BURKINA Faso's football team are hoping to continue their run at the Africa Cup of Nations all the way to the final to "give joy" to the people of their troubled west African country where the president was this week ousted in a military coup.
DANIIL Medvedev won a tempestuous Australian Open semi-final against Stefanos Tsitsipas on Friday and will face Rafael Nadal, who is bidding to become the all-time men's Grand Slam leader, in Sunday's final.
BRAZIL goalkeeper Alisson Becker had two red cards overturned by VAR reviews as Brazil hung on for a controversial 1-1 World Cup qualifier draw with Ecuador on Thursday, with both teams having a player dismissed.
THE Covid-19 pandemic has irrevocably changed the world of entertainment.
Foreign currency trader Brownson Lukas is being held in police custody after appearing in court on a charge of assault involving domestic violence.
THE South Koreans are really doing the things that need to be done when it comes to mind-blowing television shows and we are absolutely here for it all.
URANIUM exploring and mining companies were the best performing companies on the Namibian bourse last year and leading the pack was Paladin Energy, which saw its share price up 260%.
MOTORISTS and businesses will have to fork out 30 cents extra for petrol and 40 cents extra for diesel.
MATTHEW DLAMINI and LAZARUS AMUKESHE
AN ENERGY system centred on renewable energy can help resolve many social, economic, health and environmental challenges that African countries, including Namibia, face.
FRANTIŠEK VRABEL
IN THE WAR on disinformation, the enemy can be hard to determine. Journalists, politicians, governments, and even grandparents have been accused of enabling the spread of online falsehoods.
While none of these groups is entirely innocent, the real adversary is more mundane. As Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified late last year, social media’s own algorithms are what makes disinformation accessible.
Since its launch in 2004, Facebook has grown from a students’ social networking site into a surveillance monster that destroys social cohesion and democracy worldwide.
Facebook collects troves of user data – including intimate facts, like body weight and pregnancy status – to map the social DNA of its users. The company then sells this information to anyone – from shampoo manufacturers to Russian and Chinese intelligence services – who wants to ‘micro-target’ its 2,9 billion users. In this way, Facebook allows third parties to manipulate minds and trade in ‘human futures’: Predictive models of the choices individuals’ likely will make.
REAL-WORLD IMPACT
Around the world, Facebook has been used to sow distrust in democratic institutions. Its algorithms have facilitated real-world violence, from genocide in Myanmar to the recruitment of terrorists in South America, West Africa, and the Middle East.
Lies about election fraud in the United States, promoted by former president Donald Trump, inundated Facebook in the lead-up to the 6 January riots.
In Europe, Facebook enabled Belarusian strongman Aleksandr Lukashenko’s perverse efforts to use migrants as weapons against the European Union.
Efforts to mitigate Facebook’s threat to democracy so far have failed miserably. The ‘Facebook Files’, published by The Wall Street Journal, confirm that Facebook takes action on “as little as 3-5% of hate speech”.
Facebook has given users the ability to opt out of custom and political ads, but this is a token gesture. That is not enough. The micro-targeting at the root of Facebook’s business model relies on artificial intelligence to attract users’ attention, maximise engagement, and disable critical thinking.
To stop the world’s addiction to fake news and lies, lawmakers must recognise the disinformation crisis for what it is and take similar action, starting with appropriate regulation of micro-targeting.
The problem is that no one outside Facebook knows how the company’s complex algorithms work – and it could take months, if not years, to decode them. This means that regulators will have no choice but to depend on Facebook’s own people to guide them through the factory.
Regulating social media algorithms seems complicated, but it is low hanging fruit compared to even greater digital hazards on the horizon. ‘Deepfakes’ – the AI-based large-scale manipulation of videos and images to sway opinion – is barely a topic of conversation. While lawmakers fret over the threats posed by traditional content, deepfakes pose an even greater challenge to individual privacy, democracy, and national security.
FRIGHTENING FUTURE
Meanwhile, Facebook is becoming more dangerous. A recent investigation by MIT Technology Review found that Facebook funds misinformation by “paying millions of ad dollars to bankroll clickbait actors” through its advertising platform. And CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to build a metaverse, “a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality”, should frighten regulators everywhere. Just imagine the potential damage those unregulated AI algorithms could cause if they are permitted to create a new immersive reality for billions of people.
In a statement after recent hearings in Washington, DC, Zuckerberg repeated an offer he has made before: Regulate us. “I don’t believe private companies should make all of the decisions on their own.”
Zuckerberg is correct. But Facebook has a responsibility to act as well. Until Facebook opens its algorithms to scrutiny – guided by its own experts – the war on disinformation will remain unwinnable, and democracies around the world will continue to be at the mercy of an unscrupulous, renegade industry.
* František Vrabel is CEO and founder of Semantic Visions, a Prague-based analytics firm that collects and analyses 90% of the world’s online news content.
– Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2022.
The Namibian, Thursday 27 Jan 2022
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