SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter will begin to label and in some cases remove doctored or manipulated photos, audio and videos that are designed to mislead people.
The company said Tuesday that the new rules prohibit sharing synthetic or manipulated material that’s likely to cause harm. Material that is manipulated but isn’t necessarily harmful may get a warning label.
Under the new guidelines, the slowed-down video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in which she appeared to slur her words could get the label if someone tweets it out after the rules go into effect March 5. Continue reading.
In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, more than 10,000 automated Twitter accounts got caught conducting a coordinated campaign of tweets to discourage people from voting. These automated accounts may seem authentic to some, but a tool called Botometer was able to identify them while they pretentiously argued and agreed, for example, that “democratic men who vote drown out the voice of women.” We are part of the team that developed this tool that detects the bot accounts on social media.
Our next effort, called BotSlayer, is aimed at helping journalists and the general public spot these automated social media campaigns while they are happening.
It’s the latest step in our research laboratory’s work over the past few years. At Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, we are uncovering and analyzing how false and misleading information spreads online.
Report: Extremists promoting conspiracies are using same tactics as foreign actors
Lawmakers and regulators focusing their attention on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for the platforms’ role in propagating disinformation may be missing a big chunk of other online sites and portals that drive conspiracies and outright falsehoods, according to a nonprofit group that is studying how disinformation works.
Sites and discussion portals such as 4chan, 8chan, Reddit and Gab, as well as smaller social media sites such as Pinterest and even payment sites such as PayPal and GoFundMe, and online retailers such as Amazon and others are all part of a large online ecosystem that helps domestic and foreign agents shape disinformation and launch adversarial campaigns, the Global Disinformation Index said in a reportreleased last week.
The group is funded by USAID, the United Kingdom, and philanthropic entities.
NOTE: This is a bit outside our usual posts, but with this being another election year and the Trump administration and GOP Congress not doing anything to protect the voting public from manipulation by foreign adversaries, we thought this post could be helpful.
It’s Barack Obama – or is it?
The following article by Siwel Lyu, Associate Professor of Computer Science; Director Computer Vision and Machine Learning Lab at the University at Albany, State University of New York, was posted on the Conversation website August 29, 2018:
A new form of misinformation is poised to spread through online communities as the 2018 midterm election campaigns heat up. Called “deepfakes” after the pseudonymous online account that popularized the technique – which may have chosen its name because the process uses a technical method called “deep learning” – these fake videos look very realistic.
Because these techniques are so new, people are having trouble telling the difference between real videos and the deepfake videos. My work, with my colleague Ming-Ching Chang and our Ph.D. student Yuezun Li, has found a way to reliably tell real videos from deepfake videos. It’s not a permanent solution, because technology will improve. But it’s a start, and offers hope that computers will be able to help people tell truth from fiction.
The following article by Alicia Cohn was posted on the Hill website August 18, 2018:
President Trump on Saturday charged that social media is “totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices” and argued that the platforms should allow “good & bad” content online amid an ongoing debate over social media’s role in policing content online.
“Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!” he said.
“Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices,” Trump tweeted. “Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others.”
The following article by Maya Rao was posted on the Star Tribune website October 19, 2017:
The stronger proposed disclosure rules from Minnesota’s Klobuchar and colleagues are aimed at diluting Russian interference in elections.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., left, and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., speak about online political ads and preventing foreign interference in U.S. elections, during a news conference, Thursday, Oct. 19, 2017, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
WASHINGTON – Sen. Amy Klobuchar and a group of fellow U.S. senators are proposing stronger disclosure rules for paid political ads on sites like Facebook, Google and Twitter, in an effort to prevent covert foreign influence of American elections.
The legislation they unveiled Thursday follows revelations that Russian interests bought online ads during the 2016 presidential campaign, which are not subject to the same disclosure requirements of radio and TV ads. It’s a loophole that’s grown wider as more voters primarily get information online, and the senators said they would push to enact a law before the 2018 midterm elections.
“This exposes a national security vulnerability when it comes to online ads, a space where our laws have failed to keep up with technology,” Klobuchar said at a news conference. She is sponsoring the measure along with Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee; and Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who chairs the Armed Services Committee. Continue reading “Sen. Amy Klobuchar pushes for transparency in Google, Facebook, Twitter political ads”
The following article by Ann E. Marimow was posted on the Washington Post website July 15, 2017:
Demonstrators and police clash on the streets of the nation’s capital on Inauguration Day in January. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
Major technology companies and civil liberties groups have joined Facebook in a closed courtroom battle over secret government access to social media records.
Facebook is fighting a court order that prohibits it from letting users know when law enforcement investigators ask to search their political communications — a ban that Facebook contends tramples First Amendment protections of the company and individuals.
Most of the details of the case in the nation’s capital are under wraps, but the timing of the investigation, and references in public court documents, suggest the search warrants relate to demonstrations during President Trump’s inauguration. More than 200 people were detained and many have been charged with felony rioting in the Jan. 20 protests that injured police and damaged property in an area of downtown Washington. Continue reading “Facebook says it shouldn’t have to stay mum when government seeks user data”
The following article by Craig Timberg was posted on the Washington Post website February 5, 2017:
Daniel John Sobieski, a retiree in Chicago, is able to tweet more than 1,000 times a day using “schedulers” that work through stacks of his own pre-written posts in repetitive loops. (Alyssa Schukar for The Washington Post)
Daniel John Sobieski, 68, climbed the stairs in his modest brick home and settled into a worn leather chair for another busy day of tweeting. But he needn’t have bothered. As one of the nation’s most prolific conservative voices on Twitter, he already had posted hundreds of times this morning — as he ate breakfast, as he chatted with his wife, even as he slept — and would post hundreds of times more before night fell.
The key to this frenetic pace was technology allowing Twitter users to post automatically from queues of pre-written tweets that can be delivered at a nearly constant, round-the-clock pace that no human alone could match. In this way, Sobieski — a balding retiree with eyes so weak that he uses a magnifying glass to see his two computer screens — has dramatically amplified his online reach despite lacking the celebrity or the institutional affiliations that long have helped elevate some voices over the crowd. Continue reading “As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work”
SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter will begin to label and in some cases remove doctored or manipulated photos, audio and videos that are designed to mislead people.
In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, more than 10,000 automated Twitter accounts got caught conducting a 
Report: Extremists promoting conspiracies are using same tactics as foreign actors
