elections

As Trump Takes a Victory Lap, the Crypto Faithful Kiss the Ring
06 Nov

As Trump Takes a Victory Lap, the Crypto Faithful Kiss the Ring

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On the campaign trail, Trump went out of his way to court their favor. In July, speaking to thousands of bitcoiners at a conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Trump duly sang from the bitcoin hymn sheet, promising to cement the US as the foremost bitcoin mining powerhouse, establish a national “bitcoin stockpile,” and appoint a bitcoin advisory council if reelected. Trump claimed he would turn the US into the “crypto capital of the planet.”In October, Trump went as far as to launch his own crypto platform, World Liberty Financial, which his family has marketed as a way to “make finance great…
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Perplexity Dove Into Real-Time Election Tracking While Other AI Companies Held Back
06 Nov

Perplexity Dove Into Real-Time Election Tracking While Other AI Companies Held Back

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Perplexity’s Election Information Hub might also blur the line between verified and free-wheeling AI-generated information. While some results come directly from trusted sources, searching for more information triggered open-ended AI-generated results from the wider web.Other AI companies appear to be taking a more cautious approach to the election. In WIRED’s testing, ChatGPT Search, a newly launched service from OpenAI, often declined to provide information about voting. “We’ve instructed ChatGPT to not express preferences, offer opinions, or make specific recommendations about political candidates or issues even when explicitly asked,” Mattie Zazueta, an OpenAI spokesperson, told WIRED.The results were often inconsistent, however.…
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TikTok Employees Shrug Off the US Election
05 Nov

TikTok Employees Shrug Off the US Election

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TikTok is one of the tech companies that could be most impacted by the outcome of the US elections. But as the election result looms, employees there found themselves surprisingly disengaged from the high-level political drama that could decide the app’s fate.A San Jose-based product manager, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media, says he was more worried about the TikTok ban before he joined the company earlier this year than now. He claims his colleagues rarely bring up the topic, and his team plans future product features in the app as if there’s…
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What an ‘Airbnbopoly’ Game Says About Silicon Valley’s Standoff With Lina Khan
01 Nov

What an ‘Airbnbopoly’ Game Says About Silicon Valley’s Standoff With Lina Khan

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Four years ago, one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ top donors—the billionaire cofounder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman—celebrated the IPO of Airbnb, a company he was heavily invested in, by fashioning Monopoly boards where the game’s “jail” space is replaced by “government regulation.”Since Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, many billionaire tech investors have come out of the woodwork to support her campaign. While they often tout Harris as a business-friendly politician, they’ve been vocal in their dislike of Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan’s antitrust agenda. Hoffman is one of the most influential donors in that group. He has donated…
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Profiteers Are Exploiting US Election Conspiracies and Hate to Make Millions
01 Nov

Profiteers Are Exploiting US Election Conspiracies and Hate to Make Millions

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The messages, potentially misleading US citizens or stoking hate towards various groups, will have been seen by many times more people than actually made a purchase.Those running the network of Facebook pages in Nigeria may simply believe that US-focused clickbait is the best way to boost the number of people who see their scams. In contrast, the ecommerce operations identified by TBIJ give every impression that they are proudly American.Yet analysis of their listed physical addresses and online presence suggests that the businesses are at least partly run from Vietnam, the Philippines, Pakistan, India, and Croatia (with Facebook page admins…
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Europe’s Big Tech Hawks Brace for a Post-Biden Future
30 Oct

Europe’s Big Tech Hawks Brace for a Post-Biden Future

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For Europe, the outcome of next week’s US election will have profound consequences. NATO funding is at stake, as is a potential peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Projections suggest a trade war with Donald Trump could hit GDP in the bloc’s biggest economy, Germany, by 1.5 percent. The future of big tech, by comparison, is a sideshow—but a fraught one. President Joe Biden’s administration ushered in a new era of confrontation with the likes of Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia, which all faced legal action during his time in office. A proposal to break-up Google is still pending.Unlike many other…
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The Disinformation Warning Coming From the Edge of Europe
19 Oct

The Disinformation Warning Coming From the Edge of Europe

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A TikTok video of actor Brian Baumgartner, from the American version of The Office, calling for the overthrow of the president of a small European country was an early sign that this would be no ordinary election.Late last year, Baumgartner appeared among a lineup of American celebrities addressing Maia Sandu, the current, pro-European president of Moldova and proclaiming in bad Russian: “We, Hollywood stars, support the people of Moldova in their desire to overthrow you, Sandu.” These weren’t deepfakes. Instead the videos—which researchers suggested were part of a pro-Kremlin influence operation—were commissioned on Cameo, the app that lets anyone buy…
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X Is Back in Brazil
09 Oct

X Is Back in Brazil

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Today after a month-long suspension, X is now live again in Brazil. The platform had been suspended since late August after a showdown with the country’s Supreme Court in which X refused a court order to remove certain right-wing accounts and content that the Court said violated Brazilian law. After weeks of not complying, it seems that Elon Musk has caved.Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre authorized X’s return after the company blocked profiles accused of disseminating false information, re-appointing a legal representative in the country, and paying fines that amounted to R$28.6 million ($5.1m.)X issued a statement on its platform,…
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Yes, You Can Now Bet on Elections in the US
12 Sep

Yes, You Can Now Bet on Elections in the US

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A federal judge has cleared the way for betting on election results in the US for the first time in the modern era, overturning a prohibition imposed on gambling companies by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, a financial regulator.In November, the CFTC was sued in the District of Columbia by New York-based Kalshi, which operates a predictions market that allows users to bet on the outcome of various events, from the volume of recorded bird flu cases to the number of cars produced by Tesla. Kalshi filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn a CFTC decision preventing it from offering bets…
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AI-Fakes Detection Is Failing Voters in the Global South
02 Sep

AI-Fakes Detection Is Failing Voters in the Global South

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But it’s not just that models can’t recognize accents, languages, syntax, or faces less common in Western countries. “A lot of the initial deepfake detection tools were trained on high quality media,” says Gregory. But in much of the world, including Africa, cheap Chinese smartphone brands that offer stripped-down features dominate the market. The photos and videos that these phones are able to produce are much lower quality, further confusing detection models, says Ngamita.Gregory says that some models are so sensitive that even background noise in a piece of audio, or compressing a video for social media, can result in…
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