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Mark Zuckerberg’s Era of Deception: The Battle for Truth on Social Media | Chris Stokel Walker

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SSocial media has always served as an entertainment mirror for society as a whole. The algorithms and amplification of our always-on online presence have highlighted the worst parts of our lives while obscuring the best parts. This is part of why we are so polarized today, with two tribes screaming at each other on social media and plunging into a gaping chasm of despair.

This is what makes a statement released by one of the tech giants this week so alarming. Let those who enter give up hope. With less than two weeks until Donald Trump returns to the White House for the second runoff of the US presidential election, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads, is making major changes to its content moderation. added. In doing so, it appears consistent with the president-elect's views.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a bizarre video message posted to his Facebook page on Tuesday that the platform would be eliminating fact checkers. Instead of them? mob rules.

Zuckerberg said the platform: Over 3 billion people The company, which around the world logs on to its app every day, plans to adopt an Elon Musk-style community note format to police what is and isn't acceptable speech on its platform. . Starting in the United States, the company plans to dramatically shift the Overton window to those who can shout it loudest.

Meta's CEO largely acknowledged that the move was politically motivated. “It's time to go back to our roots around freedom of expression,” he said, adding that “restrictions on topics like immigration and gender… […] It deviates from mainstream discourse. ” He acknowledged past “censorship mistakes,” by which he likely meant the past four years of suppressing political speech during the Democratic president's tenure, and added that he “worked with President Trump to ensure that U.S. companies We will prevent foreign governments from attacking the United States.” Please check more. ”

The most dog-whistle comment was that Meta's remaining trust and safety and content moderation teams would be relocated from liberal California, and that its U.S. content moderation arm would now be based in solidly Republican Texas. It was a throwaway line. The only thing missing from the video was Zuckerberg wearing a MAGA hat and carrying a shotgun.

Let me be clear: all businessmen make smart decisions based on political circumstances. And few storms are as violent as Hurricane Trump as it approaches the United States. But few people's decisions are as important as Mark Zuckerberg's.

Over the past 21 years, Meta CEO has found himself a central figure in society. Initially, he oversaw a website used by college students. Now billions of people from all walks of life use it. In the early 2000s, the eccentric pursuit of online fun was nowde facto public town squareIn the words of Elon Musk. Where the meta goes, the world follows, online and offline. And Meta just decided to do a dramatic handbrake right turn.

Please don&#39t believe it. Trust the watchdog. “Today’s Meta announcement is a retreat from a healthy and safe approach to content moderation.” The Real Facebook Oversight Committeesaid in a statement that he is an independent person who sees himself as the arbiter of Meta&#39s movements.

They say that because if there&#39s one thing we&#39ve learned from social media polarization over the past decade, it&#39s that the angriest person wins the argument. Anger and lies can spread on social media, and are only partially contained by the platforms&#39 ability to intervene if things get out of hand. (Recall that exactly four years ago, Meta suspended Donald Trump from Facebook and Instagram for two years for inciting the violence that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.)


Social networks have always struggled with controlling speech on their platforms. Regardless of the outcome of the debate, what they are sure to do is annoy 50% of the population. These platforms are chronically underinvested in growing their businesses at all costs. Platforms have long argued that effective moderation is a problem of scale, and this is the problem they have created by pursuing scale at all costs.

To be sure, policing online speech is difficult, and the level of content moderation that companies like Meta are trying to operate at doesn&#39t work. But abandoning it completely in favor of community notes is not the answer. Suggesting that it is a rational, evidence-based decision masks the reality. It’s a politically expedient move for someone who this week supported the resignation of self-proclaimed “radical” centrist Nick Clegg as head of global policy. A person who leans toward the Republican Party. He appointed Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close Trump ally, to Meta&#39s board of directors.

In many ways, you can&#39t blame Zuckerberg for bending the knee to Donald Trump. The problem is that his decisions have a huge impact.

This is an extinction event for the idea of ​​objective truth on social media. The creature was already on life support, but one of the reasons it&#39s hanging on is that Meta has decided to fund an independent fact-checking organization to try to keep some elements of social media afloat. This is because he was ambitious. Authenticity and freedom from political bias. Night is day. The top is the bottom. Meta is X. Mark Zuckerberg is Elon Musk. Live out four tumultuous, bitter and unfounded years online.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Is Your Data Safe from AI Giants? Not unless you opt out | Chris Stokel Walker

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IImagine someone driving a high-end sports car to a pub. £1.5 million Koenigsegg Regerapark and saunter out of your car to pick one at random. They come to the pub where you’re drinking, start walking around the patrons, slip their hands into their visible pockets, and smile at you as they pull out your wallet and empty it of cash and cards.

Not-so-sophisticated pickpockets will stop if you ask out loud, “What the hell are you doing?” “We apologize for the inconvenience,” says Suri. “It’s an opt-out system, dude.”

It sounds ridiculous. But this appears to be the approach the government is pursuing to appease AI companies. A consultation meeting will be held soon, Financial Times coverageThis will allow AI companies to scrape content from individuals and organizations unless they explicitly opt out of having their data used.

The AI revolution is both rapid and comprehensive. Even if you’re not one of them, 200 million people If you log on to ChatGPT every week or dabble in generative AI competitors like Claude or Gemini, you’ve undoubtedly interacted with an AI system, knowingly or not. But to keep the AI fire from burning out, we need two constantly replenishing sources. One is energy. This is why AI companies are getting into the nuclear power plant acquisition business. And the other thing is data.

Data is essential to AI systems because it helps them recreate how we interact. If the AI has any “knowledge”, which is highly disputed given that it is actually a fancy pattern matching machine, it comes from the data used to train it. .

In some studies, large-scale language models such as ChatGPT Training data is missing By 2026, that appetite will be huge. But without that data, the AI revolution could stall. Tech companies know this, which is why they license content from left, right, and center. But it has created friction, and an unofficial mantra has continued in the sector over the past decade.move fast and break things” causes no friction.

This is why they are already trying to steer us towards an opt-out approach to copyright, rather than an opt-in regime, where everything we type, post and share is locked in until we say no. It is destined to become AI training data by default. Companies must ask us to use their data. We can already see how companies are nudging us towards this reality. This week, X began notifying users of changes to its terms of service that will allow all posts to be used for the following purposes: train grokElon Musk’s AI model designed to compete with ChatGPT. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, then made similar changes, resulting in the widespread urban legend of “Goodbye Meta AI,” which purportedly invalidates legal agreements.

It’s clear why AI companies want an opt-out system. If you ask most people if they want to use something in the books they write, the music they produce, or the posts and photos they share on social networks to train an AI, they’ll probably say no. And the gears of the AI revolution will turn off. Why the government would want to enable such a change to the concept of copyright ownership that has existed to date. over 300 yearsis stipulated by law. 100 or moreit’s not so obvious. But like many things, it seems to come down to money.

The government faces lobbying from big tech companies suggesting this is a requirement for the country to be considered as a place to invest in AI innovation and share the spoils. A lobbying document prepared by Google suggests support for its approach to an opt-out copyright regime.guarantee uk In the future, it could become a competitive arena for developing and training AI models. ”So the government’s discussion of how to frame the issue, with opt-out options already on the table as a countermeasure, is a major victory for big tech lobbyists.

With so much money flowing into the tech industry and high levels of investment going into AI projects, Keir Starmer understandably doesn’t want to miss out on the potential benefits. It would be remiss of the Government not to consider how to appease the tech companies developing world-changing technology and help turn the UK into an AI powerhouse.

But this is not the answer. To be clear, the copyright system in question in the UK means that companies effectively own every post we make, every book we write, every book we create. This means it will be possible to add nicknames to songs and to our data without being penalized. That requires us to sign up to every individual service and say, “No, we don’t want you to chop up our data and spit out a poor composite image of us.” The number can number in the hundreds, from large technology companies to small research institutes.

Lest we forget, OpenAI – now Over $150 billion – The company plans to abandon its original nonprofit principles and become a for-profit company. Rather than relying on the charity of the general public, we have enough funds in our coffers to pay for our training data. Surely such companies can afford to line their pockets, not ours. So please let go.

Source: www.theguardian.com