Tag: social media

To protect kids, California might require chronological feeds on social media

Social media companies design their feeds to be as gripping as possible, with complicated algorithms shuffling posts and ads into a never-ending stream of entertainment.

A new California law would require companies to shut off those algorithms by default for users under 18, and implement other mandated tweaks that lawmakers say would reduce the negative mental health effects of social media on children.

The bill, dubbed the Protecting Kids from Social Media Addiction Act by its author, state Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), was announced at a news conference with California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta on Monday, alongside another proposed law that would tighten privacy protections for minors.

“Social media companies have the ability to protect our kids,” Skinner said. “They could act; they have not.”

One of the act’s key provisions is making a chronological feed the default setting on platforms, which would show users posts from the people they follow in the order that they were uploaded, rather than arranging the content to maximize engagement.

This change would show young users “the things that they want to see, as opposed to the addictive algorithmic feed that is presently being fed to our children,” Bonta said.

The act would also require the default settings on social media apps to mute notifications between midnight and 6 a.m., cap use at one hour daily, and remove the visibility of “like” counts. Parents — and in practice, most likely, the children using these apps — would have the ability to change these default settings.

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Elon Musk’s X Blocks Searches for ‘Taylor Swift’ Amid Spread of Explicit AI-Generated Images

X was blocking searches for “Taylor Swift”over the weekend following the spread of AI-generated images depicting the pop star in sexually explicit poses.

Searches for “Taylor Swift” and “Taylor Swift AI” on X returned error messages on Saturday and Sunday, though Elon Musk’s platform allowed variations on the search terms, including “Taylor Swift photos AI.”

X confirmed it is deliberately blocking the search phrases for the time being.

“This is a temporary action and done with an abundance of caution as we prioritize safety on this issue,” X’s head of business operations Joe Benarroch said in a statement sent to multiple media outlets.

The Joe Biden administration and the mainstream news media shifted into high gear after the fake Taylor Swift images went viral, seeking to protect the left-wing pop star.

“We are alarmed by the reports of the circulation of the false images,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Friday, saying social media companies need to do a better job enforcing their own rules.

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Feds use Wayback Machine to identify alleged Jan. 6 rioter who led calls to arrest state officials for COVID-19 rules

Jason Howland, the founder of an organization known for its protest of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, has been arrested and charged with five counts including obstructing proceedings inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Court records reviewed Thursday by Law&Crime confirm Howland was arrested in Michigan on Jan. 23 and charged with obstruction of an official proceeding, entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly conduct in a Capitol building and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building.

Howland, the founder of the group “American Patriot Council,” is accused of storming the Capitol and in an FBI affidavit accompanying the charges, the agent notes that Howland was readily identified in a Jan. 17, 2021, post on social media site X, then Twitter, from a sedition hunter group known as Michigan Tea.

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Bill banning minors under 16 from using social media passes Florida House

A bill that would ban minors under the age of 16 from using social media passed the Florida House 106-13 on Wednesday.

“We must act to protect Florida’s children from these addictive features, the mental health disorders caused by excessive use, and the risk of exposure to predatory activities,” said Rep. Tyler Sirois (R-Brevard), who sponsored the bill.

House Bill 1 would require social media platforms to terminate social media accounts of minors under the age of 16.

The bill requires that social media companies have an independent, private, third-party age verification service, that the personal data collected on minors under the age of 16 be permanently deleted, and data collected by the third party authentication must also be deleted

Parents are also empowered under the measure to bring a cause of action against social media platforms that fail to terminate a minor’s unlawful account.

Democrats argue the bill goes too far. Some Democratic members suggested less restrictive measures such as allowing parents to opt in or opt out of allowing their children to use social media.

During debate on Wednesday, several representatives spoke against the bill, with some calling it government overreach.

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Parents, Not Government, Should Control How Kids Use Social Media

It’s been 21 years since the feds “protected” us from endless telemarketer phone calls by creating a Do Not Call list. I now receive perhaps a dozen calls a day from numbers my phone identifies as “Potential Spam.”

Spammers “outwitted the government and wrecked” this system, The Washington Post reported, leaving Americans more susceptible than ever to car warranty pitches. Fortunately, my phone’s call-block system works fairly well.

Excuse my cynicism, but federal and state governments have an unimpressive record of protecting the public, especially on consumer-related issues. That hasn’t stopped them from trying. The process always is the same: Politicians spotlight a legitimate concern. They pass laws. They hold press conferences. The problem gets worse. Consumers (and manufacturers) come up with their own ways to handle it.

The latest consumer panic involves social media—specifically the ability of children to access inappropriate websites and apps. Liberal and conservative state governments are in a frenzy to pass these “protect the children” internet laws. Progressive California passed Assembly Bill 2273, which imposes an “Age Appropriate Design Code” that adopts provisions similar to those implemented by the European Union.

The legislation claims to empower parents, but it mainly empowers our state government to determine what information is acceptable for children. Specifically, the law requires tech companies to complete a “Data Protection Impact Assessment…for any online service, product, or feature likely to be accessed by children.” It also empowers the state attorney general to file lawsuits against companies that don’t conform to these nebulous standards.

Supporters pointed to serious mental health concerns related to cyberbullying and the like, but it mainly forces tech companies to serve as censors, gives government officials broad powers to determine appropriate speech, and hobbles U.S.-based companies while doing nothing about offshore sites that surely will proliferate. By the way, the Do Not Call List helped assure that legitimate (but still annoying) telemarketing companies would be supplanted by overseas scammers.

The California law passed by overwhelming margins because of, well, “the children.” Now conservative states are getting in on the action. Utah’s GOP Gov. Spencer Cox last year signed two such laws that require “parental consent for a minor to join a social-media platform” and prohibit “minors from using social media from the hours of 10:30 pm to 6:30 am,” per an NPR report. They also require parental access to their kids’ accounts and let the state sue companies for age-inappropriate ads.

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X CEO Linda Yaccarino Says “Free Speech” Ends at “Hate Speech”

X continues to sit on two chairs and send mixed signals regarding the company’s stance on free speech.

A new blog post penned this week by X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino goes into this, at once claiming that society must “empower people to express its thoughts” – but also, that the line must be drawn at “hate” and “hate speech.”

Considering the platform’s long and difficult history with suppressing free speech, well documented in the Twitter Files, and the fact terms like “hate speech” not to mention “misinformation” are so often used simply to cover up straight-up censorship, Yaccarino’s intent here can be seen as confusing.

All the more so since the blog post is entitled, “Safeguarding Information Independence and Combating Hate Speech” only to be followed by the subtitle, “Building an Indispensable Global Town Square.”

This is particularly interesting since it’s an admission of sorts that X is indeed a (digital) town square. The argument that this is the case with all major social sites has been used for a long time to prove that speech there should be protected under the US Constitution’s First Amendment, regardless of the companies being privately-owned.

The term “modern public square” as it pertains to social networks is found in the 2017 US Supreme Court opinion in Packingham v. North Carolina.

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Anti-Zionist Twitter Users See Their Reach Plummet Ahead of Elon Musk’s Planned Visit to Auschwitz

Anti-Zionist Twitter users are finding that their reach has plummeted ahead of X owner Elon Musk’s planned visit to Auschwitz next week to speak on a panel with Ben Shapiro on “combating antisemitism.”

Censored Men, a large anti-Zionist X account, reported that many X users are finding their engagement is up but their impressions are down.

We have also seen heightened levels of censorship lately.

Lucas Gage was banned for 3 months, Autumn Groyper [Nick Fuentes’ alt account] was permanently banned and Sulaiman Ahmed has been locked out of his account.

This comes after major Telegram channels, and X accounts in some cases, have set up a targeted campaign to get these people removed from the app.

Now, I can’t say for certain that it was these accounts and Telegram channels that lead to the ban of these people, but it’s definitely something X should be looking into.

I hope all the issues many creators are experiencing on this app, can be addressed as soon as possible.

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BMJ Report Recommends “Behavioral Interventions” To “Reduce Vaccine Hesitancy Driven by Misinformation on Social Media”

The BMJ is not short for “Behavioral Medical Journal” – but it might as well be.

Now this publication, owned by the British Medical Association, is exploring how to deploy no less than “behavioral interventions” to bring about less “vaccine hesitancy.”

And the article doesn’t stop at medical arguments. The hesitancy here is specifically linked with social media driven “misinformation.”

The recommendations don’t differ greatly from what those Big Tech social subsidiaries have been including for years in their policies – and these “guidelines” were probably cooked in the same kitchen, so to speak.

Things like, boosting the visibility of “reliable health information” and more “pro-action” on these platforms “in dealing with the proliferation of misinformation.”

First, the authors of the piece seek to define the way in which social media affects vaccination campaigns. The take is basically entirely negative – asserting that this effect amounts to misinformation only.

Paying lip service to genuine safety concerns playing a role in low uptake, the BMJ instantly switches back to playing up the danger of hesitancy.

Thus – there’s been a “return of measles” as of late. And, the implication is, the World Health Organization (WHO) used that among other things to issue an extreme “decree” to the world – that vaccine hesitancy is “among the greatest threats to global health,” WHO said.

And while the article positions the concern about vaccination in general – including decades-long used and tested ones – the highly controversial Covid jab eventually makes an appearance.

And it is mentioned as that point where this general “hesitancy” gained momentum, with the social media – rather than the sketchy nature of these particular vaccines – to blame.

Now for the “solutions,” specifically those based on behavioral interventions methods, or let’s say, “reprogramming.”

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EU President Calls For Globalist Control Over All Information

President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen addressed elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos Tuesday, calling for overarching globalist control over the flow of all information in the digital age.

“The top concern for the next two years is not conflict, or climate, it is disinformation and misinformation,” von der Leyen proclaimed, adding “The boundary between online and offline is getting thinner and thinner, and this is even more important in the era of generative AI.”

Addressing the elite as “Excellencies,” and personally naming “dear” Klaus Schwabb in her introduction, von der Leyen further called for the development of “a new global framework for AI risks,” and a vow to “drive global collaboration” to prevent the spread of ‘misinformation’ (information they don’t want you to know about).

She continued, “Many of the solutions lie not only in countries working together but, crucially, on businesses and governments, businesses and democracies working together,” adding that “While governments hold many of the levers to deal with the great challenges of our time, business have [sic] the innovation, the technology, the talents to deliver the solutions we need to fight threats like climate change or industrial-scale disinformation.”

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ISRAELI GROUP CLAIMS IT’S WORKING WITH BIG TECH INSIDERS TO CENSOR “INFLAMMATORY” WARTIME CONTENT

A SMALL GROUP of volunteers from Israel’s tech sector is working tirelessly to remove content it says doesn’t belong on platforms like Facebook and TikTok, tapping personal connections at those and other Big Tech companies to have posts deleted outside official channels, the project’s founder told The Intercept.

The project’s moniker, “Iron Truth,” echoes the Israeli military’s vaunted Iron Dome rocket interception system. The brainchild of Dani Kaganovitch, a Tel Aviv-based software engineer at Google, Iron Truth claims its tech industry back channels have led to the removal of roughly 1,000 posts tagged by its members as false, antisemitic, or “pro-terrorist” across platforms such as X, YouTube, and TikTok.

In an interview, Kaganovitch said he launched the project after the October 7 Hamas attack, when he saw a Facebook video that cast doubt on alleged Hamas atrocities. “It had some elements of disinformation,” he told The Intercept. “The person who made the video said there were no beheaded babies, no women were raped, 200 bodies is a fake. As I saw this video, I was very pissed off. I copied the URL of the video and sent it to a team in [Facebook parent company] Meta, some Israelis that work for Meta, and I told them that this video needs to be removed and actually they removed it after a few days.”

Billed as both a fight against falsehood and a “fight for public opinion,” according to a post announcing the project on Kaganovitch’s LinkedIn profileOpens in a new tab, Iron Truth vividly illustrates the perils and pitfalls of terms like “misinformation” and “disinformation” in wartime, as well as the mission creep they enable. The project’s public face is a Telegram botOpens in a new tab that crowdsources reports of “inflammatory” posts, which Iron Truth’s organizers then forward to sympathetic insiders. “We have direct channels with Israelis who work in the big companies,” Kaganovitch said in an October 13 message to the Iron Truth Telegram group. “There are compassionate ones who take care of a quick removal.” The Intercept used Telegram’s built-in translation feature to review the Hebrew-language chat transcripts.

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