Monthly Archives: June 2020

On Wednesday, Facebook, possibly struggling to get out from under the realisation that it is probably now the only thing standing between Joe Biden and the US presidency, launched a PR blitz about new measures it was taking to clean up its act on political advertising and related matters. To a sceptical observer, it looked rather like a diversionary tactic to distract media attention from a more embarrassing Facebook-related story of the week, namely the conviction of Maria Ressa, the Philippiness most prominent independent journalist, on trumped-up libel charges brought by the Facebook-exploiting Duterte regime, in whose side she has been a courageous thorn.

This cynical conjecture was boosted by the feeble content of the Facebook announcements. First of all, it is going to block ads from foreign state media during the US election in the run-up to the presidential election. Second, Facebook is going to mount a massive campaign to persuade people to go out and vote. And third, its going to give Facebook and Instagram users the option to turn off political adverts when they appear or to block them using app settings.

Ponder these for a moment. Banning foreign states from the election campaign: translated to a British context, its like Channel 4 News announcing that it will not run ads by Russia or China during a UK election. Whatever this is, it aint news. Then theres the dramatic announcement that a commercial company is going to encourage people to go out and vote. This sparks two thoughts: first, what distinguishes it from advocating motherhood and apple pie? The second is about power: we already know from an experiment during the midterm elections in the US that a Facebook get out the vote campaign had a tangible impact on voter turnout, in itself an interesting commentary on the power of a commercial company in a democracy. And finally theres the gracious concession to give users the option not to see political ads ie ones that have the paid for by political disclaimer on them that would otherwise be placed before them by the algorithms that curate their Facebook feeds. Wow!

To hear a liberal talk like this about a company whose ignorance enabled ethnic cleansing in Myanmar takes the biscuit

Next, let us consider some of the dogs that didnt bark, to borrow an idea from Sherlock Holmes. Ads from foreign states will be banned, but what about poisonous ads from a domestic political entity? Great play is made of Facebooks earnest desire to encourage people to vote, but one of the things we know from the 2016 election is that a critical power its targeted advertising system gives to political advertisers is the capacity to suppress turnout. The Trump campaign used the technology to target 13.5 million idealistic white liberals, young women and African Americans in 16 battleground states to try and dissuade them from voting for Hillary Clinton. And, finally, giving users the option to opt out of overtly political ads neatly places all the responsibility on them, conveniently enabling the platform to avoid it.

One general principle underpins all these fatuous concessions: none of them affects Facebooks advertising revenues in any significant way. Some users may not see political ads, but the campaigns still buy ads and Facebook still pockets the money.

For me, the most interesting thing about Wednesdays farrago was the prominent role assigned in it to Nick Clegg, formerly deputy prime minister of the UK and now a bagman for the Facebook supreme leader. Listening to him on the Today programme, one wondered how he could come to countenance giving Trump a clearer run at a second term.

One answer, suggested by Anne Applebaum in her study of the rationales offered by senior Republican politicians who have found ways of accommodating themselves to Trump, is the claim that they can do more good by being on the inside. Funnily enough, this was the rationale also used by Clegg when he went over to the dark side. Im joining Facebook, he declared, to build bridges between politics and tech. Its time that we harnessed big tech to the cause of progress and optimism. I believe that Facebook can lead the way.

To hear a former liberal talk like this about a company whose carelessness and ignorance enabled ethnic cleansing and genocide in Myanmar to take just one example from a long list of Facebook outrages really takes the biscuit. It would have been more credible if he had avoided the preposterous claptrap about building bridges and just cited the money and the stock options. As HL Mencken might have said: if youre going to sell your soul, make sure you get a good price. And Clegg did.

Foreign exchangeA sombre piece by Daron Acemoglu of MIT in Foreign Affairs. He argues that democracy heads towards collapse like people towards bankruptcy: first slowly, then overnight.

Fickle financiersThe menace of private equity. A terrific essay on openDemocracy on the most pernicious form of modern capitalism.

Alone againA lovely New Yorker piece by Peter Schjeldahl on Edward Hoppers studies of solitude in his painting.

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Nick Clegg is on the wrong side of history at Facebook - The Guardian

Facebook said it has taken down Trump campaign ads on the social network that contained a symbol used by Nazis to designate political prisoners. Evan Vucci/AP hide caption

Facebook said it has taken down Trump campaign ads on the social network that contained a symbol used by Nazis to designate political prisoners.

Updated at 9:54 p.m. ET

Facebook on Thursday said it removed campaign posts and advertisements from the Trump campaign featuring an upside down red triangle symbol once used by Nazis to identify political opponents.

The posts, according to a Facebook spokesperson, violated the social network's policy against hate.

"Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group's symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol," the spokesperson told NPR.

One of the political advertisements claimed that "dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem." The ad went on to say protesters are destroying America's cities by rioting. "It's absolute madness," the ad said.

Some prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were identified with colored inverted triangles sewn onto uniforms to allow SS guards to identify the alleged grounds for being detained, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Trump campaign responded by drawing a lighthearted comparison to the red triangle symbol: "This is an emoji."

Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said that some products are sold online that use the inverted red triangle in antifa imagery, though experts said it is not a commonly adopted symbol among anti-fascist activists.

"We would note that Facebook still has an inverted red triangle emoji in use, which looks exactly the same, so it's curious that they would target only this ad," Murtaugh said.

The campaign also said that the symbol is not in the Anti-Defamation League Hate Symbols Database.

In an interview with NPR, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, pointed out that the database is not a collection of historical Nazi imagery.

"It's a database of symbols commonly used by modern extremist groups and white supremacists in the United States," he said.

Greenblatt said removing the posts should not have been a hard call. He said the Trump campaign should apologize.

"Intentionally or otherwise, using symbols that were once used by the Nazis is not a good look for someone running for the White House," he said. "It isn't difficult for one to criticize a political opponent without using Nazi-era imagery."

Earlier Greenblatt had tweeted that "ignorance is no excuse for using Nazi-related symbols."

Facebook's action is the latest salvo between Trump and social media companies, which the president has attacked as biased for placing warning labels and removing posts that violate terms of service.

The removal of the Trump campaign's Facebook posts, which had already accrued more than a million impressions, was a rare move by the social network of more than 2.5 billion users, which has taken a permissive approach to most political advertisements.

"So in a way, it's kind of closing the barn door after all of the horses have gotten out of the barn," said Sarah Roberts, an assistant professor of information studies at UCLA who studies content moderation.

Roberts said for the Trump campaign, the advertisement is beneficial regardless of what Facebook's reaction.

"They get to circulate the ads for some period of time, and then they get to capitalize on a narrative that I believe to be demonstrably false, that they are somehow censored or impeded from sharing their perspectives on social media," Roberts said.

Unlike Twitter, which banned political ads and has added fact-checking labels to Trump tweets, Facebook has taken a more hands-off approach, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg doubling down on the influential social network's free speech absolutism. Zuckerberg has said it is not Facebook's job to determine what the truth is and that voting is the best way to hold elected leaders accountable.

According to the Facebook spokesperson, it is not the first time the platform has removed content from Trump in recent months. In March, Facebook took down advertisements from the Trump campaign that made misleading claims about the 2020 census. In other instances, though, such as in an ad in which Trump wrote of street protesters, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," Facebook took no action.

The ADL's Greenblatt said his group has been urging Facebook to take a harder stance against intolerance on the platform.

"The one thing has been consistent with Facebook is the inconsistency," Greenblatt said. "It's hard to countenance how some things go up and stay up that are clearly egregious. They have an outsized role to play in the political conversation, and making sure they push prejudice out of the political conversation is not partisan. It's a matter of principle."

Facebook's move on Thursday comes as the Trump administration escalates its fight with Big Tech.

The Justice Department announced Wednesday that it was asking Congress to scale back some of the legal protections social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter have long enjoyed, arguing that the legal immunity granted to technology firms in the mid-1990s is out of step with the modern Internet.

But tech companies counter that rolling back the safeguards would impinge on free speech by forcing moderators to take down any content deemed offensive.

Supporters of keeping the legal shield in place also say eliminating the protections would disproportionately hurt smaller online operations, which could be crushed by a wave of defamation lawsuits.

More here:

Facebook Removes Trump Ads With Symbol Used By Nazis. Campaign Calls It An 'Emoji' - NPR

Public broadcasters ABC and SBS both want direct payments from Google and Facebook for using their content under a new bargaining code designed to level the playing field between digital giants and news organisations.

The move by the public broadcasters to seek a slice of the money the digital platforms are expected to pay news organisations may upset commercial media companies, which argue the two public broadcasters shouldn't be compensated because they don't rely on advertising to fund journalism and their operating models haven't been undermined by the platforms' dominance.

Facebook and Google are being forced into a code of conduct with Australian media companies.Credit:Bloomberg

In a submission to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's inquiry into digital platforms obtained by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, SBS argues that a collective bargaining agreement is the best option to negotiate with the digital platforms.

"The bargaining power between major digital platform operators and news media organisations must be appropriately balanced so news providers are adequately compensated for their content and have access to the information needed to best serve their audiences," a spokesman told the Herald and The Age.

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ABC and SBS want a slice of Google, Facebook media payments - Sydney Morning Herald

Facebook has rejected a proposal to share advertising revenue with news organisations, saying there would not be significant impacts on its business if it stopped sharing news altogether.

On Monday, the social media giant issued its response to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which has been tasked with creating a mandatory code of conduct aimed at levelling the playing field.

The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, told the ACCC to develop a code after multiple Australian media companies and regional newspapers cut jobs, or folded entirely, as a result of advertising downturn during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Facebook and Google have previously refused to accept they needed to pay for using news content.

In its submission to the watchdog, Facebook said it rejected many of the ACCCs potential ideas, and said there was a healthy rivalry between itself and news organisations.

The social media giant said it supported the idea of a code of conduct between digital platforms and news publishers, but that itself and Google were being singled out unfairly.

Facebook also said it could cut out news completely without any significant impact on its business.

We made a change to our News Feed ranking algorithm in January 2018 to prioritise content from friends and family, the company said. These changes had the effect of reducing audience exposure to public content from all pages, including news.

Notwithstanding this reduction in engagement with news content, the past two years have seen increased revenues, suggesting both that news content is highly substitutable with other content for our users and that news does not drive significant long-term value for our business.

If there were no news content available on Facebook in Australia, we are confident the impact on Facebooks community metrics and revenues in Australia would not be significant.

Facebook said that news represents only a very small fraction of the content in the average Facebook users newsfeed because Facebook was primarily a service used to connect with family and friends.

It is not healthy nor sustainable to expect that two private companies, Facebook and Google, are solely responsible for supporting a public good and solving the challenges faced by the Australian media industry, it said.

The code needs to recognise that there is healthy, competitive rivalry in the relationship between digital platforms and news publishers, in that we compete for advertising revenue.

The company said the revenue-sharing proposal would be forcing them to subsidise a competitor and distort advertising markets, potentially leading to higher prices.

Despite this, the company said it was still committed to supporting Australian news, and had invested in the industry.

Facebook said it had sent 2.3bn clicks to Australian news publishers in the five months from January to May 2020, which they estimated to be worth $195.8m to the news organisations.

Despite claims of an imbalance that should impede the striking of such agreements, we have been steadily increasing our investments in the Australian news ecosystem, Facebook said. We continue to ramp up our direct financial contributions to the news industry not to make a profit rather because we believe news is a public good and it plays an important social function.

Instead of the ACCCs proposal of a body that could issue financial penalties and binding dispute resolution, Facebook proposed the creation of an Australian Digital News Council that will mediate complaints from news organisations, based on the Australian Press Council as a model.

The social media company also objected to the focus on itself and Google, and disputed the idea that it possesses unequal bargaining power compared to some of the largest media companies in Australia.

The decision to limit the initial version of the code to two US companies is discriminatory and will inevitably give an unfair advantage to Facebooks competitors in the technology sector, including rivals from countries that propagate different and undesirable visions for the internet.

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Facebook says it doesnt need news stories for its business and wont pay to share them in Australia - The Guardian

Technological advancements, money and payment systems have been closely linked from the earliest days of society and human civilization.

However, technology is now transforming money and global payment platforms to an extent and speed never before seen, according to recent paper titled, After Libra, Digital Yuan and COVID-19: Central Bank Digital Currencies and the New World of Money and Payment Systems.

The paper is part of the European Banking Institutes Working Paper Series 65/2020.

The papers authors include Douglas W. Arner from the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law; Ross P. Buckley from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Faculty of Law; Dirk A. Zetzsche from the Universite du Luxembourg Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance; and Heinrich Heine from University Dusseldorf Center for Business & Corporate Law (CBC).

Key milestones noted in the paper include the launch of the Bitcoin (BTC) protocol in 2009, which led to the explosive growth in blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based platforms.

The researchers argue that the announcement of the Facebook-led Libra payments project last year also led to a fundamental rethinking of the potential impact of technology on global monetary affairs.

They also mentioned that the announcement of Chinas central bank digital currency (CBDC), or the Digital Currency / Electronic Payment (DCEP) system (also called the digital yuan) marked the first launch of a virtual currency by a major world economy.

They confirmed that COVID-19 has led to a significant increase in the adoption of digital payments in ways never before seen.

The claim:

While the thousands of Bitcoin [supporters] were ignored, safely, by regulators, Facebooks proposed Libra, a global stablecoin, brought an immediate and potent response from regulators globally. This proposal by the private sector to move into the traditional [domain of sovereign nations] the minting of currency was always likely to provoke a roll-out of sovereign digital currencies by central banks.

They confirmed that China has moved first in this potentially key area, with the steady development of the digital yuan, an initiative they claim could trigger a chain reaction of central bank digital currency issuance across the globe.

The paper recommends not focusing so much on introducing new forms of blockchain-enabled money at this critical time, but rather on transforming [global] payment systems.

The papers authors argue:

[Modern payments systems] is where the real benefits will lie both during the [COVID-19] crisis and beyond. Looking forward, neither the extreme private nor the public model is likely to prevail. Rather, we expect the reshaping of domestic money and payment systems to involve public central banks cooperating with (new and old) private entities which together will provide the potential to build better monetary and payment systems at the domestic and international level.

The claim that under this type of model, technology will, for the first time in history, enable the merger of the monetary and payment systems.

As reported recently, the controversial Facebook-led Libra project is the most active project in terms of developer activity, according to CoinCodeCap data.

Industry professionals have also argued that Libra serves as a signal that Fintech firms like Visa, Paypal, and Booking.com have been eager to explore stablecoins, another fast-developing area in modern, open-source finance.

Read more:

Fintech Projects like Facebook-led Libra Stablecoin Initiative, Digital Yuan, COVID-19 are Transforming Money to an Extent Never Before Seen: Report -...

This week the ML community witnessed the ire of top Kagglers when they were snubbed by Facebook that cost them a million dollar worth of prize money. In other news, India is now officially part of the Global AI group that features economically advanced democracies. Know more, in this weeks top AI releases.

This week, Honeywell claimed to have built what is currently the highest performing quantum computer available. This announcement comes three months after their initial press release on quantum computers.

With a quantum volume of 64, the Honeywell quantum computer is twice as powerful as the next alternative in the industry. That means we are closer to industries leveraging solutions to solve computational problems that are impractical to solve with traditional computers.

What makes our quantum computers so powerful is having the highest quality qubits, with the lowest error rates. This is a combination of using identical, fully connected qubits and precision control, said Tony Uttley, president of Honeywell Quantum Solutions.

Talking about the applications of quantum computers, the company cites the example of the robots in a distribution centre that improves the speed of selecting items and packing orders. The best solution to which even the supercomputers cant find!

Facebook and Kaggle got under fire for dropping the winners of their $1 million competition on deepfake detection. One of the winners, who goes by the name Giba, took to the Kaggle forums on what went wrong and how they had been snubbed when they had followed all the rules. Facebook, initially contacted the former winners regarding the licensing of the external data used for their models. After evaluation, Giba and his teams solution All Faces Are Real dropped to 7th position on the leaderboard. This is quite unfortunate considering the amount of time and resources that goes into participating in a world-level competition, let alone winning. However, Kaggle being the top platform, the participants hope that this wont happen again.

India has now officially joined the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI). This distinguished group includes the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the European Union. As the founding members, these nations pledge to support the responsible and human-centric development and use of AI in a manner consistent with human rights, fundamental freedoms, and our shared democratic values, as elaborated in the OECD Recommendation on AI.

OpenAI researchers demonstrated how features from the middle of the network, in a language model such as transformers can be as good as state-of-the-art convolutional nets for unsupervised image classification. The high-quality image generation was done using GPT-2 language model. The results show that a transformer given sufficient compute might ultimately be an effective way to learn excellent features in many domains. The above picture illustrates the results of OpenAIs experiment. We can see that the generated image of the half-hidden input is as real as that of the original.

Boston Dynamics robots are finally open for sale. Priced at around $74k apiece, the SPOT versions of the robot will be available for both commercial and industrial purposes. However, right now it is available for the US customers. SPOT is a nimble robot that can climb stairs, sprint through rough terrain and can also help in industrial remote operation and autonomous sensing.

Microsoft announced the acquisition of ADRM Software, a leading provider of large-scale industry data models. Combining comprehensive industry models from ADRM with limitless storage and compute from Azure, stated Microsoft, will facilitate intelligent data lake where data from multiple lines of business. Together with Microsoft Azure, these capabilities will be delivered at scale, to accelerate digital progress and reduce risk in a variety of major initiatives for the customers.

Ever since the onset of the pandemic, Amazon has been working on a solution that uses AI and machine learning to the camera footage to implement additional measures to improve social distancing. Now, Amazon goes live with their first Distance Assistant installations at their warehouses. As people walk past the camera, a monitor displays live video with visual overlays to show if associates are within 6 feet of one another. The self-contained device requires only a standard electrical outlet to quickly deploy on building entrances and other high-visibility areas.

Based on that positive employee feedback, Amazon stated that it will be deploying hundreds of these units over the next few weeks.

Watch the full video here.

Keen is a new way to curate, collaborate and expand your interests. Keen is an experiment from Area 120 and PAIR at Google. The website says that Keen is designed to give users control over their recommendations. This app will leverage the Google Search index, combined with user feedback to provide personalised recommendations that improve over time. This AI-powered app is poised to go toe-to-toe with another popular app Pinterest.

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Facebook's Million Dollar Snub, India's Global AI Membership And More In This Week's Top AI News - Analytics India Magazine

By: Trends Desk | New Delhi | Updated: June 21, 2020 4:35:36 pm The picture shows the snake coiled up on the floor of the drivers compartment. (Picture credit: Facebook/Eureka Police Department)

A woman had the scare of her life after finding a snake in her car and a Facebook post detailing the events after the reptiles discovery is making rounds on the internet.

Eureka Police Department, in a Facebook post, said that a woman was driving on the interstate 44 when she discovered the snake making its way into the drivers compartment.

However, as the snake couldnt be taken out by the officers, the post said that the vehicle had to be towed to another location. Subsequently, everyone had to wait until the snake made its way out of the car.

The post was accompanied by the picture of the snake, which was coiled up on the floor of the drivers compartment.

Take a look:

Since being shared on June 18, the post received quite a lot of reactions online. Take a look at some of the reactions here:

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Woman finds snake inside her car, Facebook post detailing the events goes viral - The Indian Express