The 43rd Block: The race (re)begins
'New' old threats reemerge on social media platforms – only bigger, better, bolder.
Democratic discourse in the time of pandemic
Plenty still to talk about Clubhouse, such as its safety issues and why you can’t delete your account if you already have one, but I thought we should take a break from that a little bit.
Last week, together with others under the DLSU-SEARCH’s Democracy Discourse Series, I was at a virtual forum to discuss how we’ve been working to address challenges to democracy in Southeast Asia. Here’s the public portion of the 1.5-day forum:
Learn more about our works here. Plus, the call for The Starting Block interviews is still open.
10 breakthrough technologies 2021
The editors at MIT Technology Review list the top ten breakthrough technologies of the year, many of which I’ve written about in this newsletter, such as mRNA vaccines, GPT-3, TikTok algorithms, and data trusts.
How social networks got competitive again
Casey Newton takes us on a tour on when the competition ended – precisely August 2nd, 2016 – and why (because Instagram introduced a clone of Snapchat stories); and how the competition began again.
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Deepfake videos of Tom Cruise show the technology’s threat to society is very real
We've all seen the @deeptomcruise account by now. Tom Maxwell explains the importance of integrated deepfake detection and labelling tools for Input:
…TikTok is where the videos are hosted, and that app doesn’t have any sort of deepfake detector built in. The problem with retroactive detection is that by the time false information has been flagged, it can be too late to reverse the damage.
How memes became a major vehicle for misinformation
Sara Fischer and Alison Snyder for Axios:
For years, there’s been growing concern that deepfakes (doctored pictures and videos) would become truth’s greatest threat. Instead, memes have proven to be a more effective tool in spreading misinformation because they’re easier to produce and harder to moderate using artificial intelligence.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading an exceptional piece about TikTok by Eugene Wei, American Idle, about the network effects of creativity, by which he means that “every additional user on TikTok makes every other user more creative.”
I’m watching Lindsay Ellis’ video essay that traces the roots of pop culture transphobia. You will not see Psycho or The Silence of the Lambs or even Ace Venture: Pet Detective (to name just three) the same way anymore.
I’m listening to NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly and YR’s Nimah Gobir on how the latest deepfake controversy raises legal and ethical questions in the music industry.
Chart of the week
From Gregory Ho and Emir Izat’s paper for Khazanah Research Institute investigating the “subtleties and problems associated with categorising information disorder in the context of human assessments,” using tweets about Case-26 (a member of KRI’s Board of Trustees, Hisham Hamdan) as a case study.