yoyoel

@yoyoel@macaw.social

Internet sanitation enthusiast and full-time corgi wrangler.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

thisismissem, to mastodon
@thisismissem@hachyderm.io avatar

Paper on Trust & Safety, titled ‘Securing Federated Platforms: Collective Risks and Responses’ from last year's panels with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace cohosted by @yoyoel is now available, and it's well worth a read: https://tsjournal.org/index.php/jots/article/view/171

Very pleased that I could participate & contribute to this in a small part.

#Mastodon #Fediverse #TrustAndSafety

yoyoel,

@thisismissem Your feedback and perspectives were so, so, so valuable. Thank you!

yoyoel, to random

Government jawboning of tech platforms is a serious issue, and we need serious jurisprudence that draws appropriate limits on government conduct.

The 5th Circuit, regrettably, hasn't given us that in Missouri v. Biden. I wrote about how the problems with the case start with getting the facts wrong. https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/getting-the-facts-straight-some-observations-on-the-fifth-circuit-ruling-in-missouri-v-biden-1

jeffjarvis, to random
@jeffjarvis@mastodon.social avatar

@yoyoel is one of our bravest defenders of speech and truth online and here he chronicles the attacks on those who undertake this work in social media and the academe. They need your and my support.

I Was Attacked by Trump and Musk. It Was a Strategy to Change What You See Online. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/opinion/trump-elon-musk-twitter.html?smid=tw-share

yoyoel,

@bookish @jeffjarvis No comment. 😐

yoyoel, to random

Since 2020, I’ve been at the epicenter of a wide-reaching campaign to intimidate social media platforms into backing away from their investments in safety and security. It worked.

New from me (gift link): https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/opinion/trump-elon-musk-twitter.html?unlocked_article_code=4tdIbFuKLW42ISeaU4acN26WTieKQcsLEoCyhJt1DC8dcAq9yCnJjyrbKLCEWm2hVWmWh-x94MKiw-I_OrqJ8JIYpDsdvQ4BFioWZ_RXCQ4ftJfFamVymL4ZnoK5RUQIhDdY-ZuJck3JBMeNXn5VYxEZ-tp8__DgJ_29osLV2tNCx4SZkrQrNtAyYPdzMK4asGiGrshlttyZF4arTjYH7ObwQo2-GSiVT3z3QovPSQ8Q4L9ggP7frVv1zKmIi4yukMwCGcqmRYnUy8pmnGPw0wWV3c9FMTUKuc6VM7kGy9gMnz_OUsQCiX8LR3v5Ls40VVkp1tb_c7PD4BiQ6lFP2Aw&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

yoyoel, to random

The whole piece is spectacular, but this bit in particular is just a perfect illustration of the axiom that the amount of effort required to refute bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than the effort required to produce it. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/26/naomi-klein-naomi-wolf-conspiracy-theories

“You can’t pick up human energy in the same way, like the energy field is just almost not there, it’s like people are holograms … It’s like a city of ghosts now, you’re there, you see them, but you can’t feel them.” And she had noticed something even more bizarre: “People [who are vaccinated] have no scent any more. You can’t smell them. I’m not saying like, they don’t smell bad or they don’t smell – like I’m not talking about deodorant. I’m saying they don’t smell like there’s a human being in the room, and they don’t feel like there’s a human being in the room.” This, she explained to the host, was all due to the “lipid nanoparticles” in the mRNA vaccines, since they “go into the brain, they go into the heart, and they kind of gum it up”. Perhaps even the “wavelength which is love” was experiencing this “gumming up … dialing down its ability to transmit”. She concluded, “That’s how these lipid nanoparticles work.” That is not how lipid nanoparticles work. It is not how vaccines work. It is not how anything works. Also, and I can’t quite believe I am typing these words, vaccinated people still smell like humans.

yoyoel, to random

Nvidia has started asking large GPU buyers who their end users are (per The Information): https://www.theinformation.com/articles/in-an-unusual-move-nvidia-wants-to-know-its-customers-customers?utm_source=ti_app&rc=gomoa3

Their focus seems to be on picking favorites in a crowded market, but this could actually be an interesting hook for "know your customer" diligence to prevent horrific abuses of AI, if they cared to do that.

yoyoel, to random

Interesting tidbit from Meta staff at #TrustCon23 just now: >90% of the CSAM Meta report to NCMEC is visually similar to content they’ve reported before.

The argument goes: The same bad content circulates again and again, so effective moderation requires you to get very good at similarity detection.

yoyoel,

This is one of those cool insights at Meta’s scale that also only tells part of the story:

Are 90% of their reports visually similar because they’re failing to find and report stuff that ISN’T visually similar?

It’s easier to chase the threats you’re familiar with than to find novel ones.

yoyoel, to random

Fascinating decision by the Oversight Board telling Meta to ban the Cambodian Prime Minister for inciting violence: https://oversightboard.com/news/656303619335474-oversight-board-overturns-meta-s-decision-in-cambodian-prime-minister-case/

Meta have said they’ll comply.

It’s worth noting that the content in question was posted in January, and it’s now, checks notes, uh, June.

So it’s not clear that the Oversight Board process is totally working (yet?) as a way to make difficult, life-and-death decisions in the timeframe trust and safety work requires.

yoyoel, to random

The Atlantic Council Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web, led by @rightsduff, put out its comprehensive report today: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/scaling-trust/

I had the privilege of leading work on one of the report's annexes, specifically focused on securing federated platforms: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/scaling-trust_annex5/

Bottom line up front: We're missing some key policy, technical, and institutional pieces right now, but these are solvable challenges.

mmitchell_ai, to random
@mmitchell_ai@mastodon.social avatar

@huggingface is:
1-an "open" company
2-to enable good machine learning dev & culture
These 2 can be in tension!
Led by the amazing @giadap, we've now released our updated policies. Check it out to see how we're balancing!
https://huggingface.co/blog/content-guidelines-update

yoyoel,

@mmitchell_ai @huggingface @giadap These are so, so good. I’m a huge fan of the clear articulation of consequences in the policy itself, too, and how readable it all is. 👏👏👏

yoyoel, to random

It’s unconscionable that Twitter would deploy what remains of its legal team to bully academics into paying an obscene ransom in order to keep access to essential data. https://inews.co.uk/news/twitter-researchers-delete-data-unless-pay-2364535

The best hope for stopping this is regulatory action, particularly under the DSA.

Groups like the Coalition for Independent Technology Research are helping lobby on behalf of researchers. Learn more and get involved: https://independenttechresearch.org/

conspirator0, to random
@conspirator0@newsie.social avatar

I've been tagged in cryptocurrency spam on Mastodon for the first time. Truly a momentous occasion.

yoyoel,

@conspirator0 Interesting to see that the fake accounts seem to largely be on mastodon[.]social. I’d have expected them to distribute across more instances.

yoyoel, to random

“TikTok audio sensitive words in Tibet region” is really not a good look for a company on a charm offensive to convince people they definitely aren’t skewing content based on geopolitical motivations. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2023/05/01/tiktok-bytedance-suppression-tool-trump-china-uyghurs/

rabble, to random
@rabble@mastodon.social avatar

Building a content moderation system in an open decentralized network. A proposal for how we can do it on Nostr. https://s3x.social/nostr-content-moderation

yoyoel,

@rabble The taxonomy here is great. And broadly, this approach seems like the most viable option for the future of moderation (to me anyway). Feels like the missing bit is commercial: moderation has to get funded somewhere, and a B2C, paid service seems most likely to be user-focused. Make moderation the product, and get people used to paying for it.

yoyoel, to random

When I was growing up, my best friend and I would hang out and host pretend NPR broadcasts. (On our version of Morning Edition, she was Linda Wertheimer, and I was Robert Siegel.)

The chance to be in an episode of This American Life is beyond anything I could have imagined for myself as a kid.

Grateful to @caseynewton for helping me tell this love story for trust and safety. To my friends and colleagues in internet sanitation: I hope I’ve done you proud.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/797/what-i-was-thinking-as-we-were-sinking

yoyoel,

@ukuku I’d settle for Carl Kasell’s voice on my answering machine.

yoyoel, to random

This bit on misinformation label effectiveness in today’s Facebook Oversight Board opinion is fascinating.

Short version is: Facebook automatically spray neutral “get the facts” labels on both true and false content (which they did throughout the 2020 election, and always seemed like a bit of a milquetoast non-intervention). They found experimental evidence of label fatigue — that is, people are less engaged with labels when they see them too often.

Full opinion: https://www.oversightboard.com/decision/PAO-SABU4P2S/

image/jpeg

yoyoel,

A meta-observation: It sure would be great to see Facebook make the underlying data here available to outside researchers (or at least publish it in a peer-reviewed study).

yoyoel, to random

Globally restricting speech based on local legal demands (in this case, from India) is exactly as terrifying as @mmasnick makes it sound in this post. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/11/free-speech-twitter-is-now-globally-blocking-posts-critical-of-the-modi-government/

This was EXCEEDINGLY rare in the Twitter 1.0 days — I can think of a vanishingly small number of examples, all of which involved extensive litigation and pushback to avoid having to comply.

A dark day for free speech indeed.

yoyoel, to random

Just stopping in from my social media vacation to say that “Long, Long Time” (The Last Of Us S01E03) is an absolutely perfect episode of television — easily up there with my other all-time favorites (“The Suitcase” from Mad Men, “Hush” from Buffy, “Two Cathedrals” from The West Wing, “Jayne’s Town” from Firefly, and the finale of Six Feet Under).

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