AI voice clones mimic politicians and celebrities, reshaping reality; The Washington Post, October 13, 2023

Pranshu Verma

 and 

Will Oremus

, The Washington Post; AI voice clones mimic politicians and celebrities, reshaping reality

"Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have made it easy to generate believable audio, allowing anyone from foreign actors to music fans to copy somebody’s voice — leading to a flood of faked content on the web, sewing [sic] discord, confusion and anger.

Last week, the actor Tom Hanks warned his social media followers that bad actors used his voice to falsely imitate him hawking dental plans. Over the summer, TikTok accounts used AI narrators to display fake news reports that erroneously linked former president Barack Obama to the death of his personal chef.

On Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators announced a draft bill, called the No Fakes Act, that would penalize people for producing or distributing an AI-generated replica of someone in an audiovisual or voice recording without their consent...

Social media companies also find it difficult to moderate AI-generated audio because human fact-checkers often have trouble spotting fakes. Meanwhile, few software companies have guardrails to prevent illicit use."

The Most Popular J&J Vaccine Story On Facebook? A Conspiracy Theorist Posted It; NPR, April 15, 2021

Miles Parks, NPR ; The Most Popular J&J Vaccine Story On Facebook? A Conspiracy Theorist Posted It

""This is what I would call the perfect storm for misinformation," said Jennifer Granston at Zignal Labs, a media intelligence platform...

In most cases, the social media companies say they can't do much to respond in cases such as this, since people largely are sharing articles based on factual information, even if the commentary and subtext around the posting is meant to further false ideas.

"It's a really insidious problem," said Deen Freelon, a communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in an interview with NPR last month. "The social media companies have taken a hard line against disinformation; they have not taken a similarly hard line against fallacies."

Many anti-vaccine activists have adopted this tactic as a way of getting around social media networks' policies designed to halt the spread of false information....

Often, misinformation peddlers with a specific agenda will fill in knowledge gaps with false information, knowing people are desperate for any information at all."

 

Gatekeeping Is Not The Same As Censorship; Forbes, August 22, 2019

Kalev Leetaru, Forbes; Gatekeeping Is Not The Same As Censorship

"With each new effort by social media companies to reign in the deluge of digital falsehoods, accusations pour forth that such efforts represent censorship. In reality, the two represent very different concepts, with censorship referring to the repression of ideas in alignment to political, social or moral views, while gatekeeping in its broadest sense refers to efforts to maintain the quality of information published in a given venue. A censor prohibits discussion of topics with which they disagree. A gatekeeper is viewpoint-neutral, ensuring only that the information has been thoroughly vetted and verified...

In the end, both social platforms and society at large must recognize the clear distinction between the dangers of censorship and the benefits of gatekeeping."

A Teenager Killed Himself After Being Outed as Bisexual. His Family Wants Justice.; The New York Times, September 30, 2019

Emily S. Rueb, The New York Times;

A Teenager Killed Himself After Being Outed as Bisexual. His Family Wants Justice.

The family and classmates of Channing Smith, a high school junior, said his death was a result of “social media bullying” and called for a thorough investigation.

"Channing’s death underscores the challenges of combating cyberbullying, which has proliferated in recent years. According to a report last year from the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of teenagers said they had been bullied or harassed online — and many of them thought teachers, social media companies and politicians were failing to help.

In schools across the country, L.G.B.T. students are more likely to be bullied and experience depression than their straight peers, studies have found."

'No grey areas': experts urge Facebook to change moderation policies; Guardian, May 22, 2017

Jamie Grierson, Guardian; 

'No grey areas': experts urge Facebook to change moderation policies

"Facebook’s ethical standards should not be decided “behind closed doors”, the former chair of an influential parliamentary committee has said after the Guardian revealed the social media giant’s secret rules for moderating extreme content.

Yvette Cooper, chair of the home affairs select committee before parliament was dissolved for the upcoming election, said the files – used by Facebook to moderate violence, hate speech, terrorism, pornography, racism and self-harm – underlined a need for more transparency.

A report from the cross-party committee last month concluded social media companies, including Facebook, should face fines of tens of millions of pounds for failing to remove extremist and hate-crime material."

Facebook Gets Slap on the Wrist from 2 European Privacy Regulators; New York Times, May 16, 2017

Mark Scott, New York Times; 

Facebook Gets Slap on the Wrist from 2 European Privacy Regulators

"Facebook suffered a setback on Tuesday over how it uses the reams of information it collects about users worldwide, after two European privacy watchdogs said that the social network’s practices broke their countries’ data protection rules.

The announcement by Dutch and French authorities was part of a growing pushback across the European Union about how Facebook collects data on the bloc’s roughly 500 million residents. Some European governments, notably in Germany, are considering hefty fines against the company and other social media giants if they fail to crack down on hate speech and misinformation on their networks.

As part of their separate announcements on Tuesday, the Dutch and French officials said that Facebook had not provided people in their countries with sufficient control over how their details are used. They said that the social network had collected digital information on Facebook users as well as nonusers on third-party websites without their knowledge."