Elon Musk is the father of at least 10 children. He has five with his ex Justine Musk, who has written that she felt like an employee in their marriage, rather than a partner. He secretly had twins in 2021 with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his company Neuralink; the rumor among their colleagues, Reuters reported, was that there was no romance, just IVF. Musk confirmed last month that he and Grimes, his more recent ex, are the parents of three kids, two of whom were born via surrogacy. Grimes is now suing Musk for parental rights, having asked, Vulture reported, in a now-deleted X post: tell Elon to let me see my son.

Musks many, many kids and his pattern toward the women he has them with arent just fodder for gossip. Theyre connected to Musks larger worldviewone that the billionaire owner of an increasingly chaotic social media platform is now working to spread far beyond his own family.

Musk has been called the tech worlds highest-profile pronatalist, albeit unofficially by Insider, and its clear that at least some of his views line up with the movements. The pronatalists, or natalists, as some call themselves, believe that low birth ratesespecially low birth rates among the high-achieving and really smartis the No. 1 danger plaguing the nation, and the world writ large. This ranks the number of babies women are having as more important than income inequality, gun violence, or even the continued risk of climate disaster. Really: Elon Musk has called low birth rates a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming. They also believe that the biological effects of hormonal birth control and abortionwhich Musk has linked to the crumble of civilizationcoupled with a lack of support for parents and families are driving these decreasing birth rates.

Some of these concerns do make sense: Certainly, there should be much more support for parents, especially mothers, in the United States. Subsidized child care and a health care system where childbirth doesnt cost parents $10,000 on average would be a good place to start, in my opinion as a medical sociologist with training in reproductive health and demography. Easing financial barriers to parenthood, like housing prices and the student loan crisis, would help, too.

Some of the concerns of pronatalists, though, are downright disturbing, as well as misplaced: There is no evidence that womens ability to control their fertilitya practice that has always existed, if via other meansis the main driver of low birth rates. Nor should women be responsible for fixing demographic trends with their bodies. While some pronatalists proclaim they are pro-choice, some hint at the ills of abortion or are explicitly against it. Forced births are not a viable solution to a dip in birth rates. Further, pronatalism is at least sometimes tied to racism and the great replacement theory, a belief that nonwhites and immigrants will soon outnumber white voters in Western nations.

Globally, birth rates are declining, but the reality of this is more nuanced than pronatalists often paint it as being. Demographers agree that a fertility decline does not indicate the end of babies, but rather that many women are now delaying when they have children until they feel ready. Declining birth rates are also not a worrying long-term trend: Most of us were taught at one point that resources will soon be depleted due to too much population growth. An ebb can be viewed as good news.

Instead of working to make parenthood easier for anyone who does want kids, some of the loudest proponents, namely the Silicon Valley megawealthy, have committed themselves to solving this alleged societal ailment with blunt force: by reproducing as much as possible among themselves. You might remember the bespectacled Malcolm and Simone Collins, who penned an opinion piece in the New York Post in January titled Why the World Needs More Big Families Like Ours Amid the Population Crisis (a side benefit: growing our family has made us more efficient as CEOs, they wrote). In their own reproductive journey, they are having their embryos genetically tested for mental-performance-adjacent traits, according to reporting by Insider.

Their pronatalism extends far beyond their bedrooms. The Collinses, who run a pronatalist website, are now part of a lineup for the Natalist Conference taking place in Austin, Texas, this December, which will spread the seeds of their ideology. Among the 14 other speakers is The Raw Egg Nationalist, whom some will know as the author of the book about eating raw eggs to fight globalism in the food chain, or as a star in Tucker Carlons documentary The End of Men. Another speaker is Charles Haywood, who runs The Worthy House, a Substack focused on a post-liberal future and whose Twitter bio warns that that Moloch (a mythical god of child sacrifice) is within the gates. The Natalist Conference landing page warns: By the end of the century, nearly every country on earth will have a shrinking population and economic systems dependent on reliable growth will collapse. Thousands of unique cultures and populations will be snuffed out.

For his part, Musk has donated $10 million to the University of Texas in Austin, Bloomberg reported in August, to create the Population Wellbeing Initiative (PWI), a research program tasked with generating research on his concerns about there being too few babies. The director, Dean Spears, an economist who received the grant from Musk, has written about dwindling fertility rates possibly leading humanity to end with a whimper and penned an opinion piece in the New York Times last month about the global population peaking in our lifetimes. Though not all of the PWIs research directly speaks to Musks concerns, their research program overall can be used by pronatalists to promote their beliefs. If the birth rate is really such a dire issue for humanity, its not as big a leap to think that the uptake of birth control and general autonomy for women has gone too far. (That $10 million is also the kind of funding that, say, abortion research, which has long relied on private donors, could really, really use.)

Musk doesnt just want a big family for himself, and he isnt just being a jerk to his exes. Hes hoping that everyonewell, maybe just people who are like himwill have more babies. Hes using his influence and superlative wealth to support a movement that isnt good for women. And against the backdrop of the end of Roe v. Wade, we cant afford to look away.

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Elon Musk and pronatalism: His fight with Grimes is more than media spectacle. - Slate

Of all Elon Musks exploits the Tesla cars, the SpaceX rockets, the Twitter takeover, the plans to colonize Mars his secretive brain chip company Neuralink may be the most dangerous.

What is Neuralink for? In the short term, its for helping people with paralysis. But thats not the whole answer.

Launched in 2016, the company revealed in 2019 that it had created flexible threads that can be implanted into a brain, along with a sewing-machine-like robot to do the implanting. The idea is that these threads will read signals from a paralyzed patients brain and transmit that data to an iPhone or computer, enabling the patient to control it with just their thoughts no need to tap or type or swipe.

So far, Neuralink has only done testing on animals. But in May, the company announced it had won FDA approval to run its first clinical trial in humans. Now, its recruiting paralyzed volunteers to study whether the implant enables them to control external devices. If the technology works in humans, it could improve quality of life for millions of people. Approximately 5.4 million people are living with paralysis in the US alone.

But helping paralyzed people is not Musks end goal. Thats just a step on the way to achieving a much wilder long-term ambition.

That ambition, in Musks own words, is to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence. His goal is to develop a technology that helps humans merg[e] with AI so that we wont be left behind as AI becomes more sophisticated.

This fantastical vision is not the sort of thing for which the FDA greenlights human trials. But work on helping people with paralysis? That can get a warmer reception. And so it has.

But its important to understand that this technology comes with staggering risks. Former Neuralink employees as well as experts in the field alleged that the company pushed for an unnecessarily invasive, potentially dangerous approach to the implants that can damage the brain (and apparently has done so in animal test subjects) to advance Musks goal of merging with AI.

Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment.

There are also ethical risks for society at large that go beyond just Neuralink. A number of companies are developing tech that plugs into human brains, which can decode whats going on in our minds and has the potential to erode mental privacy and supercharge authoritarian surveillance. We have to prepare ourselves for whats coming.

Neuralink is a response to one big fear: that AI will take over the world.

This is a fear thats increasingly widespread among AI leaders, who worry that we may create machines that are smarter than humans and that have the ability to deceive us and ultimately seize control from us.

In March, many of them, including Musk, signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on developing AI systems more powerful than OpenAIs GPT-4. The letter warned that AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity and went on to ask: Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?

Although Musk is not alone in warning about civilizational risk posed by AI systems, where he differs from others is in his plan for warding off the risk. The plan is basically: If you cant beat em, join em.

Musk foresees a world where AI systems that can communicate information at a trillion bits per second will look down their metaphorical noses at humans, who can only communicate at 39 bits per second. To the AI systems, wed seem useless. Unless, perhaps, we became just like them.

A big part of that, in Musks view, is being able to think and communicate at the speed of AI. Its mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output, he said in 2017. Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem.

Fast forward a half-dozen years, and you can see that Musk is still obsessed with this notion of bandwidth the rate at which computers can read out information from your brain. It is, in fact, the idea that drives Neuralink.

The Neuralink device is a brain implant, outfitted with 1,024 electrodes, that can pick up signals from a whole lot of neurons. The more electrodes youve got, the more neurons you can listen in on, and the more data youll get. Plus, the closer you can get to those neurons, the higher quality your data will be.

And the Neuralink device gets very close to the neurons. The companys procedure for implanting it requires drilling a hole in the skull and penetrating the brain.

But there are less extreme ways to go about this. Other companies are proving it. Lets break down what theyre doing and why Musk feels the need to do something different.

Neuralink isnt the only company exploring brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) for restoring peoples physical capabilities. Other companies like Synchron, Blackrock Neurotech, Paradromics, and Precision Neuroscience are also working in this space. So is the US military.

In recent years, a lot of the research thats made headlines has focused on brain implants that would translate paralyzed peoples thoughts into speech. Mark Zuckerbergs Meta, for example, is working on BCIs that could pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words in real time. (In the long term, the company says it aims to give everyone the ability to control keyboards, augmented reality glasses, and more, using just their thoughts.)

Earlier success in the BCI field focused not on speech, but on movement. In 2006, Matthew Nagle, a man with spinal cord paralysis, received a brain implant that allowed him to control a computer cursor. Soon Nagle was playing Pong using only his mind.

Nagles brain implant, developed by the research consortium BrainGate, contained a Utah array, a cluster of 100 spiky electrodes that is surgically embedded into the brain. Thats only around one-tenth of the electrodes in Neuralinks device. But it still enabled a paralyzed person to move a cursor, check email, adjust the volume or channel on a TV, and control a robotic limb. Since then, others with paralysis have achieved similar feats with BCI technology.

While early technologies like the Utah array protruded awkwardly from the skull, newer BCIs are invisible to the outside observer once theyre implanted, and some are much less invasive.

Synchrons BCI, for example, builds on stent technology thats been around since the 1980s. A stent is a metal scaffold that you can introduce into a blood vessel; it can be safely left there for decades (and has been in many cardiac patients, keeping their arteries open). Synchron uses a catheter to send a stent up into a blood vessel in the motor cortex of the brain. Once there, the stent unfurls like a flower, and sensors on it pick up signals from neurons. This has already enabled several paralyzed people to tweet and text with their thoughts.

No open brain surgery necessary. No drilling holes in the skull.

Musk himself has said that BCIs wouldnt necessarily require open brain surgery, in a telling five-minute video at Recodes Code Conference in 2016. You could go through the veins and arteries, because that provides a complete roadway to all of your neurons, he said. You could insert something basically into the jugular and...

After the audience laughed nervously, he added, It doesnt involve chopping your skull off or anything like that.

In Neuralinks early years, before the company had settled on its current approach which does involve drilling into the skull one of its research teams allegedly looked into the tamer intravascular approach, four former Neuralink employees told me. This team explored the option of delivering a device to the brain through an artery and demonstrated that it was feasible.

But by 2019, Neuralink had rejected this option, choosing instead to go with the more invasive surgical robot that implants threads directly into the brain.

Why? If the intravascular approach can restore key functioning to paralyzed patients, and also avoids some of the safety risks that come with crossing the blood-brain barrier, such as inflammation and scar tissue buildup in the brain, why opt for something more invasive than necessary?

The company isnt saying. But according to Hirobumi Watanabe, who led Neuralinks intravascular research team in 2018, the main reason was the companys obsession with maximizing bandwidth.

The goal of Neuralink is to go for more electrodes, more bandwidth, Watanabe said, so that this interface can do way more than what other technologies can do.

After all, Musk has suggested that a seamless merge with machines could enable us to do everything from enhancing our memory to uploading our minds and living forever staples of Silicon Valleys transhumanist fantasies. Which perhaps helps make sense of the companys dual mission: to create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow.

Neuralink is explicitly aiming at producing general-purpose neural interfaces, the Munich-based neuroethicist Marcello Ienca told me. To my knowledge, they are the only company that is currently planning clinical trials for implantable medical neural interfaces while making public statements about future nonmedical applications of neural implants for cognitive enhancement. To create a general-purpose technology, you need to create a seamless interface between humans and computers, enabling enhanced cognitive and sensory abilities. Achieving this vision may indeed require more invasive methods to achieve higher bandwidth and precision.

Watanabe believes Neuralink prioritized maximizing bandwidth because that serves Musks goal of creating a generalized BCI that lets us merge with AI and develop all sorts of new capacities. Thats what Elon Musk is saying, so thats what the company has to do, he said.

The intravascular approach didnt seem like it could deliver as much bandwidth as the invasive approach. Staying in the blood vessels may be safer, but the downside is that you dont have access to as many neurons. Thats the biggest reason they did not go for this approach, Watanabe said. Its rather sad. He added that he believed Neuralink was too quick to abandon the minimally invasive approach. We could have pushed this project forward.

For Tom Oxley, the CEO of Synchron, this raises a big question. The question is, does a clash emerge between the short-term goal of patient-oriented clinical health outcomes and the long-term goal of AI symbiosis? he told me. I think the answer is probably yes.

It matters what youre designing for and if you have a patient problem in mind, Oxley added. Synchron could theoretically build toward increasing bandwidth by miniaturizing its tech and going into deeper branches of the blood vessels; research shows this is viable. But, he said, we chose a point at which we think we have enough signal to solve a problem for a patient.

Ben Rapoport, a neurosurgeon who left Neuralink to found Precision Neuroscience, emphasized that any time youve got electrodes penetrating the brain, youre doing some damage to brain tissue. And thats unnecessary if your goal is helping paralyzed patients.

I dont think that tradeoff is required for the kind of neuroprosthetic function that we need to restore speech and motor function to patients with stroke and spinal cord injury, Rapoport told me. One of our guiding philosophies is that building a high-fidelity brain-computer interface system can be accomplished without damaging the brain.

To prove that you dont need Muskian invasiveness to achieve high bandwidth, Precision has designed a thin film that coats the surface of the brain with 1,024 electrodes the same number of electrodes in Neuralinks implant that deliver signals similar to Neuralinks. The film has to be inserted through a slit in the skull, but the advantage is that it sits on the brains surface without penetrating it. Rapoport calls this the Goldilocks solution, and its already been implanted in a handful of patients, recording their brain activity at high resolution.

Its key to do a very, very safe procedure that doesnt damage the brain and that is minimally invasive in nature, Rapoport said. And furthermore, that as we scale up the bandwidth of the system, the risk to the patient should not increase.

This makes sense if your most cherished ambition is to help patients improve their lives as much as possible without courting undue risk. But Musk, we know, has other ambitions.

What Neuralink doesnt seem to be very interested in is that while a more invasive approach might offer advantages in terms of bandwidth, it raises greater ethical and safety concerns, Ienca told me. At least, I havent heard any public statement in which they indicate how they intend to address the greater privacy, safety, and mental integrity risks generated by their approach. This is strange because according to international research ethics guidelines it wouldnt be ethical to use a more invasive technology if the same performance can be achieved using less invasive methods.

More invasive methods, by their nature, can do real damage to the brain as Neuralinks experiments on animals have shown.

Some Neuralink employees have come forward to speak on behalf of the pigs and monkeys used in the companys experiments, saying they suffered and died at higher rates than necessary because the company was rushing and botching surgeries. Musk, they alleged, was pushing the staff to get FDA approval quickly after hed repeatedly predicted the company would soon start human trials.

One example of a grisly error: In 2021, Neuralink implanted 25 out of 60 pigs with devices that were the wrong size. Afterward, the company killed all the affected pigs. Staff told Reuters that the mistake could have been averted if theyd had more time to prepare.

Veterinary reports indicate that Neuralinks monkeys also suffered gruesome fates. In one monkey, a bit of the device broke off during implantation in the brain. The monkey scratched and yanked until part of the device was dislodged, and infections took hold. Another monkey developed bleeding in her brain, with the implant leaving parts of her cortex tattered. Both animals were euthanized.

Last December, the US Department of Agricultures Office of Inspector General launched an investigation into possible animal welfare violations at Neuralink. The company is also facing a probe from the Department of Transportation over worries that implants removed from monkeys brains may have been packaged and moved unsafely, potentially exposing people to pathogens.

Past animal experiments [at Neuralink] revealed serious safety concerns stemming from the products invasiveness and rushed, sloppy actions by company employees, said the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit that opposes animal testing, in a May statement. As such, the public should continue to be skeptical of the safety and functionality of any device produced by Neuralink.

Nevertheless, the FDA has cleared the company to begin human trials.

The company has provided sufficient information to support the approval of its IDE [investigational device exemption] application to begin human trials under the criteria and requirements of the IDE approval, the FDA said in a statement to Vox, adding, The agencys focus for determining approval of an IDE is based on assessing the safety profile for potential subjects, ensuring risks are appropriately minimized and communicated to subjects, and ensuring the potential for benefit, including the value of the knowledge to be gained, outweighs the risk.

Beyond what the surgeries will mean for the individuals who get recruited for Neuralinks trials, there are ethical concerns about what BCI technology means for society more broadly. If high-bandwidth implants of the type Musk is pursuing really do allow unprecedented access to whats happening in peoples brains, that could make dystopian possibilities more likely. Some neuroethicists argue that the potential for misuse is so great that we need revamped human rights laws to protect us before we move forward.

For one thing, our brains are the final privacy frontier. Theyre the seat of our personal identity and our most intimate thoughts. If those precious three pounds of goo in our craniums arent ours to control, what is?

In China, the government is already mining data from some workers brains by having them wear caps that scan their brainwaves for emotional states. In the US, the military is looking into neurotechnologies to make soldiers more fit for duty more alert, for instance.

And some police departments around the world have been exploring brain fingerprinting technology, which analyzes automatic responses that occur in our brains when we encounter stimuli we recognize. (The idea is that this could enable police to interrogate a suspects brain; their brain responses would be more negative for faces or phrases they dont recognize than for faces or phrases they do recognize.) Brain fingerprinting tech is scientifically questionable, yet Indias police have used it since 2003, Singapores police bought it in 2013, and the Florida state police signed a contract to use it in 2014.

Imagine a scenario where your government uses BCIs for surveillance or interrogations. The right to not self-incriminate enshrined in the US Constitution could become meaningless in a world where the authorities are empowered to eavesdrop on your mental state without your consent.

Experts also worry that devices like those being built by Neuralink may be vulnerable to hacking. What happens if youre using one of them and a malicious actor intercepts the Bluetooth connection, changing the signals that go to your brain to make you more depressed, say, or more compliant?

Neuroethicists refer to that as brainjacking. This is still hypothetical, but the possibility has been demonstrated in proof-of-concept studies, Ienca told me in 2019. A hack like this wouldnt require that much technological sophistication.

Finally, consider how your psychological continuity or fundamental sense of self could be disrupted by the imposition of a BCI or by its removal. In one study, an epileptic woman whod been given a BCI came to feel such a radical symbiosis with it that, she said, It became me. Then the company that implanted the device in her brain went bankrupt and she was forced to have it removed. She cried, saying, I lost myself.

To ward off the risk of a hypothetical all-powerful AI in the future, Musk wants to create a symbiosis between your brain and machines. But the symbiosis generates its own very real risks and they are upon us now.

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Elon Musks Neuralink wants to merge your brain with AI at what cost? - Vox.com

Benzinga - by Bibhu Pattnaik, Benzinga Staff Writer.

Two of the tech industry's most influential figures, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, have been the subject of intense scrutiny and admiration.

What Happened: A biography of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson sheds light on their similarities, differences and the nuances that defined their leadership styles, according to Insider.

Both leaders, according to Isaacson, exhibited a certain "dark streak" in their personalities. This often manifested as brutally candid feedback, pushing their respective teams toward perfection. However, this approach, while driving innovation, sometimes bordered on being excessively critical, Isaacson noted.

Another shared trait was their tendency to overshadow their co-founders (Steve Wozniak at Apple Inc. and Martin Eberhard at Tesla Inc), according to Isaacson.

Also Read: Steve Jobs Shares Words of Wisdom: 'You've Got To Find What You Love, Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish'

Musk's and Jobs' ambitious nature also reportedly led them to set challenging deadlines, driving rapid progress but at times straining team morale.

However, Isaacson noted one stark contrast between the two was Musk's deep involvement in engineering. Unlike Jobs, who was more design-centric, Musk delved into the intricacies of manufacturing, emphasizing continuous innovation.

"Musk spends about 10 times more of his mental and physical presence on the factory lines as he does in the design room, and he believes that designing the machine that makes the machine is more important than designing the original product," Isaacson said at an event organized by the Economic Club of New York last month. "He feels that you can't be innovative unless you're iterating on an hourly basis."

Now Read: Elon Musk Says You Need 2 Things To Be 'Fully Happy,' If You Lack 1 You'll Be 'Half Happy'

This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

Photo: Shutterstock

2023 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

Read the original article on Benzinga

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Elon Musk Vs. Steve Jobs: Walter Isaacson Delves Into The Minds Of Two Tech Titans By Benzinga - Investing.com UK

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Elon Musk's X still needs the 'legacy media' he so resents - Financial Times

X closed its Australian office after Elon Musk's buyout

An Australian regulator has fined Elon Musk's social media platform X A$610,500 ($386,000) for failing to cooperate with a probe into anti-child abuse practices, a blow to a company that has struggled to keep advertisers amid complaints it is going soft on moderating content. The e-Safety Commission fined X, the platform Mr Musk rebranded from Twitter, saying it failed to respond to questions including how long it took to respond to reports of child abuse material on the platform and the methods it used to detect it.

Though small compared to the $44 billion Mr Musk paid for the website in October 2022, the fine is a reputational hit for a company that has seen a continuous revenue decline as advertisers cut spending on a platform that has stopped most content moderation and reinstated thousands of banned accounts.

Most recently the EU said it was investigating X for potential violation of its new tech rules after the platform was accused of failing to rein in disinformation in relation to Hamas's attack on Israel.

"If you've got answers to questions, if you're actually putting people, processes and technology in place to tackle illegal content at scale, and globally, and if it's your stated priority, it's pretty easy to say," Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in an interview.

"The only reason I can see to fail to answer important questions about illegal content and conduct happening on platforms would be if you don't have answers," added Inman Grant, who was a public policy director for X until 2016.

X closed its Australian office after Mr Musk's buyout, so there was no local representative to respond to Reuters. A request for comment sent to the San Francisco-based company's media email address was not immediately answered.

Under Australian laws that took effect in 2021, the regulator can compel internet companies to give information about their online safety practices or face a fine. If X refuses to pay the fine, the regulator can pursue the company in court, Grant said.

After taking the company private, Mr Musk said in a post that "removing child exploitation is priority #1". But the Australian regulator said that when it asked X how it prevented child grooming on the platform, X responded that it was "not a service used by large numbers of young people".

X told the regulator available anti-grooming technology was "not of sufficient capability or accuracy to be deployed on Twitter".

Inman Grant said the commission also issued a warning to Alphabet's Google for noncompliance with its request for information about handling of child abuse content, calling the search engine giant's responses to some questions "generic". Google said it had cooperated with the regulator and was disappointed by the warning.

"We remain committed to these efforts and collaborating constructively and in good faith with the e-Safety Commissioner, government and industry on the shared goal of keeping Australians safer online," said Google's director of government affairs and public policy for Australia, Lucinda Longcroft.

X's noncompliance was more serious, the regulator said, including failure to answer questions about how long it took to respond to reports of child abuse, steps it took to detect child abuse in livestreams and its numbers of content moderation, safety and public policy staff.

The company confirmed to the regulator that it had cut 80% of its workforce globally and has no public policy staff in Australia, compared to two before Mr Musk's takeover.

X told the regulator its proactive detection of child abuse material in public posts dropped after Mr Musk took the company private.

The company told the regulator it did not use tools to detect the material in private messages because "the technology is still in development", the regulator said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

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Musk's X Fined $3,86,000 Over Lack Of Information On Child Abuse Content - NDTV

Australias online safety watchdog said X provided no answers to some questions including how many staff remained on the trust and safety team that worked on preventing harmful and illegal content.

Australias online safety watchdog has fined X - the social media platform formerly known as Twitter - 610,500 Australian dollars (366,742) for failing to fully explain how it tackled child sexual exploitation content.

The countrys eSafety Commission describes itself as the worlds first government agency dedicated to keeping people safe online.

The commission issued legal transparency notices early this year to X and other platforms questioning what they were doing to tackle a proliferation of child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion and the livestreaming of child sexual abuse.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said X and Google had not complied with the notices because both companies had failed to adequately respond to a number of questions.

The platform renamed X by its new owner Elon Musk was the worst offender, providing no answers to some questions including how many staff remained on the trust and safety team that worked on preventing harmful and illegal content since Musk took over, Inman Grant said.

I think theres a degree of defiance there, she said.If youve got a basic HR system or payroll, youll know how many people are on each team."

After Musk completed his acquisition of the company in October last year, he drastically cut costs and shed thousands of jobs.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

X could challenge the fine in the Australian Federal Court. But the court could impose a fine of up to AU$780,000 (468,512) per day since March when the commission first found the platform had not complied with the transparency notice.

The commission would continue to pressure X through notices to become more transparent, Inman Grant said, adding:They can keep stonewalling and well keep fining them."

The commission issued Google with a formal warning for providing generic responses to specific questions, a statement said.

Google regional director Lucinda Longcroft said the company had developed a range of technologies to proactively detect, remove and report child sexual abuse material.

Protecting children on our platforms is the most important work we do, Longcroft said in a statement. Since our earliest days, we have invested heavily in the industrywide fight to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material, she added.

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X (formerly Twitter) fined for failing to tackle child abuse content - Euronews

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See the article here:

Elon Musk's Tesla just got into a weird new business: selling beer - The Albany Herald

US regulators are again taking Elon Musk to court, and hes not pleased. Musk, who has previously complained of harassment from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), responded to the latest episode by saying a comprehensive overhaul of such agencies is sorely needed and that punitive action should be taken against those who have abused their regulatory power for personal and political gain.

This victimisation lark goes down well with Musks base, but his ire is misplaced.

Among the SECs complaints is that Musk, when building a position in Twitter before last years takeover, failed to heed laws stating that investors who accumulate more than 5 per cent of a companys stock must disclose their position within 10 days. Does this really matter?

Well, yes. Shares soared after Musks Twitter position was eventually revealed; anyone who sold in the days before his belated disclosure can credibly argue they missed out on profits by selling at artificially low prices.

[Elon Musk: The confusing, bizarre life of a risk-seeking billionaire]

[Elon Musks vision for free speech on X tested by Israel-Hamas war misinformation]

Exasperated regulators are right to insist that the same rules apply to everyone even Musk.

Originally posted here:

Elon Musk angry as he falls foul of US regulators again - The Irish Times

Twitter has never been the most popular social media platform. Its never been the coolest, its never had the most features, and its never been the biggest moneymaker. It has, at times, been the weirdest, and many groups given to high-velocity posting have maintained valuable communities there over the years. But Twitters X factorsigh, pun intendedhas always been its strength as a platform for news.

In moments of crisis, Twitter has been essentialno more so in times of bloody conflict. Not only do professional journalists relay on-the-ground realities, but so do eyewitnesses and citizen journalists. War being war, the fruits of Twitters role as an information funnel have never been perfect. But theyve been a helpful first draft of the news.

In contrast, under the ownership of Elon Musk, who bought the platform for $44 billion last October, the platform now called X has become a vortex of false claims and doctored footage. Its a fog-of-war machine.

Thats been the unmistakable reality in the days after Hamas deadly terrorist attack on Israeli civiliansa land, air, and sea operation that has killed at least 1,200 people in Israel and led to another 900 deaths in Gaza following Israels military retaliation.

Musks changes to the foundation of how Twitter works have not only rendered Twitter useless as a means of making sense of the conflict as (or even hours after) it unfolds, but made it actively counterproductive for users trying to figure out whats going on. As Musk and Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino have rolled back the platforms rules of engagement and rid their ranks of the content-moderation teams and tools that actually keep X trustworthy, theyve also put in place a system that fundamentally incentivizes the spread of misinformation during times of mass panic and confusion, in part because X is now a platform that pays for viral content.

The end result is that Twitter, more so than any other platform right now, is fertile ground for a new kind of war profiteering.

On Oct. 8, the day after the initial Hamas attack, an account called @AGCast4 posted a video supposedly showing a Hamas rocket attack in Israel. The BBC journalist and fact-checker Shayan Sardarizadeh debunked it: The footage wasnt from the ongoing conflict or any real-life war but from the video game Arma 3. The account wasand still isverified with a blue check mark.

Two days later, the investigative outfit Bellingcat, known for its visual forensics work, had to debunk some fake news about itself. A doctored BBC video was circulating on social media, claiming that Bellingcats journalists had confirmed Ukrainian weapon sales to Hamas. Weve reached no such conclusions or made any such claims, Bellingcats official account wrote on Twitter. In a screenshot, Bellingcat showed that a Twitter account called Geopoliitics & Empire had shared the video. Like the account that posted video game footage, this account was also verified with a blue check mark. (The account owner deleted the post and called it an honest mistake, simultaneously posting a meme captioned We are going to be famous.)

If a user had taken even a yearlong hiatus from Twitter and redownloaded the app this week to follow the goings-on of the emerging war, theyd be disoriented. Why are these accounts posting nonsense, and why are they allowed to do so without any ramifications? Twitter has always had problems with the spread of misinformation, but the current site experience is noticeably degraded. So, why is that?

First, the blue check mark doesnt mean what it used to. Verification once signified that Twitter had confirmed the identity of a person or organization of note: a journalist, a public health organization, or even a professional athlete. But in April, Twitter began removing check marks from all but the most famous.

But now anyone who pays for Twitter Bluerecently renamed X Premiumcan just buy a blue check mark for $8 a month, along with the veneer that they are a notable person or a legitimate source of information. Just last week, X removed headlines from linked news articles, making the site exponentially more confusing to scroll through.

There is a difference between platforms that take steps to mitigate harm, platforms that have not yet started taking these steps, and platforms that take steps to undo processes that mitigated harm, Chinmayi Arun, the executive director of Yale Law Schools Information Society Project, told me. Users who are accustomed to a different version of X may not know how to process or understand what they are seeing now.

Its been mere days since the war broke out, but European regulators are already peeved with what theyve seen. In a posted letter to Musk, European commissioner Thierry Breton asked the X owner to comply with the continents sweeping Digital Services Act. He urged the billionaire to respond within 24 hours with assurances that hes taking the spread of illegal content and disinformation seriously or face legal penalties.

Musk responded, Our policy is that everything is open source and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports.

Musk has delivered on a lot of what he promised. He campaigned to buy Twitter on a platform of restoring free speech, which meant loosening the sites rules, firing most of its content moderation staff, removing blue check marks from the accounts of professional journalists, and prioritizing subscription revenue over advertising.

What were seeing right now is the culmination of all of those factors: a degraded site that cant be trusted for sensitive breaking news.

There are several additional perks for paying $8 for a blue check mark. The first is that paying users now get priority placement in a tweets replies. Take a Musk tweet, for examplescroll down and itll take a while before you find any reply without a check mark next to it. (Good way for a billionaire to insulate himself from criticism, huh?) But they also get increased reach across the siteespecially on users algorithmic news feeds.

Theres another perk thats even more dangerous. In July, Musk began paying out the most engaging users on Xas long as they had bought a check mark. Twitter rewarded a number of prominent accountsmostly far-right influencers, as the Washington Post reportedwith big paychecks. Andrew Tate, a popular right-wing internet personality facing rape and human trafficking charges in Romania, received $20,000 in his first check alone.

Twitter lagged far behind other platforms that have been paying out top influencers for yearsYouTube began doing so in 2007. But the rules about who is eligible to receive payouts, and what rules they have to follow, are vague. By promising honestly very opaque parameters, said Christine Tran, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, the floodgates open for accounts to generate content about major events that arouses engagement without discriminationregardless of what good that information serves.

X did not respond to a request for comment, but according to its website, sensitive events, including war, are not eligible for monetization. That fine print, though, doesnt seem to stop would-be profiteers from trying, asking the platforms few remaining moderators to differentiate eligible posts from rule-breaking onesespecially since X doesnt seem to be punishing any misleading posts about war. The unclear rules about what engagement [leads to] monetization leads to See what sticks to the wall incentives to aggregate engagement, Tran said. It costs nothing to post (yet), but a viral post could lead to untold profit. Low risks, high reward.

Even if fake-news peddlers are unable to profit directly from viral posts about war, there are perks to merely being allowed to post them at all: Mass engagement like this can help an account build an audienceand from there, they can profit off future viral posts, sell stuff to their followers, and monetize their newfound following off-platform. In the creator economy, all attention can be good attention. But on X, the race for clicks is simultaneously a race to the bottom.

Twitter isnt the first platform thats financially rewarded the spread of misinformation, but its policy decisions have made it all the more vulnerable to abuse, an own goal that hurts not only trust in the platform but also users understanding of a major geopolitical event.

Instead, Musk has promoted the use of Community Notesa crowdsourced fact-checking system formerly known as Birdwatchand, in recent days, has claimed to have increased the speed at which these notes appear on misleading content. Further complicating things, a recent report found that hes also stopped allowing users to self-report political misinformation on specific posts. Community Notes is a helpful system (when its not wrong!), but Twitter is ultimately outsourcing the job of content moderation from in-house professionals to unpaid volunteers. And fundamentally, leaving bad information up with a user-generated addendum is not the same as removing or hiding it with a warning label, as Twitters old guard did.

Shannon McGregor, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hills media and journalism school, has been arguing for years that the most powerful people on a platform shouldnt be treated with kid gloves but taken more seriously. That includes not only political leadersremember Donald Trumps ongoing feuds with Twitter?but also users paying for greater reach and the chance to make money.

Those with the greatest reach and power should be subject to at least the same policies as all users, if not perhaps either more stringent or more holistically enforced versions of those policies, McGregor said. Thats where we see the danger. Its not like some random person breaking a content moderation rule, which is a problem. Its a [bigger] problem when someone who has a ton of power and attention does it.

Musk may want to prioritize free speech and being open source, but millions of people rely on his platform for reliable information. And, as its played out time after time, there are often very scary real-world consequences when conspiracy theories and fraudulent stories are allowed to run rampant. The only thing thats transparent is the owners inattention.

Read the original post:

X/Twitter is useless for Israel and Gaza news. Here's how Elon Musk caused it. - Slate

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EU opens probe into Elon Musk's X over Israel-Hamas war misinformation - Financial Times

Meanwhile, disinformation about the conflict in the Middle East continues to rage on the platform, driven primarily by verified accounts.

Yesterday evening, Xs Trust and Safety team, which is currently leaderless after Ella Irwin resigned in June, wrote on X that it had removed newly created Hamas-affiliated accounts and was working with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), an industry body that helps coordinate content moderation across social media platforms, to try and prevent terrorist content from being distributed online.

The Safety teams statement also lauded the user-generated Community Notes system and said new accounts were being enrolled to address the flood of disinformation on the platform. The Safety team also revealed that it had removed several hundreds accounts for attempting to manipulate trending topics.

Since Musk took control of the platform just under a year ago, he has restructured it to encourage engagement over everything else. As a result, accounts that subscribe to X Premium now have a monetary incentive to post content that is engaging regardless of how truthful it is. This was highlighted clearly on yesterday night when, at the same time as the Safety team posted its update, a new viral piece of disinformation was spreading unchecked on X.

Sulaiman Ahmed, a self-described investigative journalist, posted the false claim that the Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City, one of the oldest churches in the world, was destroyed by an Israeli bomb. The post received over 1 million views in the span of three hours.

Ahmed is a subscriber to X Premium, which means his posts are given priority in search results and newsfeeds over other users, and he also allows followers to subscribe to his content directly through X, allowing him to profit from increased engagement with his content.

Yesterday evening, the church posted an update on Facebook dismissing the claim, adding that it was taking in refugees left homeless following Israels bombing campaign in retaliation to the Hamas attack that began on Saturday morning.

Despite the churchs rebuttaland Ahmed himself subsequently admitting that the church was untouchedthe disinformation spread far and wide on X. WIRED conducted a search for the Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church on X this morning and found that Ahmeds original false post was the third result. Multiple other posts from verified users all repeating the lie were also promoted at the top of the results, none of which had Community Notes attached to them.

Eliot Higgins, founder of investigative journalist outlet Bellingcat, pointed out that the false information was being shared by a wide variety of accounts, all of which had one thing in common: a subscription to X Premium.

If Musk hadn't made it so hard to research disinformation on his website, this case would be a good way to show the growing overlap of the pro-Assad, the pro-Putin, and the US alt-right griftospheres, Higgins wrote on X, adding: Musk hasn't given the voiceless a voice, he's just dragged us all down into the swamp, and the only people who truly benefit are shameless grifters.

Read more:

Elon Musk Is Personally Undermining Xs Efforts to Curb Israel-Hamas War Disinformation - WIRED