X, formerly Twitter, has changed its “Public interest expectations” policy to redefine what posts are newsworthy and could be kept up despite the posts defying the platform’s rules.

The company has removed the requirement of having at least 100,000 followers for posts to be newsworthy. The earlier policy said only verified accounts would be considered for newsworthy posts. But since X has made it possible for people to get verified by paying for a subscription under Elon Musk’s leadership, the new version of the policy says posts only by “a high profile account” counts as newsworthy post. However, the updated page doesn’t give any details on what kind of accounts are considered “high-profile.”

The earlier version of the policy said that exceptions were limited to elected and government officials.

“At present, we limit exceptions to one critical type of public-interest content—Tweets from elected and government officials—given the significant public interest in knowing and being able to discuss their actions and statements,” the policy said earlier.

The new policy removes the wording about restricting exceptions to posts from only one category of profiles.

The Musk-owned social media platform said it is making changes as the Israel-Hamas conflict is unfolding. The company noted that users have posted 50 million posts on the topic.

X said it has been removing “newly created Hamas-affiliated accounts” under its Violent and Hateful Entities Policy. Further, it stated that it is partnering with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) to prevent the contribution of “terrorist content.” The company’s Saftey account added that it is proactively monitoring for antisemitic speech, but didn’t say what kind of action it has taken until now.

The company has relied heavily on Community Notes, its crowdsourced moderation tool, to allow users to post contextual info on posts. X said that these notes now “typically appear within minutes of content posting.”

There have been multiple reports about X hosting misinformation about the situation. NBC News reported multiple verified accounts posting fake news about Joe Biden approving an $8 billion military grant for Israel. A Wired report noted that X’s algorithm boosted posts — including video game clips being passed off as war footage — with misinformation from paid users. In a now-deleted post, Musk recommended people follow accounts, which have posted antisemitic comments and false information in the past.

Source : Tech Crunch

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The latest updates to Google’s privacy policy reveal that Google may use any public information available to train its various AI products and services.

Google has made updates to its privacy policy that now allow it to take any publicly available data and use it for artificial intelligence (AI) training purposes.

The update to the company’s privacy policy came on July 1 and can be compared to previous versions of the policy via a link published on the site’s update page.

In the latest version, changes can be seen that include the addition of Google’s AI models, Bard and Cloud AI capabilities, to the services it may train by using “information that’s publicly available online” or from “other public sources.”

The updated Google policy conditions (in green) as of July 1, 2023. Source: screenshot 

The policy update infers that Google is now making it clear to the public and its users that anything that is publicly uploaded online could be used in its training processes with the current and future AI systems it develops. 

This update from Google comes shortly after OpenAI, the developer of the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, was charged with a class-action lawsuit in California over allegedly scraping private information from users via the internet.

The suit claims that OpenAI used data from millions of comments on social media, blogs, Wikipedia and other personal information from users to train ChatGPT without first getting consent to do so. The lawsuit concludes that this, therefore, violated the copyrights and privacy rights of millions of users on the internet.

Twitter’s recent change in the number of tweets users are able to access depending on their account verification status has caused rumors across the internet that it was imposed partially due to AI data scraping.

The documents of Twitter’s developers read that rate limits were imposed as a method to manage the volume of requests made to Twitter’s application program interface.

Elon Musk, the owner and former CEO of Twitter, recently tweeted about the platform “getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users.”

Source: Coin Telegraph

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The social media site, owned by CEO Elon Musk, has changed its hateful content policy to remove a sentence about targeted misgendering or deadnaming of individuals, that specifically protects the trans community.

Twitter’s policy, which prohibits “targeted harassment, including repeated slurs, tropes” or content intended to dehumanise protected categories, has been in effect since 2018, prior to Musk’s acquisition.

Prior to this move, the platform’s hateful content policy read: “We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanise, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category.

“This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”

The removal of the final section, which referring to deadnaming and misgendering, was described by LGBTQ+ nonprofit GLAAD as “the latest example of just how unsafe the company is for users and advertisers alike”.

GLAAD CEO and president Sarah Kate Ellis said: “This decision to roll back LGBTQ+ safety pulls Twitter even more out of step with TikTok, Pinterest and Meta, which all maintain similar policies to protect their transgender users at a time when anti-transgender rhetoric online is leading to real world discrimination and violence.”

The move means that Twitter is falling behind other social media companies including TikTok and Pinterest, which have both explicitly banned misgendering, deadnaming, misogyny and the promotion of ‘conversion therapy’ practices.

Similarly, Facebook owner Meta has publicly stated that it prohibits “violent or dehumanising content directed against people who identify as LGBTQ and remove claims about someone’s gender identity upon their request”.

It also ignores overwhelming evidence that targeted harassment has an adverse effect on the wellbeing of LGBTQ+ people.

Targeted misgendering and deadnaming were identified by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as a form of hate speech in a March report that addressed anti-trans rhetoric at the right-wing conference CPAC this year.

The advocacy group described the acts as rejecting the “existence of trans people” and denying them “recognition and respect”.

“Social media companies committed to maintaining safe environments for LGBTQ+ people should be working to improve hate speech policies, not deleting long-standing ones,” Ellis continued.

Twitter has seen a major rise in anti-trans rhetoric following Musk’s acquisition

After the world’s second-wealthiest man reluctantly bought the platform in October 2022, transphobic remarks were found to have risen by at least 1,458 times per day across the remainder of last year.

Additionally, racist, anti-Black comments increased to a height of 3,876 times a day.

After the CEO claimed that hate speech impressions were lower than expected with a vague graph posted in November, users asked how he was defining hate speech.

A survey in February 2023 also found that 60 per cent of LGBTQ+ organisations and activists had reported an increase in abusive speech since Musk’s takeover.

Musk himself has posted several anti-LGBTQ+ tweets in the past, including claims that a “woke mind virus” needs to be defeated, blaming “communist” universities for his trans daughter’s fraught relationship with him, and making false claims about gender-affirming surgery.

His historically anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric caused several queer pundits to predict that Twitter’s hateful conduct policy would be changed in future.

Source: The Pink News

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