Social Media & Big Tech news and discussions

[SerethiaFalcon]

More and more, I think I was lucky to grow up in a time when social media didn't have such a stronghold. You still had the cliques and everything of course, but it wasn't about popularity contests online, for the most part. I was even sometimes five to ten years behind my peers in entertainment media too, due to growing up in a country that was still developing economically (still in the 90s with movies, while others were in the 2000s for example). Got my first GameBoy (the old black and white version) when I was around ten years old. The only computer we had in the house was shared by everyone, and for the longest time, was the fat kind, not the thin screen one. I didn't get a personal laptop until I went off to college. Also, I didn't get a phone at all until I was a high schooler, and in the country, I lived in, you paid for minutes to put on your phone, it wasn't some shared family plan, you just went to the small shop down the street and bought as much as you could afford to put on it. Texts cost a certain amount per text (it wasn't that high of a cost), which is pretty much all I used it for. We finally got a PS1 when I was in high school. But, again it was shared with my siblings and sometimes our neighbors too. Facebook I had the last few years or maybe the last year of high school. Smartphones - not till I could buy my own in my adult life. In terms of music, I had a smaller boombox by middle school and a portable CD player. Then, by high school, I think I had a small MP3, but I'm not sure of the date on that one. We didn't have cable growing up either, and a lot of our entertainment was bought second-hand. The transition to DVD from VHS happened in high school I think, for me. There was also a weird period of my childhood where we watched VHS tapes on a very tiny screen that was directly on the VHS player. I think something happened to our TV for a while, we had moved, so we had to wait for a new TV. Needless to say, there were a lot of children gathering around screens when I was a kid. Lol! I was a child born in the late eighties, so my core childhood period was in the 90s. The only thing I think was kind of nutty about my childhood was it was severely restricted. Couldn't watch practically anything on Cartoon Network (the only foreign cartoon shows available on local TV) except for Scooby Doo for example (conservative religion was the reason). So, that's the negative, that, and the blackouts which could last for weeks.

[wjfox]

Facebook and Instagram to label all fake AI images

33 minutes ago

Meta says it will introduce technology that can detect and label images generated by other companies' artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

It will be deployed on its platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

Meta already labels AI images generated by its own systems. It says it hopes the new tech, which it is still building, will create "momentum" for the industry to tackle AI fakery.

But an AI expert told the BBC such tools are "easily evadable".

In a blog written by senior executive Sir Nick Clegg, Meta says it intends to expand its labelling of AI fakes "in the coming months".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-68215619

[Time_Traveller]

Wasn't sure where to put this:-

Children's commissioner backs 'under-16s' phone'

1 hour ago

The children's commissioner has backed the idea of a "phone for under-16s" put forward by Brianna Ghey's mum to try to keep children safe online.

On Sunday, Esther Ghey said children must be stopped from having access to social media apps.

Her daughter's killers, both 15 at the time of the murder, were fascinated by violence and had planned the killing for weeks using a messaging app.

Dame Rachel de Souza told the BBC a ban on children having phones is unlikely, but more can be done to promote phones that are "safe by design".

That could theoretically include phones for children to be able to contact their parents, but not access social media sites.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjmdz4plpxwo

[Powers]

Wasn't sure where to put this:-

Children's commissioner backs 'under-16s' phone'

1 hour ago

The children's commissioner has backed the idea of a "phone for under-16s" put forward by Brianna Ghey's mum to try to keep children safe online.

On Sunday, Esther Ghey said children must be stopped from having access to social media apps.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjmdz4plpxwo

Just disable internet/make them call only like in old phones or at least limit them to replacements for that (Whatsapp maybe?).

I mean it's not bad idea but just making a phone that blocks social media (probably not gonna work either) and calling it a day until the next case is idiotic.

[weatheriscool]

[weatheriscool]

now this is the real nanny state. Telling people what they can do and micromanagement. Thankfully judges are saying no! I remember when I was 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 years old surfing social media and watching storms and following science back in those times. What we're telling our kids is they can't and shouldn't be able to be inspired with the best minds of society or get into science or 50 million other good things that the internet offers. Pure bullshit.

[Tadasuke]

I'm now personally already 6 weeks without Facebook or Messenger. It was a good choice. I recommend it.

messy ventura has a point about social media, bots and search engines:



I think that both social media and search engines weren't really getting better for the average user after 2014 or so. There are some new functions, but also some new problems. The WWW really needs to improve.

[Tadasuke]

Just disable internet/make them call only like in old phones or at least limit them to replacements for that (Whatsapp maybe?).

I mean it's not bad idea but just making a phone that blocks social media (probably not gonna work either) and calling it a day until the next case is idiotic.

Some selected apps can be very useful. Most are not though. They could use phones like the ones from the middle 00s.

[wjfox]

Reddit’s Going Public — Should You Buy Right Away or Wait To Invest?

Mon, February 26, 2024 at 4:30 PM GMT·4 min read

Reddit is going public, having filed for an initial public offering (IPO) with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Feb. 22. This will be the first major tech IPO of the year and the first social media IPO since Pinterest in 2019, according to CNBC.

The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “RDDT,” according to the filing. The IPO is slated for March.

What also makes Reddit’s IPO notable is that it plans to place a large part of its IPO shares in the hands of 75,000 of its most prolific so-called redditors — “an unusual move that could build loyalty but also comes with risk,” as The Wall Street Journal reported. In turn, they will be able to buy Reddit shares at its IPO price before the stock starts trading. This is “a privilege normally reserved only for big investors,” The Wall Street Journal added.

“We want this sense of ownership to be reflected in real ownership — for our users to be our owners,” the Reddit IPO filing read. “Becoming a public company makes this possible. With this in mind, we are excited to invite the users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to buy shares in our IPO, alongside our investors.”

Yet, this might prove risky for the company, some experts and redditors noted, and in turn, risky for investors.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/reddit-g ... 58115.html

[caltrek]

Social Media Users Struggle to Identify AI Bots During Political Discourse
February 27, 2024

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) Artificial intelligence bots have already permeated social media. But can users tell who is human and who is not?

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame conducted a study using AI bots based on large language models — a type of AI developed for language understanding and text generation — and asked human and AI bot participants to engage in political discourse on a customized and self-hosted instance of Mastodon, a social networking platform.

The experiment was conducted in three rounds with each round lasting four days. After every round, human participants were asked to identify which accounts they believed were AI bots.

Fifty-eight percent of the time, the participants got it wrong.

“They knew they were interacting with both humans and AI bots and were tasked to identify each bot’s true nature, and less than half of their predictions were right,” said Paul Brenner, a faculty member and director in the Center for Research Computing at Notre Dame and senior author of the study. “We know that if information is coming from another human participating in a conversation, the impact is stronger than an abstract comment or reference. These AI bots are more likely to be successful in spreading misinformation because we can’t detect them.”

Additionally, the research team is planning for larger evaluations and is looking for more participants for its next round of experiments. To participate, email llmsamongus-list@nd.edu.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1035865