Thursday, October 10, 2024

A social media referee

Hi everyone, it's Aisha in San Francisco. A new organization is trying to give social media users more power. But first...Three things you n

A new organization is trying to give social media users more power. But first...

Three things you need to know today:

• Another day, another Apple senior executive retirement
• Meta expands its AI chatbot to users in the UK and Brazil
• Amazon has developed an AI tool to help drivers figure out delivery priorities

A place to complain 

If you post at all on social media, you may have run into a situation where your post was taken down. Maybe the site's algorithm thought what you put up was offensive or insensitive, or maybe someone reported it because they didn't like it. Either way, if you've had a post taken down, the only way to get it back is by making an appeal to the platform. 

A Gen Z user who has been on Instagram since she was 12 years old, for example, told me that a video she posted of her high school friends playing water tag was taken down after it was incorrectly flagged as bullying, which violated the site's content policy. She appealed the takedown and eventually had the post restored after a few days.

But it's not always that straightforward. Sometimes a post is never restored, simply because an AI-powered content moderation system (or a human) made a mistake. A breast cancer awareness post could be improperly flagged as nudity, for example, or a celebrity fan account mistakenly labeled as inauthentic. Those mistakes matter because violating content policies can lead to deleted content, account suspensions or other restrictions for users on the site.

A new group in the EU is trying to help solve that issue. Called the Appeals Centre Europe, it's an independent body that will give European users of Meta Platforms Inc.'s Facebook, ByteDance Ltd.'s TikTok and Google's YouTube another way to push back if they disagree with decisions to take down or leave up content. 

"It's going to recalibrate the balance between user and platform," the Appeals Centre Chief Executive Officer Thomas Hughes told me. It's going to give everybody "the opportunity to challenge decisions about the content that they post," he said.  

Meta has been experimenting with that idea for years through its Oversight Board, an organization it funds that helps review disputes about content on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. It sometimes works well, like when the Oversight Board convinced Meta to clarify its policies on AI-generated media or take down deepfake nudes of celebrities.

But the board also has serious limitations. It often takes months to make a decision, which in the world of social media can feel like decades. It doesn't have the power to actually make Meta do anything (like when Meta ignored the board's advice on drug-related posts). And it's funded by Meta itself, which creates questions of independence. Overall though, I would say the Oversight Board has been pretty successful. 

The Appeals Centre (which received funding from the Oversight Board's trust) will try the same approach with multiple social media platforms. The idea isn't foolproof, as my colleague pointed out earlier this week, mainly because it costs money to make an appeal and the decisions aren't binding, but it's worth a shot. At a time when social media platforms exert their influence over billions of people, giving users a little more power seems like a good thing.

The big story

Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan is the central figure in the Biden administration's antitrust crackdown — and the face of the backlash from Big Tech to Big Pharma over the government's squeeze on corporate power. 

One to watch

Get fully charged

Google DeepMind scientists share the Nobel Prize in chemistry for research into proteins.

Elon Musk prepares to unveil the robotaxi he is betting will propel Tesla forward.

The man an HBO film suggests is the inventor of Bitcoin says he is not Satoshi Nakamoto.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says cheaper computing power will be needed to get to "reasoning" AI.

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