Tag: Twitter

After the numerous layoffs that Elon Musk has carried out on his social network since he bought it, now X, the former Twitter, will once again expand its team of moderators to tackle illegal, harmful or dangerous content for the normal functioning of the application. In this way, the company seeks to address a problem that has grown due to the lack of employees.

These employees would be hired to moderate in a new headquarters in Austin, Texas, and there would be up to 100 positions open to work extensively on content moderation and ensure that user posts comply with the current policies and regulations in X.

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Problems with illegal content

As Bloomberg reports, X wants to increase its workforce by a total of 100 people to strengthen the content moderation department, which is currently overwhelmed by the proliferation of illegal, harmful, or toxic content within the application. Harmful or toxic comments have always existed in the application, but the increase in harmful content is raising concerns.

Among other types of illegal content, X is detecting a significant increase in the dissemination of content ranging from full movies and series to photos and videos of sexual abuse, child pornography, and explicit violence, among others. As reflected in the application’s policies, not only are these types of content often criminal offenses, but they also cannot be allowed within the application.

AI’s and hate also wreak havoc

These are the most serious problems regarding moderation, and the severity of the content that company employees will have to view when they have to discard such images or videos that may be seen in the application is clear. But there are more problems in this aspect, since hate speeches have also increased, and AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, is also causing havoc on social networks.

It is evident that, in current times, Internet content can be very dangerous if there is no moderation or mediation by providers. Therefore, it remains to be seen if X will soon be able to make the content available within the application go through a more severe moderation and curation than before.

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X, the social network currently owned by Elon Musk, is looking to take a new leap in terms of security by enabling a new login system. In this way, the platform formerly known as Twitter will have a passkey system that will prevent users who choose this login method from being hacked.

Currently, this functionality is only available in the United States and on iOS systems, and if it works as expected, it is possible that later on this feature will be launched globally so that all users can have this safer method of login.

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Passkeys for iOS in the United States

This new system, for the moment, is being tested only on iOS devices in the US, but, as the company explains, this feature will eventually reach the rest of users, allowing security to make its way into this application, frequently accused of bot abuse and suffering numerous hacks and thefts of various accounts.

In addition, at the moment, there is no mention that this feature is only for X Premium users, so if the company doesn’t change its mind, it is most likely that this service can be beneficial for all users, both free and paid. This is something important to consider, taking into account that security has a fundamental value, and it is above the premium functionalities that a service can offer.

X’s Swings

For better or for worse, this beginning of the year is being less eventful for X than the year 2023 or the end of 2022. The service, for the first time in a long time, is no longer the protagonist so that, once again, the contents regain weight within the application. However, this does not mean that, in a year, the service of the application has undergone a substantial change.

For example, all the branding around what was previously Twitter was completely eliminated last summer of 2023. The paid subscriptions, after several changes, seem to have settled with three different categories, depending on the amount of premium features the user wants to have, but, despite everything, it was also known in recent weeks that the company’s value is much lower than when Elon Musk completed the purchase of the company in 2022.

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We talked about this a few weeks ago. And the situation between the European Union and Twitter (now X) was very tense, with threats from both sides. The EU accuses Twitter of being a social network that only promotes misinformation, Elon Musk denies it.

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The European Commission has announced the opening of a formal infringement procedure regarding the operation of X and possible violations of the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for Internal Market, made a sarcastic comment about X, detailing the alleged non-compliance by the platform with its obligations of transparency and fight against illegal content. The possible “deceptive design” of X is also being investigated.

A war that comes from afar

In February 2023, all online services operating in the EU were required to declare their size to determine if they were a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP).

A VLOP is any platform with more than 45 million users throughout the EU. Any company designated as a VLOP had four months to comply with the DSA. These measures include establishing a specific point of contact, transparency in advertising and content moderation, and clear and user-friendly conditions.

It also requires identifying and mitigating risks such as illegal content, gender-based violence, and child protection. Other logistical stipulations include allowing authorized researchers access to data that informs about systemic risks in the EU, sharing data with the Commission, and undergoing an annual independent audit.

The Commission’s measures are a result of a risk assessment report presented by X in September, a transparency report published by the platform in November, and the concern raised by the way X manages -or mismanages, in its case- content about the war between Israel and Hamas.

Thierry Breton sent a letter to Elon Musk regarding the platform’s responsibility to moderate messages in accordance with the DSA. And shortly after, the European Union has opened an investigation into the management of X.

Last November, Elon Musk publicly announced the release of Grok, a “mischievous” chatbot positioned as the new competitor to challenge ChatGPT. After a short wait, the model developed by xAI was launched for sale last week, and users have already begun to detect numerous flaws.

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Jax Winterbourne, a security tester, posted a screenshot on their X profile showing Grok denying a task, accompanied by a concerning message: “I’m afraid I cannot fulfill that request as it goes against OpenAI’s usage policy.” Even though Grok isn’t associated with OpenAI or ChatGPT, why did the company’s name appear in that warning?

The explanation provided by Grok’s developers is simple. Igor Babuschkin, an xAI employee, responded to Winterbourne stating that the web contains “copious” results directly extracted from ChatGPT. When gathering internet data to train Grok, these were inadvertently incorporated. Babuschkin mentioned this came as a surprise when they first noticed it: “For what it’s worth, the issue is very peculiar, and now that we’re aware of it, we’ll ensure future versions of Grok won’t have this problem.” And just to be clear, the employee concluded by affirming that “no OpenAI code was used in Grok’s development.”

However, this explanation doesn’t satisfy the experts. Simon Willison, an AI researcher, explains that he has previously seen this behavior in other language models. According to Willison, it’s highly likely that Grok “has been fine-tuned with datasets generated through OpenAI APIs or extracted from ChatGPT itself.”

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At this stage, one could say that AI is feeding itself. As language models have become more capable, it has become increasingly common to fine-tune these models with synthetic data, generated by artificial intelligence. This incident has further fueled the rivalry between OpenAI and X, a conflict that Musk initiated with his constant criticisms of Sam Altman’s company.

Source: ArsTechnica

The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has permanently left X (formerly known as Twitter), or at least that’s what she has implied through a post on her official X profile. In this statement, Hidalgo strongly asserts that X is a “weapon of mass destruction of our democracies.”

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Anne Hidalgo explains in her statement that despite having been “one of the first French politicians to join,” continuous abuses and disparagement have led her to leave the social network. In her post, she continues to list the reasons for her departure (which are not few) and talks about the “manipulation, misinformation, amplification of hate, organized harassment, antisemitism, and racism” that proliferate on X. She also points out the “packs that attack scientists, climatologists, women, environmentalists, and progressives.” She adds that the platform “damages the image and sovereignty of our democracies by seeking to destabilize them.”

For Hidalgo, X (or Twitter, as she calls it) has become a “weapon of mass destruction of our democracies.” Below, we leave her statement for you to appreciate in all its glory.

In her statement, she also laid into Elon Musk, the current owner of X, accusing him of having transformed the social network into something much worse (“acts deliberately to stir up tensions and conflicts“). According to Hidalgo, “the noise generated by fake news will always be much louder than the echo of a well-founded truth.” The mayor is quite blunt and describes X as a “global sewer.”

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To conclude, in her writing she quotes Martin Luther King, with his phrase “we must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools.” Do you think Anne Hidalgo is right in her argument?