UN launches recommendations for urgent action to curb harm from spread of mis and disinformation and hate speech Global Principles for Information Integrity address risks posed by advances in AI

United Nations, New York, 24 June 2024 – The world must respond to the harm caused by the spread of online hate and lies while robustly upholding human rights, United Nations Secretary- General António Guterres said today at the launch of the United Nations Global Principles for Information Integrity.

The UN has issued a press release announcing that the UN launches recommendations for urgent action to curb harm from spread of mis and disinformation and hate speech Global Principles for Information Integrity address risks posed by advances in AI. This press release marks the launch of the United Nations Global Principles for Information Integrity.

The recommendations in the press release include:

Tech companies should ensure safety and privacy by design in all products, alongside consistent application of policies and resources across countries and languages, with particular attention to the needs of those groups often targeted online. They should elevate crisis response and take measures to support information integrity around elections.

Tech companies should scope business models that do not rely on programmatic advertising and do not prioritize engagement above human rights, privacy, and safety, allowing users greater choice and control over their online experience and personal data.

Advertisers should demand transparency in digital advertising processes from the tech sector to help ensure that ad budgets do not inadvertently fund disinformation or hate or undermine human rights.

Tech companies and AI developers should ensure meaningful transparency and allow researchers and academics access to data while respecting user privacy, commission publicly available independent audits and co-develop industry accountability frameworks.

 

Surgeon General: Social Media Platforms Need a Health Warning

It’s time for decisive action to protect our young people.

The New York Times is carrying an opinion piece by Vivek H. Murthy, the Surgeon General of the USA arguing that  Social Media Platforms Need a Health Warning. He argues that we have a youth mental health crisis and “social media has emerged as an important contributor.” For this reason he wants social media platforms to carry a warning label similar to cigarettes, something that would take congressional action.

He has more advice in a Social Media and Youth Mental Health advisory including protecting youth from harassment and problematic content. The rhetoric is to give parents support:

There is no seatbelt for parents to click, no helmet to snap in place, no assurance that trusted experts have investigated and ensured that these platforms are safe for our kids. There are just parents and their children, trying to figure it out on their own, pitted against some of the best product engineers and most well-resourced companies in the world.

Social media has gone from a tool of democracy (remember Tahir Square?) to a info-plague in a little over ten years. Just as it is easy to seek salvation in technology, and the platforms encourage such hype, it is also easy to blame it. The Surgeon General’s sort of advice will get broad support, but will anything happen? How long will it take regulation and civil society to box the platforms into civil business? The Surgeon General calls how well we protect our children a “moral test.” Indeed.

Elon Musk, X and the Problem of Misinformation in an Era Without Trust

Elon Musk thinks a free market of ideas will self-correct. Liberals want to regulate it. Both are missing a deeper predicament.

Jennifer Szalai of the New York Times has a good book review or essay on misinformation and disinformation, Elon Musk, X and the Problem of Misinformation in an Era Without Trust. She writes about how Big Tech (Facebook and Google) benefit from the view that people are being manipulated by social media. It helps sell their services even though there is less evidence of clear and easy manipulation. It is possible that there is an academic business of Big Disinfo that is invested in a story about fake news and its solutions. The problem instead may be a problem of the authority of elites who regularly lie to the US public. This of the lies told after 9/11 to justify the “war on terror”; why should we believe any “elite”?

One answer is to call people to “Do your own research.” Of course that call has its own agenda. It tends to be a call for unsophisticated research through the internet. Of course, everyone should do their own research, but we can’t in most cases. What would it take to really understand vaccines through your own research, as opposed to joining some epistemic community and calling research the parroting of their truisms. With the internet there is an abundance of communities of research to join that will make you feel well-researched. Who needs a PhD? Who needs to actually do original research? Conspiracies like academic communities provide safe haven for networks of ideas.

Who wants to farm potatoes in the metaverse? Exploring Roblox’s corporate hell-worlds

Everyone from Samsung to Victoria’s Secret is getting in on Roblox. We hunted down the very worst branded experiences in the all-ages game platform (and an unofficial Ryanair world)

Rich Pelley of the Guardian has a nice article about the worst corporate games in Roblox, Who wants to farm potatoes in the metaverse? Exploring Roblox’s corporate hell-worldsCanada’s McCain’s Farms of the Future, for example, explains regenerative farming of potatoes. You can see McCain’s Regen Fries site here.

This use of a virtual gaming platform for advertising reminds me of the way Second Life was used by companies to build virtual advertising real estate. Once a space becomes popoular the advertisers follow.

Predatory community

Projects that seek to create new communities of marginalized people to draw them in to risky speculative markets rife with scams and fraud are demonstrating

Through a Washington Post article I discovered Molly White who has been documenting the alt-right and now the crypto community. She has a blog at Molly White and a site that documents the problems of crypto at Web3 is going just great. There is, of course, a connection between the alt-right and crypto broculture, something that she talks about in posts like Predatory community which is about crypto promotions try to build community and are now playing the inclusive card – aiming at marginalized communities and trying to convince them that now they can get in on the action and build community. She calls this “predatory community.”

Groups that operate under the guise of inclusion, regardless of their intentions, are serving the greater goal of crypto that keeps the whole thing afloat: finding ever more fools to buy in so that the early investors can take their profits. And it is those latecomers who are left holding the bag in the end.

With projects that seek to provide services and opportunities to members of marginalized groups who have previously not had access, but on bad terms that ultimately disadvantaged them, we see predatory inclusion.22 With projects that seek to create new communities of marginalized people to draw them in to risky speculative markets rife with scams and fraud, we are now seeing predatory community.

The Internet is Made of Demons

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is is not what you think it is.

Sam Kriss has written a longish review essay on Justin E.H. Smith’s The Internet is Not What You Think It Is with the title The Internet is Made of Demons. In the first part Kriss writes about how the internet is possessing us and training us,

Everything you say online is subject to an instant system of rewards. Every platform comes with metrics; you can precisely quantify how well-received your thoughts are by how many likes or shares or retweets they receive. For almost everyone, the game is difficult to resist: they end up trying to say the things that the machine will like. For all the panic over online censorship, this stuff is far more destructive. You have no free speech—not because someone might ban your account, but because there’s a vast incentive structure in place that constantly channels your speech in certain directions. And unlike overt censorship, it’s not a policy that could ever be changed, but a pure function of the connectivity of the internet itself. This might be why so much writing that comes out of the internet is so unbearably dull, cycling between outrage and mockery, begging for clicks, speaking the machine back into its own bowels.

Then Kriss makes the case that the Internet is made of demons – not in a paranoid conspiracy sort of way, but in a historical sense that ideas like the internet often involve demons,

Trithemius invented the internet in a flight of mystical fancy to cover up what he was really doing, which was inventing the internet. Demons disguise themselves as technology, technology disguises itself as demons; both end up being one and the same thing.

In the last section Kriss turns to Justin E.H. Smith’s book and reflects on how the book (unlike the preceding essay “It’s All Over”) are not what the internet expects. The internet, for Smith, likes critical essays that present the internet as a “rupture” – something like the industrial revolution, but for language – while in fact the internet in some form (like demons) has been with us all along. Kriss doesn’t agree. For him the idea of the internet might be old, but what we have now is still a transformation of an old nightmare.

If there are intimations of the internet running throughout history, it might be because it’s a nightmare that has haunted all societies. People have always been aware of the internet: once, it was the loneliness lurking around the edge of the camp, the terrible possibility of a system of signs that doesn’t link people together, but wrenches them apart instead. In the end, what I can’t get away from are the demons. Whenever people imagined the internet, demons were always there.

Why people believe Covid conspiracy theories: could folklore hold the answer?

Using Danish witchcraft folklore as a model, the researchers from UCLA and Berkeley analysed thousands of social media posts with an artificial intelligence tool and extracted the key people, things and relationships.

The Guardian has a nice story on Why people believe Covid conspiracy theories: could folklore hold the answer? This reports on research using folklore theory and artificial intelligence to understand conspiracies.

The story maps how Bill Gates connects the coronavirus with 5G for conspiracy fans. They use folklore theory to understand the way conspiracies work.

Folklore isn’t just a model for the AI. Tangherlini, whose specialism is Danish folklore, is interested in how conspiratorial witchcraft folklore took hold in the 16th and 17th centuries and what lessons it has for today.

Whereas in the past, witches were accused of using herbs to create potions that caused miscarriages, today we see stories that Gates is using coronavirus vaccinations to sterilise people. …

The research also hints at a way of breaking through conspiracy theory logic, offering a glimmer of hope as increasing numbers of people get drawn in.

The story then addresses the question of what difference the research might make. What good would a folklore map of a conspiracy theory do? The challenge of research is the more information clearly doesn’t work in a world of information overload.

The paper the story is based on is Conspiracy in the time of corona: automatic detection of emerging Covid-19 conspiracy theories in social media and the news, by Shadi Shahsavari, Pavan Holur, Tianyi Wang , Timothy R Tangherlini and Vwani Roychowdhury.

Dead By Daylight fans unhappy Hellraiser model is an NFT

Apparently Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) of game models are not going down well with fans according to a story, Dead By Daylight fans unhappy Hellraiser model is an NFT.

Even thought Behaviour isn’t selling the NFTs themselves, they are facilitating the sale of them by providing the models from the game. Gaming fans seem to view blockchain and NFTs as dubious and environmentally unsound technology. Behaviour’s response was,

We hear and understand the concerns you raised over NFTs. Absolutely zero blockchain tech exists in Dead by Daylight. Nor will it ever. Behaviour Interactive does not sell NFTs.

On a related note, Valve is banning blockchain and NFT games.

Donald Trump to launch social media platform called Truth Social

The former president, who remains banned from Facebook and Twitter, has a goal to rival those tech giants

The Guardian and other sources are covering the news that  Donald Trump to launch social media platform called Truth Social. It is typical that he calls the platform the very thing he is accused of not providing … “truth”. Trump has no shame and routinely turns whatever is believed about him, from fake news to being a loser, into an accusation against others. The king of fake news called any story he didn’t like fake news and when he lost the 2020 election he turned that upside down making belief that the election was stolen (and he therefore is not a loser) into a touchstone of Republican belief. How does this end? Do sane Republicans just stop mentioning him at some point? He can’t be disproved or disagreed with; all that can happen is that he gets cancelled. And that is why he wants us to Follow the Truth.

Trump Tweet Archive

All 50,000+ of Trump’s tweets, instantly searchable

Thanks to Kaylin I found the Trump Twitter Archive: TTA – Search. Its a really nice clean site that lets you search or filter Trump’s tweets from when he was elected to when his account was shut down on January 8th, 2021. You can also download the data if you want to try other tools.

I find reading his tweets now to be quite entertaining. Here are two back to back tweets that seems to almost contradict each other. First he boasts about the delivery of vaccines, and then talks about Covid as Fake News!

Jan 3rd 2021 – 8:14:10 AM EST: The number of cases and deaths of the China Virus is far exaggerated in the United States because of @CDCgov’s ridiculous method of determination compared to other countries, many of whom report, purposely, very inaccurately and low. “When in doubt, call it Covid.” Fake News!

Jan 3rd 2021 – 8:05:34 AM EST: The vaccines are being delivered to the states by the Federal Government far faster than they can be administered!