The AI firm that conducted ‘state surveillance’ of your social media posts
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
They were for sure not the only people working on that. Even if they have a straight pipe from all the major providers or whatever this is just a BS tool of control like polygraphs. I was once the CTO for a legal deposition ipad app. One of the reasons I left was because the vendor they decided to switch to for transcription of video was offering this "micro-tremor analysis" that would detect probability that people were lying. To put in a legal deposition app. They did their magic with mono 28k audio files stripped from our HD videos. The attorneys and clients were SO excited. They didn't care if it was BS.
After I left it limped along for a while, but I think my leaving killed that idea and then later that project and I don't regret it.
Yes, it sounds like it's close to the (legitimate) bogeyman of government intruding on it's citizens for nefarious control reasons. But these are public posts - intentionally posted publicly to persuade others — not private communications.
We should not be unilaterally disarming and blinding ourselves to what is happening the public sphere.
If you want a self-determined life in a society with a self-determined (i.e., democratic) government, then we must always be better armed and better prepared than the bullies and authoritarians. If not, they will steal our lunch and our government every time. Awareness of what is happening is just part of being prepared to keep our democracy.
Doing that would infringe on the freedoms of a few dozen plutocrats though, so instead we get universal surveillance.
This is just adding a blackbox filtering the output of another black box.
A democratic discussion does not need "truth filters". The proposition is insane.
2014 is significant, as it is 1 year after the IRA went online in early 2013 and Cambridge Analytica was also in operation. The new techniques they unleashed haven't gone away and there are copycats all over the place.
I see no solution short of a massive education campaign for every person in society as to what the human brain flaws are in regard to favoring mythological media patterns. A history of humanity favoring nonsense and falsehoods, a map to the weak spots in the human brain. Machine thinking has been doing sorting the output of social media for a long time now on media platforms, and 'trending' has proven for a decade to be a race to the bottom of exploiting flaws in both the hardware of the human mind and our lacking education on faults in chasing false signals.
At about the same time these "Bod Dylan has died" fake click baits raged at Facebook, and somehow they stopped. It is probably also related.
This assumes universal good faith. The reality is that there's a war against actual democratic discussions, and that bad actors are currently arming themselves with AI-powered weapons which will exponentially amplify their ability to harm and ultimately destroy legitimate discourse.
To choose not to defend democratic discussion is akin to having a country without a military.
If you don’t make explicit the parameters and extent of what is allowable there will be no end to the thing. A little water boarding is always helpful too, but there must be limits. The limits must be decided on by society without being influenced (propagandized) into supporting tyranny that nullified their civil rights.
Until then, no.
Like when the entire George W Bush administration lied about Iraq, with enthusiastic amplification by the vast majority of news outlets, and an entire campaign to suppress anti-war dissent?
> Yes, it sounds like it's close to the (legitimate) bogeyman of government intruding on it's citizens for nefarious control reasons. But these are public posts - intentionally posted publicly to persuade others — not private communications.
You should look up COINTELPRO [0].
It’s also the primary vector authoritarian states use to oppress their own citizens.
And the primary way they justify this vector is by saying it’s to defend against foreign disinformation.
It is literally the bogeyman of the government, not close to. And I'm not sure why you draw the distinction between public and private speech. Public speech is the most important form of speech and the first thing to be attacked by authoritarian governments.
Declaring that only the government can decide what is safe for us to see is the most authoritarian thing I can think of. To think that because "bullies" and "authoritarians" would try and convince people in the marketplace of ideas constitutes a threat to democracy so we must expel free speech, and therefore democracy itself, in order to protect democracy is some really twisted thinking.
Once you have removed free speech you ARE the authoritarian bully. And in what sense is someone an authoritarian because they are trying to convince you using free speech? Would you consider me an authoritarian because I support free speech?