Tag: The Internet

  • Saving the Public Sphere from the Onslaught of Digital Media

    In this piece, Nathan Gardels, the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine, discusses what some respected thinkers are saying about how to approach “the infopocalypse,” which Aviv Ovadya of Harvard has described as “a catastrophic failure of the marketplace of ideas with no one believing anything or everyone believing lies.”

    The piece argues that “democracy cannot survive this failure of the marketplace of ideas because it disables the formation of any shared ground where competing propositions can be tested against each other in the full gaze of the body politic as a whole.”

    The main problem that the piece is trying to highlight is that “the digital media ecosystem disempowers the public sphere.” The author writes:

    “Without institutions and practices that can establish and preserve the credibility of information, there is no solid ground for democratic discourse.”

    His suggestion for creating such institutions and practices:

    “[…] new mediating institutions, such as citizens’ assemblies, that encourage and enable civil discourse and consensus formation at the same virtual scale as social networks, are more necessary than ever because the forces of fragmentation have never been greater. Mending the breach of distrust between the public and institutions of self-government in the digital age can only happen by absorbing the wired activation of civil society into governance through integrating connectivity with common platforms for deliberation.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Civil Society Urges EU to Invest in Non-commercial Digital Commons and Infrastructure

    More than forty civil society groups recently released this statement as a response to the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade, which was signed in December 2022. 

    The signatories of the statement “welcome the attention to sustainability and the need to avoid environmental harm” in the EU declaration and highlight “the growing recognition that there is a need for alternatives to the dominant commercial platforms and the extractive practices that dominate the online environment today.” 

    The central argument of the statement is this:

    “To create more socially-oriented and climate-friendly digital spaces and ensure the sovereignty of communities and our societies as a whole, Europe needs to invest in digital commons and public digital infrastructures.”

    “As a concrete first step” towards that end, the statement proposes that “the EU and its Member States should set up a European Public Digital Infrastructure fund” which “should be tasked with supporting the development and maintenance of digital public infrastructure that delivers public value by providing citizens and institutions with alternatives to commercial digital infrastructures.” 

    Read the full statement here.

  • Scam Involving International Missed Calls on WhatsApp

    As this report in The Indian Express explains, “many WhatsApp users in India have reported receiving a spate of missed calls from international numbers” and “[t]he scam has caught the government’s attention.”

    This is how the scam works: 

    “The scam typically involves defrauding unsuspecting people on platforms such as WhatsApp, where the victim, who responds to a missed call, is promised money for YouTube video likes or a positive Google review. The scammer makes initial payments to the victim, who is invited to join a group, typically on Telegram app. The victim is encouraged to “invest” small amounts for bigger payouts, but after a considerable sum has been invested, they are blocked from the group.” 

    Further investigation by The Indian Express revealed that “the fraudster who intends to target multiple people doesn’t even need to manually call each of them” as “automatic dialer software” can make multiple calls to an entire database of numbers “in one go.” 

    Reportedly, experts have “pointed to holes in WhatsApp’s security systems” but “[a] detailed questionnaire sent to WhatsApp on whether it was aware that its platform was being used by an ecosystem that created fake accounts to scam people and if it was working to strengthen its firewall remained unanswered till the time of publication of” the report. 

    Read the full report here.

  • Socialist Software Engineers

    This article in The Drift magazine talks about “a non-negligible number of the people who write software for a living” being socialists, though not “as many as the right would have you believe.” 

    Calling it “the engineer’s predicament,” the author talks about such coders developing a desire to “to put their politics into code”: 

    “They want to write software that will facilitate the creation of worker cooperatives, seed the internet with self-governing platforms, and equip movements and municipalities with tools for democratic decision-making and participatory governance.”

    Elaborating on the article’s theme after sharing some facts about the history of “highly skilled workers in capital-intensive industries who had radical politics,” the author concludes: 

    “This is the greatest dilemma faced by socialist software engineers: in working against the grain of their technological heritage, they may also be working to bring about a world in which technology matters less.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Spate of Privacy Breaches by Healthcare Businesses

    According to this report, “Telehealth company Cerebral is facing a lawsuit that accuses the company of installing tracking technologies on its website and app that led to the protected health information of more than 3 million patients to be sent to social media companies.” 

    This is happening against the backdrop of “14 other hospitals and health systems around the country” facing lawsuits “alleging use of these tracking technologies on their websites.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Social Media, Disinformation, and the Sudan Conflict

    This newsletter from Coda Story paints a grim picture of how “Big Tech is ‘failing the Sudanese people.’” 

    Reportedly, the conflict in Sudan has led to a situation on social media platforms “that bore many hallmarks of a coordinated disinformation campaign.”

    A Twitter account with a blue checkmark that “looked like the official account of the RSF” falsely announced the death of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, “the leader of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces — the paramilitary organization formerly known as the Janjaweed, notorious for carrying out the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s”: 

    “In the current situation, the disinformation — whether it’s a bogus tweet claiming the general is dead or one claiming that attacks have taken place where they haven’t — could affect how the fighting plays out and how civilians make decisions about where to take shelter or how to traverse dangerous territory.”

    Adding to the chaos of the conflict are factors like internet connections “faltering or collapsing altogether” and social media being “a jumble of real news, hearsay and propaganda.” 

    “With blue ticks available to anyone for a fee, it’s become exponentially harder to know who’s really speaking.” 

    Read the full report in the Coda newsletter here.

  • Buzzfeed News Shutting Down

    As this report summarises: 

    “Last week, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced that BuzzFeed News is being shut down, leading to layoffs of about 15% of BuzzFeed staff. The layoffs will affect the company’s business, content, tech and admin teams as well as some staff in international markets. In an email to staff reprinted by CNBC, Peretti said they can no longer fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone operation.”

    Reportedly, the company’s news content will be shifted to Huffpost: 

    “The company’s sole news provider will now be HuffPost. BuzzFeed.com will continue its signature clickbait content, including listicles, quizzes, celebrity gossip and more.”

    Read a comprehensive report on the issue here.

  • Paid Subscriptions Now Necessary for Running Ad Campaigns on Twitter

    Twitter now requires that individuals or organisations intending to run ad campaigns on Twitter be subscribed to either Twitter Blue or the “Verified Organizations” service.

    This report from Tech Crunch quotes a letter from Twitter to a Twitter user:

    “[…] your @account must have a verified checkmark or subscribe to either Twitter Blue or Verified Organizations to continue running ads on Twitter.”

    Read the full Tech Crunch report here.

  • Kenyan Deputy President Loses Twitter Verification

    A story not picked up by international media is Kenyan Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua losing his Twitter verification as a consequence of the rollout of the company’s latest policies. What makes the story noteworthy is that Gachagua did not get a grey verification badge that government officials are supposed to get under the new Twitter design, even though the Kenyan President’s account got the said grey badge. 

    According to one local media report, Gachagua “is the first high-ranking individual in Kenya to lose his verification badge in the wake of changes on the Social media platform.” 

    Read coverage of the story in mainstream Kenyan media here and here.

  • Countering Fake News and Ideological Bias in Reporting

    Ground News is an interesting effort to counter fake news and ideological bias in reporting. According to their website: 

    “Ground News is a News Aggregation platform that helps users expand their view of the news and easily compare how a story is being reported across the political spectrum. We identify all news articles written on a story and arrange the organizations reporting on the event into categories of political bias, geographic location, and chronology. News is aggregated from over 50,000 news sources, including many alternative, independent sources that aren’t confined to the mainstream news narrative. This puts our community in a position to choose and easily compare the news they want to read, not just have it pre-selected for them by algorithms designed to drive clicks.”

    Some features on both the website and app versions are behind a paywall, but either version can be used/downloaded for free. 

    Visit the Ground News website here.

  • Widespread Vulnerability to Cyberattacks

    This article on Dark Reading about a report published by cybersecurity firm Rezilion states that “[m]ore than 15 million instances of Internet-connected applications, services, and devices are vulnerable to software flaws that the US government has confirmed are being exploited by attackers in the wild.” While “[t]ypically, only a small fraction of vulnerabilities are exploited every year”, Yotam Perkal, director of vulnerability research at Rezilion, is quoted as saying that vulnerabilities “are being exploited, continuously, by sophisticated threat actors as well as advanced persistent threat (APT) groups.” 

    Furthermore, these estimates could be conservative “as the services affected by more than one vulnerability were counted only once” and Perkal reportedly thinks that “it is safe to assume that the actual number of vulnerable instances is much higher.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Amazon Deliberately Miscategorising Businesses?

    According to a story broken by The Information, Amazon has been miscategorising sellers as “Small Business” or “Black-Owned Small Business” even when they are not. 

    While Amazon had launched such badges with the claim that it was a way to “help customers who want to support small businesses”, facts uncovered in this report raise the question if this was just a way to exploit public sentiment to drive up sales. 

    The story has been picked up by other media outlets. This report in Business Insider says:

    “Even though not all businesses say they’ve seen a boost from the badges, the badges could have the potential to increase sales. An IBM study found that product downloads rose by 64% after the products were given digital badges, showing that badges can help some sales professionals ‘achieve sales quotas.’” 

    Read the original report published by The Information here. Read Business Insider‘s coverage of the story here.

  • Preventing Harm Caused by Machine-learning

    “As a leading researcher on the ethics of artificial intelligence, Timnit Gebru has long believed that machine-learning algorithms could one day power much of our lives,” writes Emily Bobrow in this profile for the The Wall Street Journal.

    “Because machine-learning systems adopt patterns of language and images scraped from the internet, they are often riddled with the internet’s all-too-human flaws” and Gebru is well-known for her work in trying to change that. As Bobrow points out:

    “For years, Dr. Gebru earned notoriety as an in-house AI skeptic at big tech companies. In 2018, while she was working at Microsoft, she co-authored a study that found that commercial facial-analysis programs were far more accurate in identifying the gender of white men than Black women, which the researchers warned could lead to damaging cases of false identification. Later, while working at Google, called on companies to be more transparent about the errors baked into their AI models.”

    Gebru “hopes for laws that push tech companies to prove their products are safe, just as they do for car manufacturers and drug companies.”

    At Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), a non-profit she launched in 2021, “Dr. Gebru is working to call attention to some of the hidden costs of AI, from the computational power it requires to the low wages paid to laborers who filter training data.”

    Read the full article here.

  • On Social Media Companies Charging for Basic Services

    Geoffrey A. Fowler writes for The Washington Post: “Social media used to be free. That’s starting to change, in part, because the profits are no longer piling up quite as high in Silicon Valley for companies that built businesses on targeting us with ads. So they’re looking for new sources of growth that are actually worth paying for.”

    Comparing these subscription plans to mobsters asking for protection money, Fowler writes: “Facebook’s current support limitations are costing people time, money and relationships. It’s true that, unlike Twitter, Facebook is not removing any existing security features from everyone else to begin charging for them. But don’t even think about offering premium customer service until you’re able to keep a product or service functional at a basic level for everyone.”

    Meta’s Zuckerberg has responded to such concerns with: “Verifying government IDs and providing direct access to customer support for millions or billions of people costs a significant amount of money. Subscription fees will cover this and will also pace how many people sign up so we’ll be able to ensure quality as we scale,” he wrote.

    But users and commentators are far from convinced by this explanation.

    As Fowler concludes: “These are Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s problems to solve, not ours. Meta’s net income last year was $23 billion, mostly made off our personal data. Protecting us is a cost of doing business.”

    Read the full article here.

  • A Return to Blogging

    Writing for The Verge, Monique Judge makes the following case: “The decline of Twitter with the current erosion of legacy media has left me thinking we need to bring personal blogging back with a vengeance.”

    The biggest reason for this, according to her, “is a simple one: we should all be in control of our own platforms.”

    Perhaps most important of all her arguments is the following: 

    “We are now in an age where people come on the internet to be the worst possible versions of themselves, and it’s an ugly sight to behold. Take the power back by building blogs and putting comment moderation in place (it’s relatively easy on both WordPress and Blogger).

    Trolls only thrive in an environment where they are allowed to run around unchecked, and that is what most of social media is. There are plenty of tools that allow you to keep those people out of your comments while still allowing those who appreciate your words, thoughts, and content to fellowship with each other in a community of your own design.

    It’s what the social web was originally about, and we desperately need to get back to that.”

     Read the full article here.