memory is something that makes it useful to support this very important ability to run simulations of future events. But that very flexibility might be something that contributes to some of the memory distortion we talked about. That has been prominent in the last few years in my thinking about the constructive nature of memory.
  • The historian Daniel Aaron told his students “we remember what’s important.” What do you think of that comment?I think that generally holds true. Certainly, again, more important memories tend to be more significant with more emotional arousal and may elicit “deeper processing”, as we call it in cognitive psychology
Javier E

What's behind the confidence of the incompetent? This suddenly popular psychological ph... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...pular-psychological-phenomenon

confidence psychology knowledge competence

shared by Javier E on 07 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Someone who has very little knowledge in a subject claims to know a lot. That person might even boast about being an expert.
  • This phenomenon has a name: the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s not a disease, syndrome or mental illness; it is present in everybody to some extent, and it’s been around as long as human cognition, though only recently has it been studied and documented in social psychology.
  • Charles Darwin followed that up in 1871 with “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
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  • Put simply, incompetent people think they know more than they really do, and they tend to be more boastful about it.
  • To test Darwin’s theory, the researchers quizzed people on several topics, such as grammar, logical reasoning and humor. After each test, they asked the participants how they thought they did. Specifically, participants were asked how many of the other quiz-takers they beat.
  • Time after time, no matter the subject, the people who did poorly on the tests ranked their competence much higher
  • On average, test takers who scored as low as the 10th percentile ranked themselves near the 70th percentile. Those least likely to know what they were talking about believed they knew as much as the experts.
  • Dunning and Kruger’s results have been replicated in at least a dozen different domains: math skills, wine tasting, chess, medical knowledge among surgeons and firearm safety among hunters.
  • Even though President Trump’s statements are rife with errors, falsehoods or inaccuracies, he expresses great confidence in his aptitude. He says he does not read extensively because he solves problems “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had.” He has said in interviews he doesn’t read lengthy reports because “I already know exactly what it is.”
  • He has “the best words” and cites his “high levels of intelligence” in rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change. Decades ago, he said he could end the Cold War: “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” Trump told The Washington Post’s Lois Romano over dinner in 1984. “I think I know most of it anyway.”
  • Whether people want to understand “the other side” or they’re just looking for an epithet, the Dunning-Kruger effect works as both, Dunning said, which he believes explains the rise of interest.
  • Dunning says the effect is particularly dangerous when someone with influence or the means to do harm doesn’t have anyone who can speak honestly about their mistakes.
  • Not surprisingly (though no less concerning), Dunning’s follow-up research shows the poorest performers are also the least likely to accept criticism or show interest in self improvement.
clairemann

Your brain thinks - but how? - 0 views

theconversation.com/ur-brain-thinks-but-how-153951

education research knowledge psychology science brain science

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • “Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird!” “It’s a plane!” “It’s Superman!”It’s the same object, the same sky. It’s even the same roar. So why do three people witnessing the same event reach different conclusions?
  • The answer to this question lies in how our brains are hardwired to think. We experience and interpret the world around us based on what we already know, even though sometimes what we know is flawed.
  • However, they cannot, because it is too impractical.
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  • You must immediately know to cross a road quickly – even run – when you hear a car rapidly approaching.
  • These limitations represent a thinking problem: Our brains simply do not have enough resources to understand the world without taking some mental shortcuts.
  • Our brains find shortcuts to overcome the thinking problem by relying on thoughts already stored in our minds, called schemas. Schemas do the processing for the brain, like auto-fill, but for thinking.
  • Schemas are the building blocks of our knowledge about the world. Our brains rely on different types of schemas to understand different types of situations.
  • When our brains try to understand unfamiliar objects, they must rely on a schema for a different but similar object because the correct schema is unavailable. If the object and chosen schema closely match, our brains effortlessly – but inaccurately – assume the two objects are the same.
  • A person who has never seen a bat might assume a bat is a bird because the features of the bat and their schema for a bird are similar: Both are small animals with wings and can fly. Our brains accept occasional inaccuracies.
Javier E

What's behind the confidence of the incompetent? This suddenly popular psychological ph... - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...pular-psychological-phenomenon

confidence knowledge psychology brain science bias science ignorance incompetence

shared by Javier E on 06 May 20 - No Cached
  • To test Darwin’s theory, the researchers quizzed people on several topics, such as grammar, logical reasoning and humor. After each test, they asked the participants how they thought they did. Specifically, participants were asked how many of the other quiz-takers they beat.
  • Dunning was shocked by the results, even though it confirmed his hypothesis. Time after time, no matter the subject, the people who did poorly on the tests ranked their competence much higher. On average, test takers who scored as low as the 10th percentile ranked themselves near the 70th percentile. Those least likely to know what they were talking about believed they knew as much as the experts.
  • Dunning and Kruger’s results have been replicated in at least a dozen different domains: math skills, wine tasting, chess, medical knowledge among surgeons and firearm safety among hunters.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Dunning-Kruger “offers an explanation for a kind of hubris,” said Steven Sloman, a cognitive psychologist at Brown University. “The fact is, that’s Trump in a nutshell. He’s a man with zero political skill who has no idea he has zero political skill. And it’s given him extreme confidence.”
  • What happens when the incompetent are unwilling to admit they have shortcomings? Are they so confident in their own perceived knowledge that they will reject the very idea of improvement? Not surprisingly (though no less concerning), Dunning’s follow-up research shows the poorest performers are also the least likely to accept criticism or show interest in self improvement.
  • Someone who has very little knowledge in a subject claims to know a lot.
  • the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s not a disease, syndrome or mental illness; it is present in everybody to some extent, and it’s been around as long as human cognition, though only recently has it been studied and documented in social psychology
  • “Obviously it has to do with Trump and the various treatments that people have given him,” Dunning said, “So yeah, a lot of it is political. People trying to understand the other side. We have a massive rise in partisanship and it’s become more vicious and extreme, so people are reaching for explanations."
  • Even though President Trump’s statements are rife with errors, falsehoods or inaccuracies, he expresses great confidence in his aptitude. He says he does not read extensively because he solves problems “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had.” He has said in interviews he doesn’t read lengthy reports because “I already know exactly what it is.”
  • the Dunning-Kruger effect has become popular outside of the research world because it is a simple phenomenon that could apply to all of us
  • The ramifications of the Dunning-Kruger effect are usually harmless. If you’ve ever felt confident answering questions on an exam, only to have the teacher mark them incorrect, you have firsthand experience with Dunning-Kruger.
Javier E

Whistleblower: Twitter misled investors, FTC and underplayed spam issues - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...twitter-whistleblower-sec-spam

twitter whistleblower security social media technology

shared by Javier E on 27 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • Twitter executives deceived federal regulators and the company’s own board of directors about “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its defenses against hackers, as well as its meager efforts to fight spam, according to an explosive whistleblower complaint from its former security chief.
  • The complaint from former head of security Peiter Zatko, a widely admired hacker known as “Mudge,” depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting, unable to properly protect its 238 million daily users including government agencies, heads of state and other influential public figures.
  • Among the most serious accusations in the complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is that Twitter violated the terms of an 11-year-old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan. Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.
  • ...56 more annotations...
  • The complaint — filed last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice, as well as the FTC — says thousands of employees still had wide-ranging and poorly tracked internal access to core company software, a situation that for years had led to embarrassing hacks, including the commandeering of accounts held by such high-profile users as Elon Musk and former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
  • the whistleblower document alleges the company prioritized user growth over reducing spam, though unwanted content made the user experience worse. Executives stood to win individual bonuses of as much as $10 million tied to increases in daily users, the complaint asserts, and nothing explicitly for cutting spam.
  • Chief executive Parag Agrawal was “lying” when he tweeted in May that the company was “strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can,” the complaint alleges.
  • Zatko described his decision to go public as an extension of his previous work exposing flaws in specific pieces of software and broader systemic failings in cybersecurity. He was hired at Twitter by former CEO Jack Dorsey in late 2020 after a major hack of the company’s systems.
  • “I felt ethically bound. This is not a light step to take,” said Zatko, who was fired by Agrawal in January. He declined to discuss what happened at Twitter, except to stand by the formal complaint. Under SEC whistleblower rules, he is entitled to legal protection against retaliation, as well as potential monetary rewards.
  • “Security and privacy have long been top companywide priorities at Twitter,” said Twitter spokeswoman Rebecca Hahn. She said that Zatko’s allegations appeared to be “riddled with inaccuracies” and that Zatko “now appears to be opportunistically seeking to inflict harm on Twitter, its customers, and its shareholders.” Hahn said that Twitter fired Zatko after 15 months “for poor performance and leadership.” Attorneys for Zatko confirmed he was fired but denied it was for performance or leadership.
  • A person familiar with Zatko’s tenure said the company investigated Zatko’s security claims during his time there and concluded they were sensationalistic and without merit. Four people familiar with Twitter’s efforts to fight spam said the company deploys extensive manual and automated tools to both measure the extent of spam across the service and reduce it.
  • Overall, Zatko wrote in a February analysis for the company attached as an exhibit to the SEC complaint, “Twitter is grossly negligent in several areas of information security. If these problems are not corrected, regulators, media and users of the platform will be shocked when they inevitably learn about Twitter’s severe lack of security basics.”
  • Zatko’s complaint says strong security should have been much more important to Twitter, which holds vast amounts of sensitive personal data about users. Twitter has the email addresses and phone numbers of many public figures, as well as dissidents who communicate over the service at great personal risk.
  • This month, an ex-Twitter employee was convicted of using his position at the company to spy on Saudi dissidents and government critics, passing their information to a close aide of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in exchange for cash and gifts.
  • Zatko’s complaint says he believed the Indian government had forced Twitter to put one of its agents on the payroll, with access to user data at a time of intense protests in the country. The complaint said supporting information for that claim has gone to the National Security Division of the Justice Department and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Another person familiar with the matter agreed that the employee was probably an agent.
  • “Take a tech platform that collects massive amounts of user data, combine it with what appears to be an incredibly weak security infrastructure and infuse it with foreign state actors with an agenda, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster,” Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee,
  • Many government leaders and other trusted voices use Twitter to spread important messages quickly, so a hijacked account could drive panic or violence. In 2013, a captured Associated Press handle falsely tweeted about explosions at the White House, sending the Dow Jones industrial average briefly plunging more than 140 points.
  • After a teenager managed to hijack the verified accounts of Obama, then-candidate Joe Biden, Musk and others in 2020, Twitter’s chief executive at the time, Jack Dorsey, asked Zatko to join him, saying that he could help the world by fixing Twitter’s security and improving the public conversation, Zatko asserts in the complaint.
  • In 1998, Zatko had testified to Congress that the internet was so fragile that he and others could take it down with a half-hour of concentrated effort. He later served as the head of cyber grants at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon innovation unit that had backed the internet’s invention.
  • But at Twitter Zatko encountered problems more widespread than he realized and leadership that didn’t act on his concerns, according to the complaint.
  • Twitter’s difficulties with weak security stretches back more than a decade before Zatko’s arrival at the company in November 2020. In a pair of 2009 incidents, hackers gained administrative control of the social network, allowing them to reset passwords and access user data. In the first, beginning around January of that year, hackers sent tweets from the accounts of high-profile users, including Fox News and Obama.
  • Several months later, a hacker was able to guess an employee’s administrative password after gaining access to similar passwords in their personal email account. That hacker was able to reset at least one user’s password and obtain private information about any Twitter user.
  • Twitter continued to suffer high-profile hacks and security violations, including in 2017, when a contract worker briefly took over Trump’s account, and in the 2020 hack, in which a Florida teen tricked Twitter employees and won access to verified accounts. Twitter then said it put additional safeguards in place.
  • This year, the Justice Department accused Twitter of asking users for their phone numbers in the name of increased security, then using the numbers for marketing. Twitter agreed to pay a $150 million fine for allegedly breaking the 2011 order, which barred the company from making misrepresentations about the security of personal data.
  • After Zatko joined the company, he found it had made little progress since the 2011 settlement, the complaint says. The complaint alleges that he was able to reduce the backlog of safety cases, including harassment and threats, from 1 million to 200,000, add staff and push to measure results.
  • But Zatko saw major gaps in what the company was doing to satisfy its obligations to the FTC, according to the complaint. In Zatko’s interpretation, according to the complaint, the 2011 order required Twitter to implement a Software Development Life Cycle program, a standard process for making sure new code is free of dangerous bugs. The complaint alleges that other employees had been telling the board and the FTC that they were making progress in rolling out that program to Twitter’s systems. But Zatko alleges that he discovered that it had been sent to only a tenth of the company’s projects, and even then treated as optional.
  • “If all of that is true, I don’t think there’s any doubt that there are order violations,” Vladeck, who is now a Georgetown Law professor, said in an interview. “It is possible that the kinds of problems that Twitter faced eleven years ago are still running through the company.”
  • The complaint also alleges that Zatko warned the board early in his tenure that overlapping outages in the company’s data centers could leave it unable to correctly restart its servers. That could have left the service down for months, or even have caused all of its data to be lost. That came close to happening in 2021, when an “impending catastrophic” crisis threatened the platform’s survival before engineers were able to save the day, the complaint says, without providing further details.
  • One current and one former employee recalled that incident, when failures at two Twitter data centers drove concerns that the service could have collapsed for an extended period. “I wondered if the company would exist in a few days,” one of them said.
  • The current and former employees also agreed with the complaint’s assertion that past reports to various privacy regulators were “misleading at best.”
  • For example, they said the company implied that it had destroyed all data on users who asked, but the material had spread so widely inside Twitter’s networks, it was impossible to know for sure
  • As the head of security, Zatko says he also was in charge of a division that investigated users’ complaints about accounts, which meant that he oversaw the removal of some bots, according to the complaint. Spam bots — computer programs that tweet automatically — have long vexed Twitter. Unlike its social media counterparts, Twitter allows users to program bots to be used on its service: For example, the Twitter account @big_ben_clock is programmed to tweet “Bong Bong Bong” every hour in time with Big Ben in London. Twitter also allows people to create accounts without using their real identities, making it harder for the company to distinguish between authentic, duplicate and automated accounts.
  • In the complaint, Zatko alleges he could not get a straight answer when he sought what he viewed as an important data point: the prevalence of spam and bots across all of Twitter, not just among monetizable users.
  • Zatko cites a “sensitive source” who said Twitter was afraid to determine that number because it “would harm the image and valuation of the company.” He says the company’s tools for detecting spam are far less robust than implied in various statements.
  • “Agrawal’s Tweets and Twitter’s previous blog posts misleadingly imply that Twitter employs proactive, sophisticated systems to measure and block spam bots,” the complaint says. “The reality: mostly outdated, unmonitored, simple scripts plus overworked, inefficient, understaffed, and reactive human teams.”
  • The four people familiar with Twitter’s spam and bot efforts said the engineering and integrity teams run software that samples thousands of tweets per day, and 100 accounts are sampled manually.
  • Some employees charged with executing the fight agreed that they had been short of staff. One said top executives showed “apathy” toward the issue.
  • Zatko’s complaint likewise depicts leadership dysfunction, starting with the CEO. Dorsey was largely absent during the pandemic, which made it hard for Zatko to get rulings on who should be in charge of what in areas of overlap and easier for rival executives to avoid collaborating, three current and former employees said.
  • For example, Zatko would encounter disinformation as part of his mandate to handle complaints, according to the complaint. To that end, he commissioned an outside report that found one of the disinformation teams had unfilled positions, yawning language deficiencies, and a lack of technical tools or the engineers to craft them. The authors said Twitter had no effective means of dealing with consistent spreaders of falsehoods.
  • Dorsey made little effort to integrate Zatko at the company, according to the three employees as well as two others familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive dynamics. In 12 months, Zatko could manage only six one-on-one calls, all less than 30 minutes, with his direct boss Dorsey, who also served as CEO of payments company Square, now known as Block, according to the complaint. Zatko allegedly did almost all of the talking, and Dorsey said perhaps 50 words in the entire year to him. “A couple dozen text messages” rounded out their electronic communication, the complaint alleges.
  • Faced with such inertia, Zatko asserts that he was unable to solve some of the most serious issues, according to the complaint.
  • Some 30 percent of company laptops blocked automatic software updates carrying security fixes, and thousands of laptops had complete copies of Twitter’s source code, making them a rich target for hackers, it alleges.
  • A successful hacker takeover of one of those machines would have been able to sabotage the product with relative ease, because the engineers pushed out changes without being forced to test them first in a simulated environment, current and former employees said.
  • “It’s near-incredible that for something of that scale there would not be a development test environment separate from production and there would not be a more controlled source-code management process,” said Tony Sager, former chief operating officer at the cyberdefense wing of the National Security Agency, the Information Assurance divisio
  • Sager is currently senior vice president at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, where he leads a consensus effort to establish best security practices.
  • Zatko stopped the material from being presented at the Dec. 9, 2021 meeting, the complaint said. But over his continued objections, Agrawal let it go to the board’s smaller Risk Committee a week later.
  • “A best practice is that you should only be authorized to see and access what you need to do your job, and nothing else,” said former U.S. chief information security officer Gregory Touhill. “If half the company has access to and can make configuration changes to the production environment, that exposes the company and its customers to significant risk.”
  • The complaint says Dorsey never encouraged anyone to mislead the board about the shortcomings, but that others deliberately left out bad news.
  • The complaint says that about half of Twitter’s roughly 7,000 full-time employees had wide access to the company’s internal software and that access was not closely monitored, giving them the ability to tap into sensitive data and alter how the service worked. Three current and former employees agreed that these were issues.
  • An unnamed executive had prepared a presentation for the new CEO’s first full board meeting, according to the complaint. Zatko’s complaint calls the presentation deeply misleading.
  • The presentation showed that 92 percent of employee computers had security software installed — without mentioning that those installations determined that a third of the machines were insecure, according to the complaint.
  • Another graphic implied a downward trend in the number of people with overly broad access, based on the small subset of people who had access to the highest administrative powers, known internally as “God mode.” That number was in the hundreds. But the number of people with broad access to core systems, which Zatko had called out as a big problem after joining, had actually grown slightly and remained in the thousands.
  • The presentation included only a subset of serious intrusions or other security incidents, from a total Zatko estimated as one per week, and it said that the uncontrolled internal access to core systems was responsible for just 7 percent of incidents, when Zatko calculated the real proportion as 60 percent.
  • When Dorsey left in November 2021, a difficult situation worsened under Agrawal, who had been responsible for security decisions as chief technology officer before Zatko’s hiring, the complaint says.
  • Agrawal didn’t respond to requests for comment. In an email to employees after publication of this article, obtained by The Post, he said that privacy and security continues to be a top priority for the company, and he added that the narrative is “riddled with inconsistences” and “presented without important context.”
  • On Jan. 4, Zatko reported internally that the Risk Committee meeting might have been fraudulent, which triggered an Audit Committee investigation.
  • Agarwal fired him two weeks later. But Zatko complied with the company’s request to spell out his concerns in writing, even without access to his work email and documents, according to the complaint.
  • Since Zatko’s departure, Twitter has plunged further into chaos with Musk’s takeover, which the two parties agreed to in May. The stock price has fallen, many employees have quit, and Agrawal has dismissed executives and frozen big projects.
  • Zatko said he hoped that by bringing new scrutiny and accountability, he could improve the company from the outside.
  • “I still believe that this is a tremendous platform, and there is huge value and huge risk, and I hope that looking back at this, the world will be a better place, in part because of this.”
Javier E

AI could end independent UK news, Mail owner warns - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...ews-mail-owner-warns-7fz80n2bb

AI threat inaccuracies culture research technology

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Artificial intelligence could destroy independent news organisations in Britain and potentially is an “existential threat to democracy”, the executive chairman of DMGT has warned.
  • “They have basically taken all our data, without permission and without even a consideration of the consequences. They are using it to train their models and to start producing content. They’re commercialising it,
  • AI had the potential to destroy independent news organisations “by ripping off all our content and then repurposing it to people … without any responsibility for the efficacy of that content”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The risk was that the internet had become an echo chamber of stories produced by special interest groups and rogue states, he said.
  • The danger is that these huge platforms end up in an arms race with each other. They’re like elephants fighting and then everybody else is like mice that get stamped on without them even realising the consequences of their actions.”
  • there are huge consequences to this technology. And it’s not just the danger of ripping our industry apart, but also ripping other industries apart, all the creative industries. How many jobs are going to be lost? What’s the damage to the economy going to be if these rapacious organisations can continue to operate without any legal ramifications?
  • Rothermere revealed that DMGT had experimented with using AI to help journalists to publish stories faster, but that it then took longer “to check the accuracy of what it comes up” than it would have done to write the article.
  • Javier E on 18 Nov 23
     
    Rothermere revealed that DMGT had experimented with using AI to help journalists to publish stories faster, but that it then took longer "to check the accuracy of what it comes up" than it would have done to write the article.
Javier E

The New York Times' trans coverage is under fire. The paper needs to listen | Arwa Mahd... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-trans-coverage-open-letters

trans debate nyt objectivity bias

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.
  • “In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”
  • This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to seek to influence our journalism,” Kahn wrote in the memo. “In this case, however, members of our staff and contributors to The Times joined the effort … We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.”
  • Charlie Stadtlander, the Times’ director of external communication, put out a statement stating that the organization pursues “independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care”. While that was all very diplomatic, the executive editor, Joe Kahn, and opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, sent around a rather more pointed newsroom memo condemning the letters on Thursday.
  • The second letter was signed by more than 100 LGBTQ+ and civil rights groups, including Glaad and the Human Rights Campaign. It expressed support for the contributor letter and accused the Times of platforming “fringe theories” and “dangerous inaccuracies”. It noted that while the Times has produced responsible coverage of trans people, “those articles are not getting front-page placement or sent to app users via push notification like the irresponsible pieces are”. And it observed that rightwing politicians have been using the Times’s coverage of trans issues to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care.
  • Here’s the thing: there is no clear-cut line between advocacy and journalism. All media organizations have a perspective about the world and filter their output (which will, of course, strive to be fairly reported) through that perspective. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. Like it or not, the Times is involved in advocacy. It just needs to step back for a moment and think about who it’s advocating for.
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