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Twitter Expands Community Notes to More Regions

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2 månader sedan

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januari 23, 2023

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Twitter Expands Display of Community Notes, Flags Coming Improvements

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Twitter continues to expand its Community Notes feature, which Twitter chief Elon Musk believes will be a key element in establishing the platform’s new ‘Trust as a Service’ approach, and see Twitter become a more critical provider of truth in news and information.

Which is a noble aim, but how that actually plays out remains to be seen.

The latest expansion sees Community Notes moving abroad, with users in more regions now able to apply to add notes to contextual notes and reference links to questionable claims in tweets.

We are now admitting contributors from the UK ????????, Ireland ????????, Australia ???????? and New Zealand ???????? — welcome to Community Notes! Want to help? Sign up here: https://t.co/FSsqNzonnz

— Community Notes (@CommunityNotes) January 20, 2023

As per the announcement, selected users in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand will now be admitted into the Community Notes program, which will greatly expand the amount of local knowledge and input feeding into the Notes system.

Twitter’s been working to build Community Notes (formerly ‘Birdwatch’) into a form of crowd-sourced fact-checking, as a means to both reduce its internal obligations in moderating content, and to empower Twitter users themselves to decide what’s acceptable and what’s not in the app.

Approved Notes contributors are able to add contextual explainers that are then appended to tweets, with all Twitter users then able to rate notes as helpful or not, thus influencing the trustworthiness of the Note creator (and their capacity to continue adding Notes).

Which is a good experiment, though whether it’s a scalable replacement for actual, human fact-checkers and moderators is another question altogether.

Elon is pushing hard to make Community Notes a thing – which makes sense given that he’s also cut thousands of moderators as part of his cost-reduction measures.

But one of the key concerns with Community Notes is that they could potentially over-simplify complex issues, with notes that may seem right, but don’t really tell the full story.

Which is a broader problem with modern web culture. If you can explain something with a simple meme, it quickly spreads as a fact, when the world’s most divisive and challenging issues are actually far more complex than a screenshot of a cowboy telling it how it is.

Take, for example, this Community Note that Elon himself retweeted.

This is correct, egg prices are up due to avian flu – but also due to increasing costs of production, as well as higher demand. But does that justify a corporation upping its prices, and raking in more profit? They do this because they can – why would they eat the price rises from suppliers if they don’t have to – but in essence, both aspects are true, egg prices are higher because of avian flu AND corporate greed.

But that type of nuance could be restricted by a more simplified Notes system, which could then see misleading claims amplified, as opponents try to dunk on each other’s tweets.

And if you then apply the same process to even bigger issues, like, say, climate change, for which there are many complex elements, what then? What about vaccine take-up – it’s possible that you could disprove one element with a simple Note, while skipping over several other influential factors or points?

Definitely, giving users reason to pause on any potentially false claims is a positive. But when you also feel a need to make qualifying statements like this:

We are going to great lengths to avoid the Wikipedia left wing editorial control problem. By the same token, Community Notes cannot be biased towards the right either. Maximizing for truth is the goal.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 22, 2023

That seems a little concerning.

Either way, Elon sees Community Notes as part of his broader mission to make Twitter the source of truth, as ruled by, and for the people, whether that’s actually true or not.

As outlined in a recent overview by The Rabbit Hole, which Musk shared:

“To succeed as a [Trust as a Service provider], New Twitter must act as a defiant force by resisting pressure from Legacy Media to stifle conversations on its platform and by empowering citizen journalism in order to displace the role of old oligarchies in trust brokering.”

Community Notes is part of the ‘citizen journalism’ push, but as with most of Elon’s statements on this front, this also vastly overrates the perceived influence of outside forces in general media coverage, which people in positions of power, like Musk, can then use to imbue distrust, and dismiss any information that they find inconvenient.

But that’s, apparently, the mission. Which, given Twitter has lost 40% of ad revenue, and is potentially on track for bankruptcy, isn’t looking great. But maybe, through the added capacity of fact-checks via Community Notes – for which Twitter is developing a more robust solution for vetting and approving contributors – that could end up lessening the impact of false claims, while saving Twitter money in the process.

But it feels risky to put so much reliance on it so quickly.

Twitter says that it will add new Community Notes contributors in batches, as it looks to grow the contributor base by 10% per week for the immediate future.

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An Overview of Generative AI [Infographic]

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3 timmar sedan

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mars 29, 2023

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An Overview of Generative AI [Infographic]

Generative AI is the latest big tech trend, with the latest variations of text and image generators now able to create original content that’s comparable to human outputs, opening up a range of new possibilities.

That’s also freaking a lot of people out, due to concerns that they could be out of the job entirely due to the sudden influx of impressive AI tools. And some, like digital artists, are already feeling the pinch – but it is worth noting that AI systems can only iterate on what’s come before, in order to provide similar content, they can’t come up with entirely original, unique, or even trustworthy material.

‘Trustworthy’ in this context relates to the accuracy of the text data such systems provide, with AI systems known to ‘hallucinate’ answers based on the various data points they can connect to your query. Essentially, you really have to know and understand the topics that you’re focusing on to produce the best results, because you can then view the outputs with a more critical eye, and ensure no mistakes or errors slip through.

In this sense, these tools work best as assistants – and in that context, it’s less about them taking your job, and more about them leveling up your capacity.

To provide more context as to what these systems are, and how they work, the team from Visual Capitalist has put together a basic overview of some of the key generative AI processes that you need to know about as we move into the next stage of the digital era.

Understanding these tools, and their many applications, will soon become a requisite for many roles – and the more you know, the better placed you’ll be.

Time to jump in – check out the fullständig infografik Nedan.

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US state to require parental consent for social media

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9 timmar sedan

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mars 29, 2023

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Sociala medier i Niger utsattes för en massiv desinformationsattack i februari, har en AFP Fact Check-utredning funnit

Social media. – © AFP Denis Charlet

Utah on Thursday became the first US state to require social media sites to get parental consent for accounts used by under-18s, placing the burden on platforms like Instagram and TikTok to verify the age of their users.

The law, which takes effect March 2024, was brought in response to fears over growing youth addiction to social media, and to security risks such as online bullying, exploitation, and collection of children’s personal data.

But it has prompted warnings from tech firms and civil liberties groups that it could curtail access to online resources for marginalized teens, and have far-reaching implications for free speech.

“We’re no longer willing to let social media companies continue to harm the mental health of our youth,” tweeted Spencer Cox, governor of the western US state, who signed two related bills at a ceremony Thursday.

The bills also require social media firms to grant parents full access to their children’s accounts, and to create a default “curfew” blocking overnight access to children’s accounts.

They set out fines for social media companies if they target users under 18 with “addictive algorithms,” and make it easier for parents to sue social media companies for financial, physical or emotional harm.

“We hope that this is just the first step in many bills that we’ll see across the nation, and hopefully taken on by the federal government,” said state representative Jordan Teuscher, who co-sponsored the bill.

Michael McKell, a Republican member of Utah’s Senate who also sponsored the bill, said it was a “bipartisan” effort, and praised President Joe Biden’s recent State of the Union address, in which he raised the issue.

Biden last month called on US lawmakers to restrict how social media companies advertise to children and collect their data, as he accused Big Tech of conducting a “for profit” experiment on the nation’s youth.

California has already introduced online safety laws including strict default privacy settings for minors, but the Utah law goes further.

Lawmakers in states such as Ohio and Connecticut are working on similar bills.

Platforms including Instagram and TikTok have introduced more controls for parents, such as messaging limits and time caps.

At Thursday’s ceremony in Utah, McKell pointed to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which he said highlighted the toll social media apps can have on young minds.

“The impact on our daughters — and I have two daughters — it was incredibly troubling,” he said.

“Thirty percent of our daughters from ninth grade to 12th grade had seriously contemplated suicide. That’s startling.”

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ChatGPT is being used to lure victims into downloading malware

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15 timmar sedan

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28 mars 2023

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EntirewebNewsBot

Hackers are trying to capitalize on the enormous popularity of ChatGPT to distribute malware, security experts have warned.

A report from cybersecurity researchers CloudSEK has detailed an elaborate scheme that includes stolen Facebook accounts, groups, and pages, malicious Facebook ads, and fake ChatGPT software.

As per the report, threat actors are using stolen Facebook accounts to distribute malware. They would log into these accounts, and use them to run malicious ads. The ads would advertise a website where the “latest version” of ChatGPT can be downloaded – for free.

Fake sites, stolen Facebook groups

For the uninitiated, ChatGPT is a language-based artificial intelligence model, a chatbot whose revolutionary technology took the world by storm.

The tool is mostly free and can be accessed via this link (öppnas i ny flik). There is no executable to be downloaded, and whoever is advertising one is a malicious actor.

Victims that take the bait and download the malware risk compromising their personally identifiable data (öppnas i ny flik) (PII), as well as payment data. The researchers also say the malware can spread across systems through removable media, and escalate privileges to remain on the compromised endpoints.

When they’re not running malicious ads, the attackers are using compromised Facebook accounts that administer different pages and groups. Admin accounts are quite valuable on the dark web, as they exponentially expand the reach of any malware campaign, and do so organically. For this campaign, the researchers discovered 13 Facebook pages/accounts with more than 500,000 followers. The oldest page was stolen in mid-February this year and has more than 23,000 followers.

“Cybercriminals are capitalizing on the popularity of ChatGPT, exploiting Facebook’s vast user base by compromising legitimate Facebook accounts to distribute malware via Facebook ads, putting users’ security at risk. Our investigation has uncovered 13 compromised pages with over 500K followers, some of which have been hijacked since February 2023. We urge users to be vigilant and aware of such malicious activities on the platform,” said Bablu Kumar, Cyber Intelligence Analyst, CloudSEK.

Through these pages and groups, the attackers seem to be distributing a video to attract and engage the audience. Furthermore, CloudSEK discovered at least 25 websites that are impersonating OpenAI’s chatbot. The majority of compromised accounts were being controlled by Vietnamese actors, they concluded.

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