Warning labels on social media, like on tobacco cigarettes, face a lot of opposition. CC-licensed photo by Brian Johnson & Dane Kantner on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Instagram recommends sexual videos to accounts for 13-year-olds, tests show • WSJ
Jeff Horwitz:
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Instagram regularly recommends sexual videos to accounts for teenagers that appear interested in racy content, and does so within minutes of when they first log in, according to tests by The Wall Street Journal and an academic researcher.
The tests, run over seven months ending in June, show that the social-media service has continued pushing adult-oriented content to minors after parent Meta Platforms said in January that it was giving teens a more age-appropriate experience by restricting what it calls sensitive content including sexually suggestive material.
Separate testing by the Journal and Laura Edelson, a computer-science professor at Northeastern University, used similar methodology, involving setting up new accounts with ages listed as 13. The accounts then watched Instagram’s curated video stream, known as Reels.
Instagram served a mix of videos that, from the start, included moderately racy content such as women dancing seductively or posing in positions that emphasized their breasts. When the accounts skipped past other clips but watched those racy videos to completion, Reels recommended edgier content.
Adult sex-content creators began appearing in the feeds in as little as three minutes. After less than 20 minutes watching Reels, the test accounts’ feeds were dominated by promotions for such creators, some offering to send nude photos to users who engaged with their posts.
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It feels as though we’re back here, in one form or another, again and again and again.
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The Surgeon General is wrong. Social media doesn’t need warning labels • Daily Beast
Mike Masnick:
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Warning: reading this article may cause you to question the Surgeon General’s reliance on feelings over science.
In 1982, then-U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop said video games could be hazardous to children and warned of kids becoming “addicted” to them, causing problems for their “body and soul.” This warning was not based on any actual science or evidence, but it kicked off decades of moral panic and fearmongering over the supposed risks of video games and children. This culminated in the Supreme Court rejecting a California law to require labeling of video games and restrict kids’ access to them, deeming it unconstitutional.
Studies have repeatedly debunked the claim that video games make kids more violent. Indeed, a recent Stanford meta-study of dozens of previous studies on kids and video games found no evidence of a connection between video games and violence. The researchers noted that if there was any correlation, it seemed to come from the public believing the unproven claims of a connection because politicians kept insisting it must be there.
History repeats itself. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy has decided to call on Congress to put warning labels on social media sites, similar to those found on cigarettes. He claims this is necessary because “the mental health crisis among young people is an emergency—and social media has emerged as an important contributor.”
While Dr. Murthy admits at the very beginning of his plea that he does not have “perfect information,” he suggests that it’s important to use his “best judgment” and “act quickly.”
The major problem is that, as with Dr. Koop and video games, the evidence supports little more than the fact that politicians jumping on the moral panic bandwagon has resulted in many people falsely believing that social media is harmful to kids.
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As ever, Masnick pulls no punches.
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Biden bans US sales of Kaspersky software over Russia ties • Reuters
Alexandra Alper:
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The Biden administration on Thursday announced plans to bar the sale of antivirus software made by Russia’s Kaspersky Lab in the United States, citing the firm’s large U.S. customers, including critical infrastructure providers and state and local governments.
Moscow’s influence over the company was found to pose a significant risk, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on a briefing call with reporters on Thursday. The software’s privileged access to a computer’s systems could allow it to steal sensitive information from American computers or install malware and withhold critical updates, enhancing the threat, a source added.
“Russia has shown it has the capacity and… the intent to exploit Russian companies like Kaspersky to collect and weaponize the personal information of Americans and that is why we are compelled to take the action that we are taking today,” Raimondo said on the call.
Kaspersky Lab and the Russian Embassy did not respond to requests for comment. Previously, Kaspersky has said that it is a privately managed company with no ties to the Russian government.
The sweeping new rule, using broad powers created by the Trump administration, will be coupled with another move to add three units of the company to a trade restriction list, Raimondo said, dealing a blow to the firm’s reputation that could hammer its overseas sales.
The plan to add the cybersecurity company to the entity list, which effectively bars a company’s U.S. suppliers from selling to it, and the timing and details of the software sales prohibition were first reported by Reuters.
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The fine detail is that US customers can keep on using Kaspersky software, but resellers (and Kaspersky) can’t sell it in the US after July 20, and after September 29 Kaspersky can’t update software on the machines of US customers. (Not clear if that includes machines of US customers in countries outside the US.)
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Elon Musk pitches advertisers on a return to X, months after telling some to ‘F’ themselves • WSJ
Megan Graham:
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Seven months after declaring that advertisers pulling their ads from his social-media platform X could “go f— yourself,” Elon Musk took a more congenial tone onstage at the advertising industry’s most important annual festival.
Musk joined Mark Read, chief executive of ad giant WPP, in a session Wednesday at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France, a five-day event that draws thousands of the industry’s chief marketing officers, tech leaders, creative workers and others from around the world.
“Back in November, you had a message to us. You told us to go f— ourselves,” Read said. “Why did you say that? And what did you mean by that?”
Musk said that he had not intended the message for advertisers as a whole.
“It was with respect to freedom of speech,” he said. “Advertisers have a right to appear next to content that they find compatible with their brands. That’s totally fine…What is not cool is insisting that there can be no content that they disagree with on the platform.”
X in November was grappling with the departure of several large advertisers in the wake of a post by the billionaire describing a post that espoused an antisemitic conspiracy theory as “the actual truth.”
Musk later that month called the advertisers’ response “blackmail” and said the advertising boycott was “going to kill the company.” He also said he had tried to clarify after his post that he hadn’t meant anything antisemitic
In Cannes on Wednesday, Musk also said that the company has worked to overhaul its abilities to match its users with ads using AI.
For advertisers who haven’t been on the platform but might be mulling a return, Musk said he believed it was “worth trying out.”
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A filing elsewhere showed that eX-Twitter’s revenues for the first six months of 2023 were half what they were in 2022. Sterling job, sir.
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Astronomers see a massive black hole awaken in real time • ESO United Kingdom
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In late 2019 the previously unremarkable galaxy SDSS1335+0728 suddenly started shining brighter than ever before. To understand why, astronomers have used data from several space and ground-based observatories, including the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), to track how the galaxy’s brightness has varied. In a study out today, they conclude that they are witnessing changes never seen before in a galaxy — likely the result of the sudden awakening of the massive black hole at its core.
“Imagine you’ve been observing a distant galaxy for years, and it always seemed calm and inactive,” says Paula Sánchez Sáez, an astronomer at ESO in Germany and lead author of the study accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “Suddenly, its [core] starts showing dramatic changes in brightness, unlike any typical events we’ve seen before.” This is what happened to SDSS1335+0728, which is now classified as having an ‘active galactic nucleus’ (AGN) — a bright compact region powered by a massive black hole — after it brightened dramatically in December 2019.
Some phenomena, like supernova explosions or tidal disruption events — when a star gets too close to a black hole and is torn apart — can make galaxies suddenly light up. But these brightness variations typically last only a few dozen or, at most, a few hundreds of days. SDSS1335+0728 is still growing brighter today, more than four years after it was first seen to ‘switch on’. Moreover, the variations detected in the galaxy, which is located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, are unlike any seen before, pointing astronomers towards a different explanation.
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Neo-Nazis are all-in on AI • WIRED
David Gilbert:
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Extremists across the US have weaponized artificial intelligence tools to help them spread hate speech more efficiently, recruit new members, and radicalize online supporters at an unprecedented speed and scale, according to a new report from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an American non-profit press monitoring organization.
The report found that AI-generated content is now a mainstay of extremists’ output: They are developing their own extremist-infused AI models, and are already experimenting with novel ways to leverage the technology, including producing blueprints for 3D weapons and recipes for making bombs.
Researchers at the Domestic Terrorism Threat Monitor, a group within the institute which specifically tracks US-based extremists, lay out in stark detail the scale and scope of the use of AI among domestic actors, including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and anti-government extremists.
“There initially was a bit of hesitation around this technology and we saw a lot of debate and discussion among [extremists] online about whether this technology could be used for their purposes,” Simon Purdue, director of the Domestic Terrorism Threat Monitor at MEMRI, told reporters in a briefing earlier this week. “In the last few years we’ve gone from seeing occasional AI content to AI being a significant portion of hateful propaganda content online, particularly when it comes to video and visual propaganda. So as this technology develops, we’ll see extremists use it more.”
As the US election approaches, Purdue’s team is tracking a number of troubling developments in extremists’ use of AI technology, including the widespread adoption of AI video tools.
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Don’t worry, there are all sorts of disinformation centres which–oh maybe not. (Thanks G for the link.)
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What the web looked like in 1994, the year it became the internet • Fast Company
Alex Pasternack:
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What was the World Wide Web like at the start? Long before it became the place we think and work and talk, the air that we (and the bots) now breathe no matter how polluted it’s become? So much of the old web has rotted away that it can be hard to say; even the great Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine only goes back to 1996. But try browsing farther back in time, and you can start to see in those weird, formative years some surprising signs of what the web would be, and what it could be.
In 1994, the modern Internet (which you always capitalized and sometimes called just “Internet”) was itself only 11 years old, mostly the domain of researchers and hobbyists and hackers and geeks, who used an array of globe-spanning services for communicating (email and Usenet newsgroups, in addition to local BBS and IRC) and for downloading files via FTP and for searching for documents and texts with services like Gopher and WAIS.
The Web was a relatively new addition to the mix that tied a few of these systems together, with a twist. Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN in Geneva, had built it in 1989 to organize the lab’s sprawling pool of physics research by combining three technologies he’d invented: a language (HTML), a protocol (HTTP), and a way to locate things on the network (URLs). Now, the Web was growing rapidly, in part because it was free. In April 1993, shortly after the University of Minnesota decided to charge licensing fees for servers that used its Gopher protocol, managers at CERN chose to put the Web’s source code in the public domain and make it available on a royalty-free basis. That opened it to anyone who wanted to set up their own server.
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My principal memory of the internet in 1994, confirmed by these screenshots, is that the typography was terrible.
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Miami is entering a state of unreality • The Atlantic
Mario Alejandro Ariza:
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Hank Perez, 72, was trying to get home to North Miami Beach on Wednesday afternoon last week, but the rain had other plans. Floodwaters as high as the hood of Perez’s gray Toyota Yaris stalled the car; he pulled onto the median and called for roadside assistance, but it never came. Thousands of other commuters found themselves in similar straits: About a foot and a half of water had fallen across South Florida—not the product of a hurricane or a tropical storm but of a rainstorm, dubbed Invest 90L, a deluge that meteorologists are calling a once-in-200-years event. It was the fourth such massive rainfall to smite southeastern Florida in as many years.
…the amount of rain that did fall last week is the sort of extreme-weather event that infrastructure planners don’t design for, if only because it would be too expensive to construct stormwater systems capable of moving that much water that quickly. “Nowhere can withstand this much rain,” Bryan McNoldy, a senior researcher at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, told me. At his home in Biscayne Park, he slept uneasily on Wednesday night after nine inches of rain fell in just 11 hours. “That’s definitely more than what my area can ingest,” he said on Friday. Just a few more inches of rain would have meant water coming up through his floorboards.
The state government isn’t exactly ignoring the rising water. Governor Ron DeSantis and his administration have attempted to address the havoc caused by the changing climate with his $1.8bn Resilient Florida Program, an initiative to help communities adapt to sea-level rise and more intense flooding. But the governor has also signed a bill into law that would make the term climate change largely verboten in state statutes. That same bill effectively boosted the use of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in Florida by reducing regulations on gas pipelines and increasing protections on gas stoves.
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The Long Goodbye has already begun.
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Unusual burst of bets preceded Rishi Sunak’s election announcement • FT
Chris Cook, Lucy Fisher and Rafe Uddin:
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An unusual burst of bets on a July poll preceded Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s announcement of the UK general election, according to an analysis of public market data by the Financial Times.
The data from Betfair Exchange adds to concerns about political insiders gambling on the timing of the July 4 poll. It excludes wagers made through other bookmakers.
The bets included several thousand pounds wagered on the day before the May 22 announcement, when the odds implied a less than 25% chance of an election being called for July.
Sunak for months said he expected the election to take place in the second half of 2024, but had not specified a date. Most political observers assumed he would opt to call an election in the autumn.
The betting scandal enveloping Sunak’s struggling campaign intensified on Thursday when the party confirmed Tony Lee, the Conservative director of campaigning, had taken a leave of absence.
The Gambling Commission is investigating Lee over betting on the timing of the election, said a person familiar with the situation. His wife Laura Saunders, the Tory candidate for Bristol North West, is also under investigation by the commission.
Lee did not respond to a request for comment. A solicitor for Saunders said: “Ms Saunders will be co-operating with the Gambling Commission.”
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There’s an amazing hockey-stick graph here of the value of bets placed on the July 4 date, where the spike is on the day before the announcement. One has to wonder how stupid you must be to make such a bet and not expect it to be flagged: we’re in the age of electronic oversight. But of course, the Tories have never had to consider the possibility of consequences for their actions. (A police officer has also been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office: believed to be a personal protection officer from inside No.10.)
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
Somewhere in a box I have an old newspaper clipping (you remember what those were) from I think around 1996, about “HATE GROUPS ON THE INTERNET!”. It reported at length on how – content warning, be prepared – extremists of all sort were on the Information Superhighway. They were doing things like – gasp – setting up their own BBSes and forums. These sites – my god, can you imagine this – allowed them to recruit all over the world! Oh the horror, the horror, civilization was under threat from this uncontrolled technology.
And now BBSes and forums seem almost quaint. Though I think the one which was in the article is actually still around.
We need a catchy term similar to “copaganda” to describe an article which hyperventilates over the concept that all sorts of people can use general tools (did you know that Neo-Nazis can take a city bus to have a meeting at a public library?)
“The street finds its own uses for things” — William Gibson
I agree – there is a certain amount of pearl-clutching going on. After all, can’t virulent left-wingers use AI too, or are they meant to be too moral somehow? (There’s always a certain sense that “nazis” are using stuff in ways that are totally immoral, pushing them to places they were never meant to be pushed, while everyone else who built that functionality in stands back appalled.)
Perhaps “appallaganda”?