How disinformation 'sabotages America'; WBUR, March 21, 2024

Jonathan Chang 

Meghna Chakrabarti

, WBUR; How disinformation 'sabotages America'

"CHAKRABARTI: By the way, I was really taken with the dedication that you put in the front of the book, and I just want to read it here for a second.

You said, "To all of the brave American heroes who have given their lives to defend democracy from fascism, a trip to Normandy where more than 9,000 American service members are buried, left me in awe of their courage and selflessness. We owe them and other American patriots our vigilance so that their sacrifices will not have been in vain."

Why are you dedicating the book to them?

McQUADE: Yeah, I had the opportunity to visit Normandy a couple of years ago, and anybody who's ever been there, I know, must feel that moving sense of awe to see all of those white crosses and stars of David representing the 9,000 young people who gave their lives for our democracy, and they're all, young, 19, 20 years old.

And then you think about the crass, lying power grabs that we're seeing today. It's really disgusting. And it is an insult to people who sacrifice their lives for democracy. To simply lie and try to steal the power of the people through lies to advance a party's power or an individual's power...

CHAKRABARTI: We're rounding towards the last few minutes of the conversation, Barbara. I would love to hear more about, given your experience inside government, within the law and the research that you did for this book, you have a couple of chapters of what can we do about it? So what are a couple of your other proposed solutions that we haven't already potentially touched on in this show?

McQUADE: Yeah. So I think there are a few things that can be done. One is I think we need some meaningful regulation of social media. It's been an incredible explosion of technology to have social media, especially those based in the United States, these tech companies, but they've allowed, they've been allowed to grow unregulated since the 1990s.

And now that we have seen the harms of it, I think in retrospect, we ought to have some controls. So one of them is to control these algorithms. The idea that they have computer programs, computer code. This is not speech. This is a process. And so I think without running afoul of the first amendment, we could regulate the processes that social media companies are allowed to use.

Some of these that manipulate us, that push us toward this content designed to engender outrage, I think, is certainly something that we could prohibit, or at least require disclosure, so people know when they are being manipulated."

A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture; The New York Times, March 29, 2024

Erik Hoel, The New York Times ; A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture

"To deal with this corporate refusal to act we need the equivalent of a Clean Air Act: a Clean Internet Act. Perhaps the simplest solution would be to legislatively force advanced watermarking intrinsic to generated outputs, like patterns not easily removable. Just as the 20th century required extensive interventions to protect the shared environment, the 21st century is going to require extensive interventions to protect a different, but equally critical, common resource, one we haven’t noticed up until now since it was never under threat: our shared human culture."

‘Social media is like driving with no speed limits’: the US surgeon general fighting for youngsters’ happiness; The Guardian, March 19, 2024

Robert Booth, The Guardian; ‘Social media is like driving with no speed limits’: the US surgeon general fighting for youngsters’ happiness

"Last year, Murthy, who was first appointed to his role by Barack Obama and again by Joe Biden, issued a formal US-wide warning that social media presented “a profound risk of harm” to the mental health and wellbeing of children and adolescents. “We do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe” for them to use, it said.

“I’m still waiting for companies to show us data that tells us that their platforms are actually safe,” he added.

He compared tech companies to 20th-century car giants producing vehicles without seatbelts and airbags until legislation mandated it.

“What’s happening in social media is the equivalent of having children in cars that have no safety features and driving on roads with no speed limits,” he said. “No traffic lights and no rules whatsoever. And we’re telling them: ‘you know what, do your best – figure out how to manage it.’ It is insane if you think about it.”"

Stop talking about AI ethics. It’s time to talk about power.; MIT Technology Review, April 23, 2021

 Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review;

• archive page

Stop talking about AI ethics. It’s time to talk about power.

"If there’s been a real trap in the tech sector for the last decade, it’s that the theory of change has always centered engineering. It’s always been, “If there’s a problem, there’s a tech fix for it.” And only recently are we starting to see that broaden out to “Oh, well, if there’s a problem, then regulation can fix it. Policymakers have a role.”

But I think we need to broaden that out even further. We have to say also: Where are the civil society groups, where are the activists, where are the advocates who are addressing issues of climate justice, labor rights, data protection? How do we include them in these discussions? How do we include affected communities?

In other words, how do we make this a far deeper democratic conversation around how these systems are already influencing the lives of billions of people in primarily unaccountable ways that live outside of regulation and democratic oversight?

In that sense, this book is trying to de-center tech and starting to ask bigger questions around: What sort of world do we want to live in?""

Real-Time Surveillance Will Test the British Tolerance for Cameras; The New York Times, September 15, 2019

Adam Satariano, The New York Times; Real-Time Surveillance Will Test the British Tolerance for Cameras

Facial recognition technology is drawing scrutiny in a country more accustomed to surveillance than any other Western democracy. 

"“Technology is driving forward, and legislation and regulation follows ever so slowly behind,” said Tony Porter, Britain’s surveillance camera commissioner, who oversees compliance with the country’s surveillance camera code of practice. “It would be wrong for me to suggest the balance is right.”

Britain’s experience mirrors debates about the technology in the United States and elsewhere in Europe. Critics say the technology is an intrusion of privacy, akin to constant identification checks of an unsuspecting public, and has questionable accuracy, particularly at identifying people who aren’t white men."