The problem of social media

[morganism]

Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show

The privacy mess is troubling because the chatbots actively encourage you to share details that are far more personal than in a typical app.

Lonely on Valentine’s Day? AI can help. At least, that’s what a number of companies hawking “romantic” chatbots will tell you. But as your robot love story unfolds, there’s a tradeoff you may not realize you’re making. According to a new study from Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included project, AI girlfriends and boyfriends harvest shockingly personal information, and almost all of them sell or share the data they collect.

“To be perfectly blunt, AI girlfriends and boyfriends are not your friends,” said Misha Rykov, a Mozilla Researcher, in a press statement. “Although they are marketed as something that will enhance your mental health and well-being, they specialize in delivering dependency, loneliness, and toxicity, all while prying as much data as possible from you.”

Mozilla dug into 11 different AI romance chatbots, including popular apps such as Replika, Chai, Romantic AI, EVA AI Chat Bot & Soulmate, and CrushOn.AI. Every single one earned the Privacy Not Included label, putting these chatbots among the worst categories of products Mozilla has ever reviewed. The apps mentioned in this story didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

You’ve heard stories about data problems before, but according to Mozilla, AI girlfriends violate your privacy in “disturbing new ways.” For example, CrushOn.AI collects details including information about sexual health, use of medication, and gender-affirming care. 90% of the apps may sell or share user data for targeted ads and other purposes, and more than half won’t let you delete the data they collect. Security was also a problem. Only one app, Genesia AI Friend & Partner, met Mozilla’s minimum security standards.

One of the more striking findings came when Mozilla counted the trackers in these apps, little bits of code that collect data and share them with other companies for advertising and other purposes. Mozilla found the AI girlfriend apps used an average of 2,663 trackers per minute, though that number was driven up by Romantic AI, which called a whopping 24,354 trackers in just one minute of using the app.
(more)

https://gizmodo.com/your-ai-girlfriend-is-a-data-harvesting-horror-show-1851253284

[morganism]

(excellent article by Mike on Techdirt taking apart an article on Wired about Section 230 and algorithms and 1st Ammend issues. Touches on mods. Doesn't address probs with bots and AI that is a diff issue ahead, tho with the PTOffice saying no trademarks to AI content, may be able to filter from a blacklist)

(...)
No one — and I do mean no one — wants a website where companies can only moderate based on the First Amendment. Such a site would almost immediately turn into harassment, abuse, and garbage central. Most speech is protected under the First Amendment. Very, very, very little speech is not protected. The very “harassment” that the authors complain about literally one paragraph above is almost entirely protected under the First Amendment.

Also, if you could only moderate based on the First Amendment, all online forums would be the same. The wonder of the internet right now is that every online forum gets to set its own rules and moderate accordingly. And that’s because Section 230 allows them to do so without fear of litigation over their choices.

Under this plan, you couldn’t (for example) have a knitting community with a “no politics” rule. You’d have to allow all legal speech. That’s… beyond stupid.

And, as if to underline that the authors, the fact checkers, and the editors, have no idea how any of this works, they throw this in:

    The United States has more than 200 years of First Amendment jurisprudence that establishes categories of less protected speech—obscenity, defamation, incitement, fighting words—to build upon, and Section 230 has effectively impeded its development for online expression. The perverse result has been the elevation of algorithms over constitutional law, effectively ceding judicial power.

The first sentence is partially right. There is jurisprudence establishing exceptions to the First Amendment. Though it’s very narrow and very clearly defined. Indeed, the inclusion of “fighting words” in the list of exceptions above shows that the authors are unaware that over the past 50 years the fighting words doctrine has been effectively deprecated as an exception.

It’s also just blatantly, factually, incorrect that 230 has somehow “impeded” the development of First Amendment exceptions. It’s as if the authors are wholly unaware of myriad attempts in the decades since Section 230 went into effect for people to convince courts to establish new exceptions. Most notably was the US v. Stevens, in which the Supreme Court made it clear that it wasn’t really open to adding new exceptions to the First Amendment.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/15/has-wired-given-up-on-fact-checking-publishes-facts-optional-screed-against-section-230-that-gets-almost-everything-wrong/

[morganism]

The “Need for Chaos” and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors

Why are some people motivated to circulate hostile political information? While prior studies have focused on partisan motivations, we demonstrate that some individuals circulate hostile rumors because they wish to unleash chaos to “burn down” the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process. To understand this psychology, we theorize and measure a novel psychological state, the Need for Chaos, emerging in an interplay of social marginalization and status-oriented personalities. Across eight studies of individuals living in the United States, we show that this need is a strong predictor of motivations to share hostile political rumors, even after accounting for partisan motivations, and can help illuminate differences and commonalities in the frustrations of both historically privileged and marginalized groups. To stem the tide of hostility on social media, the present findings suggest that real-world policy solutions are needed to address social frustrations in the United States.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/need-for-chaos-and-motivations-to-share-hostile-political-rumors/7E50529B41998816383F5790B6E0545A


(and another write up article on the Turchin theory of Cliodynamics is always worth a read)

https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/

How we’re using maths and data to reveal why societies collapse

(...)
We create structured, analysable information by surveying the huge amount of scholarship available about the past. For instance, we can record a society’s population as a number, or answer questions about whether something was present or absent. Like, did a society have professional bureaucrats? Or, did it maintain public irrigation works?

These questions get turned into numerical data – a present can become a “1” and absent a “0” – in a way that allows us to examine these data points with a host of analytical tools. Critically, we always combine this “hard” quantitative data with more qualitative descriptions, explaining why the answers were given, providing nuance and marking uncertainty when the research is unclear, and citing relevant published literature.

We’re focused on gathering as many examples of past crises as we can. These are periods of social unrest that often result in major devastation — things like famine, disease outbreaks, civil wars and even complete collapse.

Our goal is to find out what drove these societies into crisis, and then what factors seem to have determined whether people could course-correct to stave off devastation.

But why? Right now, we are living in an age of polycrisis – a state where social, political, economic, environmental and other systems are not only deeply interrelated, but nearly all of them are under strain or experiencing some kind of disaster or extreme upheaval.
(more)

https://www.rawstory.com/how-were-using-maths-and-data-to-reveal-why-societies-collapse/

(can't find the link to the Conversation article)

[morganism]

(Step right up,get ur clicks right here!)

How games are used to control you You don't have to play by other people's rules

(...)
But it begins with a mild-mannered psychologist who studied pigeons at Harvard in the Thirties. B.F. Skinner believed environment determines behaviour, and a person could therefore be controlled simply by controlling their environment. He began testing this theory, known as behaviourism, on pigeons. For his experiments, he developed the “Skinner box”, a birdcage with a food dispenser controlled by a button.

Skinner’s goal was to make the pigeons peck the button as many times as possible. From his experiments, he made three discoveries. First, the pigeons pecked most when doing so yielded immediate, rather than delayed, rewards. Second, the pigeons pecked most when it rewarded them randomly, rather than every time. Skinner’s third discovery occurred when he noticed the pigeons continued to peck the button long after the food dispenser was empty, provided they could hear it click. He realised the pigeons had become conditioned to associate the click with the food, and now valued the click as a reward in itself.
(more)

https://unherd.com/2024/04/how-games-are-used-to-control-you/

[etienne]

I have one issue regarding the #️⃣ on Twitter.
The system always suggest some, and I guess that what they do it is not fully honest.
I used lately the #StopWW3, but wasn't careful and one post was done with the #StoppWW3. I had similar problems with the #SaveGaza.

[Neven]

Two interesting interviews with Jonathan Haidt about how social media is a disaster for children:





Very interesting, because a lot of stuff I watch about what's wrong with kids today (especially in politics) or with their levels of knowledge/education, almost entirely ignores the influence of smart phones and social media. So at least, the elephant in the room isn't ignored.

But still, the analysis doesn't go deep enough by ignoring the mammoth in the room: the system/machine. The solutions proposed are thus, in my view, very superficial.

I remain of the opinion that solutions need to follow some or all of these lines:

-No advertising, no profits from social media
-No anonymity, no bots, no hidden influences
-No algorithms reinforcing the points above
-A taboo on social media and smart phone use to nudge people away from them, so that they become tools again instead of distraction drugs

[morganism]

( i think we need to teach kids how to use those hand held computers better. Search and Machine parameters. Checking SEO optimization schemes before even opening sites. checking vid clips for mods.
How to install ad and java blocking software.

May just have to legislate that kids can't be fed any feeds that they havn't personally added. No ads, news, other folk, bots, or algo feeds. They should be taught to search and compare info and be able to see who is amplifying said info)

[Neven]

I don't agree. That's working on the wrong end, like teaching rape victims to accommodate so that it hurts less. Take way the root causes, not the symptoms.

The Internet should be a public forum and encyclopaedia, not a billboard with tentacles in your head.

[kassy]

But that would cost some people money and also lots of parties like that tentacles thing.

There are also tentacles in TV and there were probably some in impressive radio speeches when that  is was in vogue long before my time.

Of course the net/social media gives much more user info away. In the worst case we get a well trained AI as your only search prompt and the news fitted to you.
 
Will there be some backlash to the screen zombie mentality? I hope so.
I agree with your list but it is more idealistic then realistic.

[Neven]

Everything starts with an idea. If 'reality' is your starting point, nothing will ever change.

[morganism]

(gotta block the memes. If folks have to search for answers, they will come across many. Then they have to learn to choose. Choices have consequences.

To truly protect the kids, we have to stop the paid and algorithmic feeds. To do that, we have to protect everyone. Privacy matters too, if they know what you are looking for, they know how to corrupt it.)


"Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment which states that an otherwise artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future would be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize said advancement. It originated in a 2010 post at discussion board LessWrong, a technical forum focused on analytical rational enquiry. The thought experiment's name derives from the poster of the article (Roko) and the basilisk, a mythical creature capable of destroying enemies with its stare.

While the theory was initially dismissed as nothing but conjecture or speculation by many LessWrong users, LessWrong co-founder Eliezer Yudkowsky reported users who described symptoms such as nightmares and mental breakdowns upon reading the theory, due to its stipulation that knowing about the theory and its basilisk made one vulnerable to the basilisk itself. This led to discussion of the basilisk on the site being banned for five years. However, these reports were later dismissed as being exaggerations or inconsequential, and the theory itself was dismissed as nonsense, including by Yudkowsky himself. Even after the post's discreditation, it is still used as an example of principles such as Bayesian probability and implicit religion. It is also regarded as a modern version of Pascal's wager.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

[kassy]

Everything starts with an idea. If 'reality' is your starting point, nothing will ever change.

But the idea is always a variation on reality. Something we do must be done differently.

A taboo on social media and smart phone use to nudge people away from them, so that they become tools again instead of distraction drugs

So who comes up with this taboo if not people themselves? People love their fixes. Then there is an industry that profits from that so good luck on banning adds etc.

[Freegrass]

Everything starts with an idea. If 'reality' is your starting point, nothing will ever change.

Not true. Fire wasn't an idea, it was a natural reality we had to live with, and later learned to deal with.

Most new inventions are discovered by accident, like penicillin. Some actions suddenly create a new reality we have to find a good use for.

[Neven]

And to find a good use, you need an idea. QED.

If 'reality' (ie what you perceive as reality) is your starting point, you will stand in the forest with a bag of marshmallows waiting for a thunderbolt to start a fire. But the idea was to re-create the fire caused by thunderbolts, so you can eat your marshmallows whenever you like.

To extend this analogy to social media: If 'reality' is that the system of ads and hidden influence cannot be changed, you will try to adjust accordingly which will not work (and thus isn't all that realistic, after all).

Everything starts with an idea. If 'reality' is your starting point, nothing will ever change.

But the idea is always a variation on reality. Something we do must be done differently.

Yes, and that's why one needs to be idealistic, ie come up with ideas. Of course, there's a chasm between theory/idea and practice/'reality', but chasms are there to be bridged. It should work in theory, and practice has shown that it can sometimes be done. Usually, if it can't be done, then Reality will at some point force the change.

So who comes up with this taboo if not people themselves? People love their fixes. Then there is an industry that profits from that so good luck on banning adds etc.

Yes, let's discuss the idea.

Indeed, people themselves should come up with the taboo. People love their fix (once they have been made addicted). But people are also conformist. So, if one could somehow get it into their heads that social media and smart phones in general turn you into a shallow and addicted f**kwit, you could create a vanguard that is then followed by the masses.

Of course, this could only work if at the same time the ideas for the other end of the equation (social media) are executed: no more ads, no more anonymity. If there can be a War on Drugs, there can also be a War on Social Media. If the government can hand out methadone, it can also have its own legal social media platform.

Personally, I think it'd be great if prisons were overcrowded with tech company executives, managers and engineers. Or let them do gardening work, the produce of which is used for kindergarten and school meals. 

[kassy]

So that would work like smoking which is not encouraging for pace.

Kids also like to do things differently to their parents, but only a bit so they hang out on different platforms. Maybe there will be some backlash and a movement to live life off screen. At least they are banning phones in classrooms now.

If the government can hand out methadone, it can also have its own legal social media platform.

But would you be allowed to criticize lets say the handling of the pandemic there?

I guess it is one of those wicked problem which grows with us. Now we have this tech we can hardly imagine living without it. Same goes for AI and bitcoins and in a way cars and fly away holidays too.

[morganism]

Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-Dark-Web-to-the-Future-of-Privacy