Executives from four of the biggest social media companies testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee Wednesday, defending their platforms and their respective safety, privacy and moderation failures in recent years. [...] Source: Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter dodge questions on social media and national security | TechCrunch
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by CT Jones
New Report Claims YouTube Is Cashing in on Misogyny, Racism, and Targeted Harassment | Rolling Stone
On YouTube, engagement is king. The platform, which thrives on its dual status as both a social media network and news space, pays creators handsomely for making videos that get large amounts of views and interactions from any given audience. To keep the worst out, the sheer influx of content is moderated with a series of community guidelines that are intended to “make YouTube a safer community” while still giving creators freedom, according to the site. [...] Source: New Report Claims YouTube Is Cashing in on Misogyny, Racism, and Targeted Harassment – Rolling Stone
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by Anna Merlan
Peter Thiel’s Investment Firm Is Backing a Menstrual Cycle-Focused ‘Femtech’ Company
On September 1st, Evie Magazine—which strives to be the conservative answer to Cosmo, and which promotes COVID denialism and vaccine misinformation, soft-focus transphobia, and a weird obsession with organ meats—announced a new venture: 28, a “femtech” company offering workouts and nutritional tips based on users’ menstrual cycles, and which requires those users to enter information about the first day of their last period. The week prior, TechCrunch announced the new venture’s biggest funder: the investment firm Thiel Capital, which led the latest $3.2 million funding round, and whose founder Peter Thiel has a variety of other interests. (Those include, of late, funding the MAGA movement to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.) [...] Source: Peter Thiel’s Investment Firm Is Backing a Menstrual Cycle-Focused ‘Femtech’ Company
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by Patrick Whittle
Internet service providers drop challenge of privacy law | AP News
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — One of the strictest internet privacy laws in the United States has withstood a legal challenge, as a group of telecommunication providers has dropped its bid to overturn the Maine standard. Maine created one of the toughest rules in the nation for internet service providers in 2020 when it began enforcing an “opt-in” web privacy standard. The law stops the service providers from using, disclosing, selling or providing access to customers’ personal information without permission. Industry associations swiftly sued with a claim that the new law violated their First Amendment rights. A federal judge rejected that challenge, but legal wrangling continued. [...] Source: Internet service providers drop challenge of privacy law | AP News
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by Darryl Campbell
The Humiliating History of the TSA | The Verge
People cry at airports all the time. So when Jai Cooper heard sobbing from the back of the security line, it didn’t really faze her. As an officer of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), she had gotten used to the strange behavior of passengers. Her job was to check people’s travel documents, not their emotional well-being. But this particular group of tearful passengers presented her with a problem. One of them was in a wheelchair, bent over with her head between her knees, completely unresponsive. “Is she okay? Can she sit up?” Cooper asked, taking their boarding passes and IDs to check. “I need to see her face to identify her.” [...] Source: The Humiliating History of the TSA
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by J. Khadijah Abdurahman
Birthing Predictions of Premature Death | Logic
Child welfare agencies are actually in the family policing business. And just as with other forms of police, their analog violence is powered by digital systems. When I was giving birth to my oldest son, the attending told me it would feel like an elephant was stepping on my chest. They made the C-section incision right below my belly. With the high dose of epidural, my whole body shook like I was having a seizure. Then, a few minutes later, it was over, relieved of ten months of pregnancy and the clinical intrusions that left my body feeling like it no longer belonged to me. [...] Source: Birthing Predictions of Premature Death
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by Wilfred Chan
The AI startup erasing call center worker accents: is it fighting bias – or perpetuating it? | The Guardian
“Hi, good morning. I’m calling in from Bangalore, India.” I’m talking on speakerphone to a man with an obvious Indian accent. He pauses. “Now I have enabled the accent translation,” he says. It’s the same person, but he sounds completely different: loud and slightly nasal, impossible to distinguish from the accents of my friends in Brooklyn. Only after he had spoken a few more sentences did I notice a hint of the software changing his voice: it rendered the word “technology” with an unnatural cadence and stress on the wrong syllable. Still, it was hard not to be impressed – and disturbed. [...] Source: The AI startup erasing call center worker accents: is it fighting bias – or perpetuating it? | Technology | The Guardian
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by Khari Johnson
How to Stop Robots From Becoming Racist | WIRED
In 2017, Holliday contributed to a RAND report warning that resolving bias in machine learning requires hiring diverse teams and cannot be fixed through technical means alone. In 2020, he helped found the nonprofit Black in Robotics, which works to widen the presence of Black people and other minorities in the industry. He thinks two principles from an algorithmic bill of rights he proposed at the time could reduce the risk of deploying biased robots. One is requiring disclosures that inform people when an algorithm is going to make a high stakes decision affecting them; the other is giving people the right to review or dispute such decisions. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is currently developing an AI Bill of Rights. [...] Source: How to Stop Robots From Becoming Racist | WIRED
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by Shana Lynch
AI Book Recs: Add These to Your Reading List
This summer we asked our HAI community across social media channels what books on artificial intelligence they’d recommend. Here are some books to nab the next time you visit your local bookseller, from general interest to deep dives for practitioners and a few from the fiction aisles. [...] Source: AI Book Recs: Add These to Your Reading List
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by Francesca Tripodi
Google Search Is Quietly Damaging Democracy | WIRED
Google’s aesthetic has always been rooted in a clean appearance—a homepage free of advertising and pop-up clutter, adorned only with a signature “doodle” decorating its name. Part of why many users love Google is its sleek designs and ability to return remarkably accurate results. Yet the simplicity of Google’s homepage is deceptively static. Over time, the way that the corporation returns information has shifted ever so slightly. These incremental changes go largely unnoticed by the millions of users who rely on the search engine daily, but it has fundamentally changed the information seeking processes—and not necessarily for the better. [...] Source: Google Search Is Quietly Damaging Democracy | WIRED