Google’s search engine conspicuously left out Donald Trump in autocomplete suggestions for “assassination,” “assassination attempt” and even “president donald” Sunday, drawing criticism from social media users including X owner Elon Musk that it was censoring recent history.
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Does artificial intelligence threaten to conquer humanity? In recent months, the question has leaped from the pages of science fiction novels to the forefront of media and government attention. It’s unclear, however, how many of the discussants understand the implication of that leap.
In the public mind, the threat either focuses narrowly on the inherent confusion of ever-better deep fakes and its consequences for the job market, or points in directions that would make a great movie: What if AI systems decide that they’re superior to humans, seize control, and put genocidal plans into practice? That latter focus is obviously the more compelling of the two.
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Video sharing platform TikTok promotes sexual content to underage users through its suggestion algorithm, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal.
Investigators for The Wall Street Journal set up 31 fake TikTok accounts registered to users between the ages of 13 and 15 and studied their “For You” feeds, which consist of videos recommended to users by TikTok’s suggestion algorithm.
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Facebook’s News Feed algorithm determines what users see on its platform – from funny memes to comments from friends. The company regularly updates this algorithm, which can dramatically change what information people consume.
As the 2020 election approaches, there is much public concern that what was dubbed “Russian meddling” in the 2016 presidential election could happen again. But what’s not getting enough attention is the role Facebook’s algorithm changes play, intentionally or not, in that kind of meddling.
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by Chris White Facebook recently changed its algorithms to steer focus away from explicitly political content, but now that alteration is laying waste to conservative and liberal outlets. Conservative pundit Deneen Borelli laid into Facebook last week, telling her followers on July 9 that the company’s bias against conservatives cost her a job. In fact, she is holding CEO Mark Zuckerberg chiefly responsible after BlazeTV cancelled her Facebook show, “Here’s the Deal.” “And Mark, I hold you responsible for the high-tech lynching of my job,” Borelli, a black conservative who gained a large following during her run, said in her final video on July 9, which received more than 374,000 views as of the posting of this article. Reports appear to show that Facebook’s algorithm shift is suppressing content across all platforms. A BlazeTV representative confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation that her show was cancelled due to a lack of viewership. “My videos were not clickbait. I didn’t engage in over-the-top antics to get attention. I wasn’t shrill, and my videos were not challenged by a fact-check organization,” Borelli added. She told the DCNF she started seeing her content crater after she spoke at the Conservative Political Action…
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Reuters Facebook is lifting the lid on the algorithm that decides which posts appear in its news feed, as part of a drive to be more transparent and offer greater control to users. The feature “Why am I seeing this post?”, being rolled out from Monday, offers some insight into the tens of thousands of inputs used by the social network to rank stories, photos and video in the news feed, the foundation of the platform. “The basic thing that this tool does is let people see why they are seeing a particular post in their news feed, and it helps them access the actions they might want to take if they want to change that,” Facebook’s Head of News Feed John Hegeman told reporters on Monday. After a series of privacy scandals, Facebook needs to regain users’ trust as it prepares to roll out a single messaging service combining Facebook messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram that could make it even more central to users’ communications. The new news feed feature will show users the data that connect them to a particular type of post, Hegeman said, for example that they are friends with the poster and they’ve liked their…
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