Will the bots just grow some brains?
Generation Zoomer did it again: Social media users claim TikTok users and K-pop fans were behind the poor Trump Rally turnout, as teens ordered tickets without turning up, reports BBC.
Josh Taylor for The Guardian: Not just nipples – how Facebook’s AI struggles to detect misinformation.
James Vincent for The Verge: Facebook contest reveals deepfake detection is still an ‘unsolved problem,’ with the winning algorithm spotting examples of deepfake with an average accuracy of 65.18 per cent.
Instagram “will overtake Twitter as a news source,” reports BBC.
Rebecca Ratcliffe for The Guardian: Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam... How some countries kept COVID-19 at bay.
I wonder if I am a platypus
A sign pinned to my former colleague’s cubicle, circa 2012.
This week, as I was doom-scrolling my Twitter timeline, I realised that this is my second Twitter reincarnation. Each time before I deactivated my account, I downloaded my tweets. So I decided to doom-scroll my tweet archives to my very first tweet:
fight for the ones you love, and for the ones you’ve lost.
– 10:53 AM - 2 May 2009
I wrote a lot of great, cringe-worthy one-liners, such as:
Humour is not a joke. It is a point of view.
– 1:44 PM - 10 Mar 2012
And:
Don’t stay awestruck for too long. The truth is, you cannot be what you’re in awe of.
– 8:01 AM - 5 Sep 2013
As well as:
I wanted to be invisible, that’s why I write.
– 11:37 AM - 17 Apr 2014
I think I had a philosopher complex. (Yes that is a term I just made up, because, completely aware of the irony, I think I did have it.) I think I would like to denounce those tweets today. However, one Twitter thread (back then, there was no such thing, so it was just called a tweetstorm) I will stand by is this one:
It’s a furry mammal, yet it is venomous and lays eggs. It has the bill of a duck, an otter’s feet, a beaver’s tail. It has electroreception for its senses. When the platypus was first discovered in the 18th century, it was quickly dismissed as an elaborated fraud. This is what happens when you don’t fit into a category. So when you feel sorry for yourself for not fitting in, for being a weirdo, for doing something silly… Think of the g*dd*mn platypus and move along.
– 11:39 AM - 3 April 2012
Wow, Twitter was a lot less newsy back then.
This week, Twitter released voice Tweet for iOS. Jaipreet Virdi, a historian of medicine, technology and disability at University of Delaware, criticised the move, explaining that there are already “too many videos on Twitter that aren't captioned, and hence, inaccessible.”
Evelyn Douek, a lawyer specialising in global regulation of online speech, content moderation and comparative free speech law and theory further cautioned: “…One of the reasons there’s less controversy about contention moderation in podcasts and even Youtube videos (comparatively) is it’s harder to detect and study things like hate speech in not-text.”
Twitter later apologised for testing voice Tweets “without support for people who are visually impaired, deaf or hard of hearing.” They added that it was “a miss to introduce this experiment without this support,” and that they are “exploring ideas for how we could support manual and auto transcriptions.” Accessibility as an after-thought? What’s new?
Although I have always transcribed the audio portion of my newsletter, this week, we will have neither.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading Overshare: Love, Laughs, Sexuality and Secrets by Rose Ellen Dix and Rosie Spaughton because I need a break from the never-ending bleakness of the current news cycle.
I’m watching Certified Copy (2010) by Abbas Kiarostami:
I’m looking at this image from the Tulsa Rally by Jabin Botsford for The Washington Post:
Chart of the week
Taken directly from Charles Arthur’s The Overspill, former British police officer Jerry Ratcliffe explains American policing. The area of each box represents the volume of incidents in 2015 in the City of Philadelphia (about 1.5 million in total):
Fakta, Auta & Data #3: Penjelasan ringkas tentang kepercayaan terhadap konspirasi
Dunia semakin kompleks dan membingungkan kerana kita mempunyai lebih banyak akses kepada maklumat berbanding sebelumnya, dan maklumat-maklumat itu datang dengan begitu pantas. Untuk memprosesnya pada kelajuan yang sama, kita bergantung pada corak dan keteraturan. Oleh itu, apabila sesuatu berlaku secara rawak – tetapi terutama jika ia pelik dan mengecewakan – kita cendurung untuk mempercayai bahawa ia berlaku kerana seseorang atau sesuatu telah berusaha sedaya upaya untuk memastikannya berlaku – besar kemungkinan dengan niat yang jahat.
Dan dari niat itulah lahirnya teori konspirasi. Kita memerlukan Si Penjahat untuk disalahkan. Mana mungkin sesuatu itu berlaku tanpa sebab.
Apabila kita bersua dengan maklumat baru yang bertentangan dengan pemikiran yang terdahulu, otak kita menghasilkan keinginan untuk mengurangkan ketidakcocokan kognitif. Oleh itu, kita melalui pendedahan selektif untuk memperkuat pemikiran lama itu, mengetepikan sebarang maklumat yang bertentangan dengan corak dan struktur yang tidak bersebab.
Bias kognitif sering terhasil akibat cubaan otak kita untuk mempermudahkan pemprosesan maklumat dengan cara ini. Ini juga menimbulkan rasa tidak senang dengan ahli politik dan saintis, yang biasanya merupakan pihak berkuasa, kerana merekalah yang biasanya menyampaikan maklumat baru itu.
Selain itu, terdapat juga motivasi sosial. Khususnya, untuk menjadi unik, tetapi juga tergolong dalam ‘kumpulan eksklusif’ yang terpilih, yang teristimewa – sifat kesukuan. Lagipun, kita merupakan makhluk sosial yang mempunyai ego individu yang melangit.