Aleksandra Atanasova (Reset.Tech), Amaury Lesplingart (CheckFirst), Francesco Poldi (CheckFirst), Guillaume Kuster (CheckFirst) Published in June 2024 under the CC BY-SA licence. “This report exposes a large-scale, cross-country, multi-platform disinformation campaign designed to spread pro-Russian propaganda in the West, with clear indicators of foreign interference and information manipulation (FIMI). The narratives promoted by the actors are… Continue Reading
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Category Archives: Social Media
Bluesky and Mastodon users can now talk to each other with Bridgy Fed
TechCrunch: “An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved. Now, users on decentralized apps like Mastodon, powered by the ActivityPub protocol, and those powered by Bluesky’s AT Protocol, can easily follow people on other networks, see their… Continue Reading
OpenAI Is Just Facebook Now
The Atlantic [unpaywalled] “Facing one controversy after the next, the artificial-intelligence company enters a new phase. OpenAI appears to be in the midst of a months-long revolt from within. The latest flash point came yesterday, when a group of 11 current and former employees—plus two from other firms—issued a public letter declaring that leading AI… Continue Reading
Identifying and characterizing superspreaders of low-credibility content on Twitter
DeVerna MR, Aiyappa R, Pacheco D, Bryden J, Menczer F (2024) Identifying and characterizing superspreaders of low-credibility content on Twitter. PLoS ONE 19(5): e0302201. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302201: “The world’s digital information ecosystem continues to struggle with the spread of misinformation. Prior work has suggested that users who consistently disseminate a disproportionate amount of low-credibility content—so-called superspreaders—are at… Continue Reading
The New Generation of Online Culture Curators
The New Yorker [unpaywalled]: “In a digital landscape overrun by algorithms and A.I., we need human guides to help us decide what’s worth paying attention. The current Internet landscape sometimes feels like the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker”: directionless, inexplicable, bound to change in confusing ways. Our social-media feeds don’t offer much except the… Continue Reading
If Google Kills News Media, Who Will Feed the AI Beast?
Vanity Fair [unpaywalled] – “Summarization tools from OpenAI and Google offer a CliffsNotes version of journalism that may further dumb down public discourse and deliver a brutal blow to an already battered media business…we’re on the cusp of a similar phenomenon with the new wave of AI summarization tools being launched by OpenAI, Google, and… Continue Reading
OpenAI Insiders Warn of a ‘Reckless’ Race for Dominance
Th New York Times: “A group of OpenAI insiders is blowing the whistle on what they say is a culture of recklessness and secrecy at the San Francisco artificial intelligence company, which is racing to build the most powerful A.I. systems ever created. The group, which includes nine current and former OpenAI employees, has rallied… Continue Reading
X tweaks rules to formally allow adult content
TechCrunch: “The internet has been home to all kinds of content for a long time, so it was no surprise to anyone when people started tweeting porn at each other. X (formerly Twitter) has long had many active NSFW (not safe for work) communities, and though the social network unofficially allowed people to post adult… Continue Reading
Supersharers of fake news on Twitter
Science. 30 May 2024. Vol 384, Issue 6699. pp. 979-982. DOI: 10.1126/science.adl4435 – “Most fake news on Twitter (now X) is spread by an extremely small population called supersharers. They flood the platform and unequally distort political debates, but a clear demographic portrait of these users was not available. Baribi-Bartov et al. identified a meaningful… Continue Reading
NIST Reports First Results From Age Estimation Software Evaluation
Software algorithms that estimate a person’s age from a photo offer a potential way to control access to age-restricted activities without compromising privacy. NIST’s new report, its first on the topic in a decade, evaluates the capabilities of six algorithms, finding none that clearly outperforms the others. Moving forward, the agency plans to update its… Continue Reading
You Think You Know How Misinformation Spreads?
Wired [unpaywalled]- How Advertising Broke the World. “The internet is a cesspool of misinformation, and the biggest blue-chip brands and their ad agencies are the ones funding it—by stuffing money into a Rube Goldberg machine called programmatic advertising…You Are the Product Being Sold. Spending on programmatic advertising globally is estimated to reach more than $300… Continue Reading
Instagram’s Uneasy Rise as a News Site
The New York Times [unpaywalled]: Instagram’s Uneasy Rise as a News Site – In this year’s presidential election, more people are turning to Instagram for news, even as the platform tries de-emphasizing “political content.” Continue Reading
