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Jack Dorsey Takes the Blame for Even Building Twitter’s Moderation Tools
Twitter co-founder and ex-CEO Jack Dorsey has not had it easy the past few weeks. After being hounded on the internet by mobs of Elon Musk fans wanting his blood for what’s been presented in the so-called “Twitter Files,” Dorsey finally came out late Tuesday not to apologize for banning former President Donald Trump, but to apologize for ever even creating moderation tools in the first place.
In a blog post, Dorsey wrote “The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves.”
He also laid out three points that exemplify his social media philosophy: that social media should be kept out of any corporate or government control, that only an author should have the option to remove content they produce on a platform and that moderation is best implemented by “algorithmic choice,” which is essentially ranking content based on user preferences. It’s an idea that’s been championed by the Dorsey-fronted Bluesky social app.
Facebook Knew Instagram Was Pushing Girls to Dangerous Content: Internal Document
A previously unpublished internal document reveals Facebook, now known as Meta, knew Instagram was pushing girls to dangerous content.
In 2021, according to the document, an Instagram employee ran an internal investigation on eating disorders by opening a false account as a 13-year-old girl looking for diet tips. She was led to graphic content and recommendations to follow accounts titled “skinny binge” and “apple core anorexic.”
Other internal memos show Facebook employees raising concerns about company research that revealed Instagram made 1-in-3 teen girls feel worse about their bodies, and that teens who used the app felt higher rates of anxiety and depression.
Attorney Matt Bergman started the Social Media Victims Law Center after reading the so-called “Facebook Papers,” disclosed by whistleblower Frances Haugen last year. He’s now working with more than 1,200 families who are pursuing lawsuits against social media companies. Next year, Bergman and his team will start the discovery process for the consolidated federal cases against Meta and other companies in multimillion-dollar lawsuits that he says are more about changing policy than financial compensation.
Is Social-Media Censorship a Crime?
The Wall Street Journal reported:
Amid growing revelations about government involvement in social-media censorship, it’s no longer enough to talk simply about tech censorship. The problem should be understood as gov-tech censorship. The Biden White House has threatened tech companies and federal agencies have pressed them to censor disfavored opinions and users. So it’s time to ask about accountability.
Will there be legal consequences for government officials, for the companies, or for their personnel who cooperate in the gov-tech censorship of dissent on COVID-19, election irregularities or other matters? Cooperation between government officials and private parties to suppress speech could be considered a criminal conspiracy to violate civil rights. The current administration won’t entertain such a theory, but a future one might.
Such accountability is constitutionally desirable — not for reasons of retribution but because without accountability, censorship will persist. The platforms probably will reassure their directors, officers and censorship review board members that there’s little to worry about. That may turn out to be correct. Section 241 is sufficiently broad that prosecutors should hesitate to pursue it in marginal cases.
But there’s nothing marginal about the most massive system of censorship in the nation’s history. If the gov-tech partnership to suppress speech isn’t a conspiracy to interfere in the enjoyment of the freedom of speech, what is?
U.S. Lawmakers Introduce Bill to Ban TikTok Nationwide
As more and more states across the country pile on to ban TikTok from state-owned devices, Republican Senator Marco Rubio from Florida along with Republican Representative Mike Gallagher from Wisconsin and Democrat Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi from Illinois have taken the move to the next level by proposing a national ban of the platform.
The bill, titled “Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act” or, more succinctly, the ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act. If passed, the Act would then go to the President’s desk and if signed, would “block and prohibit all transactions in all property and interests in property of a social media company,” 30 days after passage.
The ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act defines the social media company of interest as those that are either headquartered in, use algorithms controlled by, or are influenced by a “country of concern,” while later specifying that the companies of interest are TikTok parent company ByteDance and any of its subsidiaries.
“The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok. This isn’t about creative videos — this is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day,” Senator Rubio stated in a press release on his website. Representative Gallagher, meanwhile, referred to the platform as “digital fentanyl that’s addicting Americans, collecting troves of their data, and censoring their news” in a subsequent statement.
Dr. Fauci Says He Ignores Elon Musk and ‘Cesspool’ Twitter After ‘Bizarre’ Allegations
Elon who? Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday said he doesn’t know or care what billionaire Elon Musk has said about him and derided his Twitter as a “cesspool of misinformation.”
“[Musk] has a big megaphone, but [Twitter] has really gone berserk lately. It’s kind of become almost a cesspool of misinformation,” Fauci said in an interview with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC.
“I don’t have a Twitter account. I don’t tweet and I don’t listen to tweets,” the Brooklyn-bred pandemic doctor said. “So whatever he said, I’m not paying attention to it.”
Musk has in recent days called for Fauci, who is leaving government after six decades of public health service, to be charged with unspecified crimes related to his management of the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘Out of Control’: Dozens of Telehealth Startups Sent Sensitive Health Information to Big Tech Companies
Open the website of Workit Health, and the path to treatment starts with a simple intake form: Are you in danger of harming yourself or others? If not, what’s your current opioid and alcohol use? How much methadone do you use?
Within minutes, patients looking for online treatment for opioid use and other addictions can complete the assessment and book a video visit with a provider licensed to prescribe suboxone and other drugs. But what patients probably don’t know is that Workit was sending their delicate, even intimate, answers about drug use and self-harm to Facebook.
A joint investigation by STAT and The Markup of 50 direct-to-consumer telehealth companies like Workit found that quick, online access to medications often comes with a hidden cost for patients: Virtual care websites were leaking sensitive medical information they collect to the world’s largest advertising platforms.
On 13 of the 50 websites, STAT and The Markup documented at least one tracker — from Meta, Google, TikTok, Bing, Snap, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest — that collected patients’ answers to medical intake questions. Trackers on 25 sites, including those run by industry leaders Hims & Hers, Ro, and Thirty Madison, told at least one big tech platform that the user had added an item like a prescription medication to their cart, or checked out with a subscription for a treatment plan.
YouTube Will Send a Notification to Users if Their Comment Is Abusive
Toxic and hateful comments on YouTube have been a constant headache for the company, creators and users. The company has previously attempted to curtail this by introducing features such as showing an alert to individuals at the time of posting so that they could be more considerate. Now, the streaming service is introducing a new feature that will more aggressively nudge such individuals of their abusive comments and take broader actions.
YouTube says it will send a notification to people whose abusive comments have been removed for violating the platform’s rules. If despite receiving the notification a user continues to post abusive comments, the service will ban them from posting any more comments for 24 hours. The company said it tested the feature before the rollout today and found that notifications and timeouts proved materially successful.
At the moment, hateful comment detection is available only for English-language comments, but the streaming service aims to include more languages in the future. Notably, the pre-posting warning is available for English and Spanish.
This Stalkerware Tracked Thousands of Android and iPhones
One of the most widely-used stalkerware apps is supposedly “riddled” with security flaws, and risks exposing its victim’s data to third parties, experts have warned.
Xnspy allows users to monitor the activities of their spouse, partner, or child after they covertly install it on their victim’s device, it then runs in the background secretly while sending data back to the installer.
An investigation by TechCrunch found that in addition to the already questionable more and legal issues that a tool like Xnspy presents, its underlying technology makes users extremely vulnerable to data security issues like identity theft.
According to the research, this app primarily targeted Android users — although it also reported that thousands of iPhones were compromised.
Police Detain 4 in Guangzhou After COVID Protests
Police in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou have detained at least four people for more than a week after they attended protests against COVID-19 restrictions in late November, according to activists, family members and friends of the detained.
While many who attended protests in cities across China last month were released after being held for 24 hours — the legal limit on detention before police must file charges — the four Guangzhou residents as of Wednesday have been held for a week and a half.
The detentions came a week after a burst of nationwide protests on the last weekend in November where people demanded freedom from China’s strict pandemic restrictions across several cities in a rare display of direct defiance against the central government. Protesters took to the streets despite great personal risk, knowing that surveillance cameras were pervasive and their social media would be tracked by police.
Now, what the protesters feared — that police would arrest them after the initial wave of action had passed — is happening in Guangzhou.
