\t\t\t\tView From the Valley
\nTelecom
\nInternet<\/p>\n
Tech Leaders Dismayed by Weaponization of Social Media<\/a>By Tekla S. Perry The tech industry can\u2019t hide from the information war, particularly when its own creations are being weaponized.<\/p>\n That was the consensus of a panel at the Techonomy17 conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., last week. The group assembled to discuss the meaning of authority in a networked, artificially intelligent world. The panelists quickly zoomed in on the manipulation of Facebook, Google, and other sites by Russians during the U.S. presidential election. They, as well as several other speakers at the conference, painted a dark picture of our current online world for at least the immediate future; they concluded that preventing such manipulation is not going to be easy.<\/p>\n \u201cI spent my whole life working in civil liberties, and I didn\u2019t see this coming,\u201d said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. \u201cDemocratic institutions, the rule of law…are up for grabs. Anything can happen.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe always knew we were going into an information war next,\u201d said Danah Boyd, a principal researcher at Microsoft and founder of the Data & Society Research Institute, \u201cand that we would never know immediately that that is what it is. Now we can\u2019t tell what reality is.\u201d<\/p>\n The tech companies should have seen this coming, panelists maintained.<\/p>\n Said Roger McNamee, co-founder and managing director of venture capital firm Elevation Partners: \u201cThese companies began with a goal of connecting the world. But once they put a business model in place that depended on advertising, they had to put in techniques that depended on creating addiction. Then when the smart phone came along, it created an opportunity to create a level of brain hacking that had never previously been seen.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaker after speaker marveled that, at the previous year\u2019s Techonomy conference, Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg told the attendees \u201cthe idea that fake news, of which it\u2019s a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI believe Mark was sincere when he said that,\u201d McNamee said. (Now that the extensive use of Facebook by Russians intent on manipulating the election has come to light, just what Facebook execs knew and when they knew it has come under scrutiny, most recently in Senate judiciary subcommittee hearings.)<\/p>\n Panelists\u2014and others I spoke to at the conference\u2014seemed shocked by how cheap and easy it turned out to be to weaponize social networks.<\/p>\n \u201cThe first $100,000 spent on Facebook [by the Russians] reached as many people as voted in the election,\u201d Stratford Sherman, co-founder of Accompli, pointed out.<\/p>\n McNamee explained that all the ads had to do was get people to join groups, by playing on their emotions\u2014mostly fear and anger. Once they were into the groups, they could be targeted for free.<\/p>\n \u201cWe hardened our financial institutions against hacking,\u201d McNamee said, \u201cbut it never occurred to us that the minds of our voters could be hacked; they turned our tools against us.\u201d<\/p>\n While the industry leaders can make the case that they didn\u2019t see this coming, they can no longer pretend it hasn\u2019t happened\u2014or deny that they have to do everything they can to fix it, the speakers indicated.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is an \u2018Oh crap!\u2019 moment for tech companies,\u201d said Microsoft\u2019s Boyd.<\/p>\n But what, exactly, can be done? Nobody is really sure what will work, but speakers at the Techonomy conference had a few ideas.<\/p>\n J. Galen Buckwalter, best known as the brains behind eHarmony\u2019s patented algorithm for matching singles profiles on its dating site, suggested that AI could potentially revamp social media \u201cinto an antidote for authoritarian thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n However, Boyd expressed concern that AI could be subverted as well. She noted that groups of social media hackers that use the dark web to share tools and strategies have started to address AI. Among the thought experiments they\u2019re now toying with is how to affect \u201ccore data sources to mess with the natural language processing systems.\u201d<\/p>\n In response, she argued, developers need \u201cto think about technical antibodies.\u201d<\/p>\n For starters, she argued, companies need to get back to testing things. \u201cSocial media obliterated the idea that we should have to test,\u201d she said. Instead, the social media companies \u201cwould throw things out into the wild, see how people would mess with them, and hope we could work fixes back in. That won\u2019t work going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n The social networks like Facebook, Google, and Twitter also need to embrace transparency, speakers agreed.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to defend the rights of individuals to speak online as they would offline,\u201d said Rotenberg, but \u201cwhen a company sells advertising it should be more transparent, and it should be regulated.\u201d<\/p>\n The tech community, he continued \u201chas to get away from the idea of self-regulation. Every technology\u2014the train, the car\u2014required regulation. The current model [of self-regulation] is collapsing.\u201d<\/p>\n Andrew Anagnost, the new CEO of Autodesk, spoke at a later session, and agreed with their assessment. \u201cWe have two Silicon Valley companies [Google and Facebook]\u2014they aren\u2019t tech companies, they are media companies; we are not their customers, we are their product. And they aren\u2019t even regulated to the point that television was regulated when we were all calling it the idiot tube.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s also time to start deprogramming the people who were targeted by Russian propaganda, McNamee said. \u201cThe only way to reprogram the Russian thing is for Facebook to send a message to everyone who was manipulated, stating that they were manipulated and showing them every item that touched them that came from the Russians.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe have passed the fail-safe point,\u201d McNamee said. \u201cI don\u2019t think we can get back to the Silicon Valley that I loved. At this point we just have to save America.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" View From the Valley Telecom Internet Tech Leaders Dismayed by Weaponization of Social MediaBy Tekla S. Perry Posted 14 Nov 2017 | 15:00 GMT IEEE SPECTRUM The tech industry can\u2019t hide from the information war, particularly when its own creations are being weaponized. That was the consensus of a panel at the Techonomy17 conference in … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,15,19],"tags":[119,122,220,426,637,772,1101,1179,1373,1577,1674,1756,1794],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-sergneri","4":"has-excerpt","5":"post-1748","7":"format-standard","8":"category-politics","9":"category-science","10":"category-trump","11":"post_tag-adsense","12":"post_tag-advertising","13":"post_tag-autodesk","14":"post_tag-clickbait","15":"post_tag-facebook","16":"post_tag-google","17":"post_tag-misinformation","18":"post_tag-net-neutrality","19":"post_tag-propaganda","20":"post_tag-social-networks","21":"post_tag-techonomy","22":"post_tag-twitter","23":"post_tag-verizon"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nPosted 14 Nov 2017 | 15:00 GMT
\nIEEE SPECTRUM <\/p>\n