Disinformation

The European Commission, which announced Thursday an inquiry into Microsoft's promotion of its Teams messaging app, has fought US tech giants on fronts from tax avoidance, disinformation and hate speech to data privacy and monopolistic practices.Here is a summary of the tussles between Silicon Valley and Brussels. - Stifling competition -The European Commission on Thursday said it would investigate whether Microsoft was "abusing and defending its market position" by bundling its Teams app with its Office suite. It comes…

In May, a fake image of an explosion near the Pentagon went viral on Twitter. It was soon followed by images seeming to show explosions near the White House as well. Experts in mis- and disinformation quickly flagged that the images seemed to have been generated by artificial intelligence, but not before the stock market had started to dip.It was only the latest example of how fake content can have troubling real-world effects. The boom in generative artificial intelligence has meant that tools to create fake images and…

For three months in late 2020, nearly 7,200 US adults on Facebook and 8,800 on Instagram received a radically different experience than the services’ billions of other users. When they scrolled through their newsfeeds, Facebook and Instagram showed them the newest posts as determined by the clock, not those judged most relevant by an algorithm. The response was clear: Users served chronological feeds got bored quicker and were much more likely to decamp to rivals such as YouTube and TikTok.That result emerged from a…

Wrote Doughty, “Defendants ‘significantly encouraged’ the social-media companies to such extent that the decisions (of the companies) should be deemed to be the decisions of the government.”Doughty’s ban, which is now on hold as the White House appeals, attempts to set the bounds of acceptable conduct for government IRUs. It provides an exemption for officials to continue notifying social media companies about illegal activity or national security issues. Emma Llansó, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center…

A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump held firm this week by declining a request to delay a controversial order barring government agencies from making content moderation requests to social media companies. The Justice Department is already appealing the decision, according to court filings, and said in a statement it would seek an emergency action from the Supreme Court if its appeal is rejected.Twitter Verification is a Hot MessJudge Terry A. Doughty defended his ruling Mondayagainst critiques who claimed its…

The Biden administration is appealing a bombshell ruling from a federal judge barring government agencies from contacting social media companies to make takedown requests or recommend other content moderation. State Department officials had already halted routine meetings with Facebook in response to the July 5th ruling. Experts fear the lack of communication between the federal government and social media companies could delay responses to online disinformation campaigns ahead of upcoming elections.Twitter Verification…

That credibility gap, while small, is concerning given that the problem of AI-generated disinformation seems poised to grow significantly, says Giovanni Spitale, the researcher at the University of Zurich who led the study, which appeared in Science Advances today.  “The fact that AI-generated disinformation is not only cheaper and faster, but also more effective, gives me nightmares,” he says. He believes that if the team repeated the study with the latest large language model from OpenAI, GPT-4, the difference would…

Tech giants could face billions of dollars in fines for failing to tackle disinformation under proposed Australian laws, which a watchdog on Monday said would bring "mandatory" standards to the little-regulated sector.Under the proposed legislation, the owners of platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok and podcasting services would face penalties worth up to five percent of annual global turnover -- some of the highest proposed anywhere in the world. The Australian Communications and Media Authority, a government…

Illustration: Marko Aliaksandr (Shutterstock)How Conspiracy Theories and Disinformation Spiral Out of Control on the Internet | TechModoFake news is a complex problem and can span text, images and video.For written articles in particular, there are several ways of generating fake news. A fake news article could be produced by selectively editing facts, including people’s names, dates or statistics. An article could also be completely fabricated with made-up events or people.Fake news articles can also be machine-generated…

Twitter "chose confrontation" by exiting a voluntary EU disinformation code of practice that lays ground rules for an incoming European law on digital services, a European Union commissioner said Monday."We believe this is a mistake of Twitter. Twitter has chosen the hard way. They chose confrontation," commissioner Vera Jourova told journalists. She said Twitter's compliance with the new Digital Services Act (DSA) entering force on August 25 "will be scrutinised... vigorously and urgently". The European Commission…