Month: February 2023

Participants at a global U.N. conference in France’s capital on Wednesday urged the international community to find better safeguards against online disinformation and hate speech.

Hundreds of officials, tech firm representatives, academics and members of civil society were invited to the two-day meeting hosted by the United Nation’s cultural fund to brainstorm how to best vet content while upholding human rights.

“Digital platforms have changed the way we connect and face the world, the way we face each other,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said in opening remarks.

But “only by fully evaluating this technological revolution can we ensure it is a revolution that does not compromise human rights, freedom of expression and democracy.”

UNESCO has warned that despite their benefits in communication and knowledge sharing, social media platforms rely on algorithms that “often prioritize engagement over safety and human rights.”

Filipina investigative journalist Maria Ressa, who jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for exposing abuses under former president Rodrigo Duterte, said social media had allowed lies to flourish.

“Our communication systems today are insidiously manipulating us,” she told attendees.

“We focus only on content moderation. It’s like there is a polluted river. We take a glass … we clean up the water and then dump it back,” she said.

But “what we have to do is to go all the way to the factory polluting the river, shut it down and then resuscitate the river.”

She said that at the height of online campaigns against her for her work, she had received up to 98 hate messages an hour.

A little over half sought to undermine her credibility as a journalist, including false claims that she peddled “fake news,” she said.

The rest were personal attacks targeting her gender, “skin color and sexuality” or even “threats of rape and murder.”

‘This must stop’

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula earlier addressed the conference in a letter, after disgruntled supporters of his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro on January 8 invaded the presidential palace, Congress and the Supreme Court in Brasilia.

“What happened that day was the culmination of a campaign initiated much before, and that used as ammunition, lies and disinformation,” he said.

“To a large extent, this campaign was nurtured, organized and disseminated through several digital platforms and messaging apps,” he added.

“This must stop. The international community needs, from now on, to work to give effective answers to this challenging question of our times.”

Facebook whistleblower Christopher Wylie also contributed to the discussions.

The data scientist has revealed how he helped Cambridge Analytica, founded by former U.S. president Donald Trump’s former right-hand man Steve Bannon, to use unauthorized personal data harvested from Facebook to help swing a string of elections, including Trump’s U.S. presidential win in 2016.

“Many countries around the world have issued or are currently considering national legislation to address the spread of harmful content,” UNESCO said in a statement ahead of the conference.

But “some of this legislation risks infringing the human rights of their populations, particularly the right to freedom of expression and opinion,” it warned.

 
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The Supreme Court is taking up its first case about a federal law that is credited with helping create the modern internet by shielding Google, Twitter, Facebook and other companies from lawsuits over content posted on their sites by others. 

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday about whether the family of an American college student killed in a terrorist attack in Paris can sue Google for helping extremists spread their message and attract new recruits. 

The case is the court’s first look at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, adopted early in the internet age, in 1996, to protect companies from being sued over information their users post online. 

Lower courts have broadly interpreted the law to protect the industry, which the companies and their allies say has fueled the meteoric growth of the internet and encouraged the removal of harmful content. 

But critics argue that the companies have not done nearly enough and that the law should not block lawsuits over the recommendations, generated by computer algorithms, that point viewers to more material that interests them and keeps them online longer. 

Any narrowing of their immunity could have dramatic consequences that could affect every corner of the internet because websites use algorithms to sort and filter a mountain of data. 

“Recommendation algorithms are what make it possible to find the needles in humanity’s largest haystack,” Google’s lawyers wrote in their main Supreme Court brief. 

In response, the lawyers for the victim’s family questioned the prediction of dire consequences. “There is, on the other hand, no denying that the materials being promoted on social media sites have in fact caused serious harm,” the lawyers wrote. 

The lawsuit was filed by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old senior at Cal State Long Beach who was spending a semester in Paris studying industrial design. She was killed by Islamic State group gunmen in a series of attacks that left 130 people dead in November 2015. 

The Gonzalez family alleges that Google-owned YouTube aided and abetted the Islamic State group, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, by recommending its videos to viewers most likely to be interested in them, in violation of the federal Anti-Terrorism Act. 

Lower courts sided with Google. 

A related case, set for arguments Wednesday, involves a terrorist attack at a nightclub in Istanbul in 2017 that killed 39 people and prompted a lawsuit against Twitter, Facebook and Google. 

Separate challenges to social media laws enacted by Republicans in Florida and Texas are pending before the high court, but they will not be argued before the fall and decisions probably won’t come until the first half of 2024. 
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Two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut will remain aboard the International Space Station for an extra six months because of damage to their Russian spacecraft.

Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin and Frank Rubio were set to end their six-month stay aboard the ISS in late March, but the Russian space agency Roscosmos said Tuesday the trio will have to remain on the orbital outpost until September.

The Soyuz MS-22 capsule that carried the crew to the ISS last September has been leaking coolant since mid-December, which both Roscosmos and the U.S. space agency NASA have blamed on a micrometeoroid, or space rock, that struck the capsule.

Russia had planned to send an unmanned Soyuz capsule to the ISS earlier this month to bring the crew home, but the launch of that spacecraft was postponed because a Russian Progress MS-21 cargo ship docked at the station was also leaking coolant. That leak has been blamed by officials on an “external impact.”

Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio were joined on the ISS in October by four astronauts brought by a SpaceX capsule: two Americans, a Russian and a Japanese. The space station will become even more crowded next week when another four person crew, including an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates, is set to arrive.

Some information for this report came from Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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