The Center for Humane Technology is a world-class team of former tech insiders and CEOs who are advancing thoughtful solutions to change the culture, business incentives, design techniques, and organizational structures driving how technology hijacks our brains. Source: Center for Humane Technology
Had this announcement in my notifications today: Facebook intends to stop showing me content that I actually want to see. You can turn this off but it requires manual intervention to regain control over what you want to see, rather than what Facebook thinks you want to see. First, when Facebook decides what you see, Facebook is acting as an editorial director. Second, when Facebook decides what you see, Facebook is potentially promoting propaganda. It does not matter that this…
Mexico said to be early adopter of computational propaganda and other social media propaganda techniques: The country’s high level of internet access and history of corruption make it a frequent testbed for digital manipulation techniques often later seen elsewhere. Source: To See The Future Of Social Media Manipulation In Politics, Look To Me When your hypothesis is that computational propaganda is a Russia-specific thing, its awkward to discover its widespread use in social media activities in Mexico since 2012. Computational…
The threat of fake news is about to get immeasurably worse. Start-ups and internet users are discovering ways to quickly create realistic video using artificial intelligence, which could make it hard to know what’s fact and what’s fiction. Source: Fake videos are on the rise. As they become more realistic, seeing shouldn’t always be believing We are no where close to peak propaganda. In the near future, a smart phone app will digitally manipulate real people’s faces into fake video…
Two computer science students created a Google Chrome extension that when clicked tells you if a Twitter user appears to be a bot or not. They claim it has 93.5% accuracy[1] (but see the footnote for a hint at some of the problems in how they came to that conclusion). It uses “machine learning” technology to attempt to identify Twitter accounts that may be automated “propaganda” accounts. Per the article, their classifier was trained using Tweets identified as left or…