content moderation - CybAI news

30 Sep

Inside Two Years of Turmoil at Big Tech’s Anti-Terrorism Group

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscontent moderation, facebook, google, meta, social media, terrorism, twitter, youtube

The four tech giants have presided over the consortium since they announced it in 2016, when Western governments were berating them for allowing Islamic State to post gruesome videos of journalists and humanitarians being beheaded. Now with a staff of eight, GIFCT—which the board organized as a US nonprofit in 2019 after the Christchurch massacre—is one of the groups through which tech competitors are meant to work together to address discrete online harms, including child abuse and the illicit trade of intimate images.The efforts have helped bring down some unwelcome content, and pointing to the work can help companies stave…

25 Sep

X’s First Transparency Report Since Elon Musk’s Takeover Is Finally Here

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscontent moderation, elon musk, social media, transparency, twitter, X

Today, X released the company’s first transparency report since Elon Musk bought the company, formerly Twitter, in 2022.Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter would release transparency reports every six months.These largely covered the same ground as the new X report, giving specific numbers for takedowns, government requests for information, and content removals, as well as data about which content was reported and, in some cases, removed for violating policies. The last transparency report available from Twitter covered the second half of 2021 and was 50 pages long. (X’s is a shorter 15 pages, but requests from governments are also listed elsewhere on…

05 Sep

Why It’s So Hard to Fully Block X in Brazil

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscensorship, content moderation, elon musk, internet, ISPs, social media, websites, X

The social network X has been largely inaccessible in Brazil since Saturday, after the country's Supreme Court ordered all mobile and internet service providers to block the platform. The court order followed a months-long dispute between Judge Alexandre de Moraes and X CEO Elon Musk over the company's misinformation, hate speech, and moderation policies.With Brazil's population of 215 million people, its mature democracy, its sprawling land mass, and more than 20,000 internet service providers, blocking a web platform in the South American nation isn't straightforward. And while the biggest ISPs have implemented the ban, many are still scrambling to comply…

30 Aug

Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Be Neutral–While Tossing Gifts to Trump and the GOP

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscontent moderation, facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, meta, national affairs, plaintext, politics

This week Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. For months, the GOP-led committee has been on a crusade to prove that Meta, via its once-eponymous Facebook app, engaged in political sabotage by taking down right-wing content. Its investigation has involved thousands of documents, and the committee interviewed multiple employees, which failed to locate a smoking gun. Now, under the guise of offering his take on the subject, Zuckerberg’s letter is a mea culpa where he seems to indicate that there was something to the GOP conspiracy theory.Specifically, he said that in…

29 Aug

Telegram Faces a Reckoning. Other Founders Should Beware

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscensorship, content moderation, encryption, privacy, social media, telegram

“[Elon] Musk and fellow executives should be reminded of their criminal liability,” said Bruce Daisley, a former executive at Twitter, who worked at the company’s British office, days after British protesters tried to set fire to a hotel for asylum seekers.But Telegram has provoked politicians more than any other platform. What could be called the company’s uncollaborative approach has put the platform—part messaging app, part social media network—on a collision course with governments around the world.The case in France is far from the first time Telegram has been reprimanded by authorities for its refusal to cooperate. Telegram has been temporarily…

28 Aug

Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Charged Over Alleged Criminal Activity on the App

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscontent moderation, crime, France, russia, telegram

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is forbidden from leaving French territory after being charged for complicity in running an online platform that allegedly enabled the spread of sexual images of children, creating an uncertain future for the messaging app that has become one of the world’s biggest social media platforms.Durov was arrested on Saturday at 8 pm local time after his private jet landed at an airport near Paris. He was then detained for four days as part of an investigation into alleged criminal activity taking place on Telegram. On Wednesday evening, local time, he was indicted and forbidden from leaving…

25 Aug

Pavel Durov’s Arrest Leaves Telegram Hanging in the Balance

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscontent moderation, crime, France, free speech, russia, telegram

“Civil society has had a complicated relationship with Telegram over the years,” says Natalia Kapriva, a lawyer at the digital rights group Access Now. “We have defended Telegram against attempts by authoritarian regimes to block and coerce the platform into providing encryption keys, but we have also been raising alarms about Telegram’s lack of human rights policies, reliable channel of communication, and remedy for its users.” Kapriva stresses that French authorities may try to force Durov to provide Telegram’s encryption keys to decrypt private messages, “which Russia has already tried to do in the past.”The hashtag #FreePavel has been spreading…

11 Jul

How Watermelon Cupcakes Kicked Off an Internal Storm at Meta

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscontent moderation, israel, israel-hamas war, meta

Williams in her note explained that “‘Prayers for …’ any location where there is a war in process might be taken down, but prayers for those impacted by a natural disaster, for example, might stay up.” She continued, “We know people may not agree with this approach, but it’s one of the trade-offs we made to ensure we maintain a productive place for everyone.”Pain and DistressMeanwhile, Arab and Muslim workers expressed disappointment that last month’s World Refugee Week commemorations inside Meta included talks about human rights projects and refugee experiences and lunches featuring Ukrainian and Syrian food but nothing mentioning…

29 May

A Nonprofit Tried to Fix Tech Culture—but Lost Control of Its Own

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelscontent moderation, facebook, google, meta, philanthropy, platforms, silicon valley, social media, startups

Allen, a data scientist, and Massachi, a software engineer, worked for nearly four years at Facebook on some of the uglier aspects of social media, combating scams and election meddling. They didn’t know each other but both quit in 2019, frustrated at feeling a lack of support from executives. “The work that teams like the one I was on, civic integrity, was being squandered,” Massachi said in a recent conference talk. “Worse than a crime, it was a mistake.”Massachi first conceived the idea of using expertise like that he’d developed at Facebook to drive greater public attention to the dangers…

23 May

The Low-Paid Humans Behind AI’s Smarts Ask Biden to Free Them From ‘Modern Day Slavery’

stp2y0 CommentsAIafrica, artificial intelligence, chatgpt, content moderation, crowdsourcing, joe biden, labor, meta, openai, social media

AI projects like OpenAI’s ChatGPT get part of their savvy from some of the lowest-paid workers in the tech industry—contractors often in poor countries paid small sums to correct chatbots and label images. On Wednesday, 97 African workers who do AI training work or online content moderation for companies like Meta and OpenAI published an open letter to President Biden, demanding that US tech companies stop “systemically abusing and exploiting African workers.”Most of the letter’s signatories are from Kenya, a hub for tech outsourcing, whose president, William Ruto, is visiting the US this week. The workers allege that the practices…