“Newly released undercover video footage from Project Veritas shows current and former Twitter employees bragging about their ability to censor people on the platform whose political opinions they don’t like.”
Read more: https://thefederalist.com/2018/01/11/twitter-employees-brag-about-shadow-banning-users-video/
“Zuckerberg outlined two areas of technology that he wanted to research in 2018: encryption and cryptocurrencies. He said both technologies led to decentralised power, which Zuckerberg saw as a positive move. Zuckerberg wasn’t explicit in his post about Facebook’s plans regarding cryptocurrencies. He didn’t say the company would add bitcoin as a payment option, for example. But it shows that one of the world’s most powerful companies is looking closely at the technology.”
“A German satirical magazine’s Twitter account was blocked after it parodied anti-Muslim comments, the publication said on Wednesday, in what the national journalists association said showed the downside of a new law against online hate speech. Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms are scrambling to adapt to the law, and its implementation is being closely watched after warnings that the threat of fines could prompt websites to block more content than necessary.”
“As is always true of censorship, there is one, and only one, principle driving all of this: power. Facebook will submit to and obey the censorship demands of governments and officials who actually wield power over it, while ignoring those who do not. That’s why declared enemies of the U.S. and Israeli governments are vulnerable to censorship measures by Facebook, whereas U.S and Israeli officials (and their most tyrannical and repressive allies) are not.”
“Police in the US state of Delaware are poised to deploy ‘smart’ cameras in cruisers to help authorities detect a vehicle carrying a fugitive, missing child or straying senior. The program is part of a growing trend to use vision-based AI to thwart crime and improve public safety, a trend which has stirred concerns among privacy and civil liberties activists who fear the technology could lead to secret ‘profiling’ and misuse of data.”
Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/privacy-fears-over-artificial-intelligence-crimestopper-015326163.html
“Almost half of millennials supported restricting freedom of speech on social media, according to a recent survey. Congressional threats have probably already done long-term damage to corporate spines. It would be naive to expect Facebook, Twitter, or other social media companies to take heroic stands in favor of free speech. But it would be even more naive to expect anything good to result from permitting politicians to decimate freedom in the name of democracy.”
“Facebook plans to use these people — and their ability to receive government information about potential threats — to search more proactively for questionable social media campaigns ahead of elections, according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is sensitive. A Facebook spokesman declined to comment. Job candidates like this are often former government and intelligence officials or contractors.”
“Government institutions are already blindly following the direction the algorithms give. A report by ProPublica found that an algorithmic system for criminal sentencing was biased against black people—not by understanding the color of their skin but by using flawed data correlated with race. Teachers in Texas recently won a case where their job performance was being evaluated by an algorithm—a circuit court found that the unexplainable software violated the teachers’ 14th amendment rights to due process.”
“Facebook has apologized after a Palestinian man was arrested by Israeli police for a post saying ‘good morning’ that its automatic-translation service erroneously translated as ‘attack them’ in Hebrew and ‘hurt them’ in English.”
“‘A lot of people aren’t thinking hard about the world they are asking [Silicon Valley] to build,’ Stamos wrote. ‘When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.'”