Thx for your link and efforts @Seirdy !

All this said, being part of a decentralized web, as pointed out in this toot, our publicly visible interaction lands on other instances and servers of the #fediVerse and can be scrapped there. I wonder if this situation actually might lead, or should lead, to a federation of servers that share the same robots.txt "ideals".

As @Matthias pointed out in his short investigation of the AI matter, this has (in my eyes) already unimagined levels of criminal and without any doubt unethical behavior, not to mention the range of options rouge actors have at hand.

It's evident why for example the elongated immediately closed down access to X's public tweets and I guess other companies did the same for the same reasons. Obviously the very first reason was to protect their advantage about the hoarded data sets to train their AI in the first place. Yet, considering the latest behavior of the new owner of #twitter, nothing less than at least the creation of #AI driven lists of "political" enemies, and not only from all the collected data on his platform, is to be expected. A international political nightmare of epical proportions. Enough material for dystopian books and articles for people like @Cory Doctorow, @Mike Masnick ✅, @Eva Wolfangel, @Taylor Lorenz, @Jeff Jarvis, @Elena Matera, @Gustavo Antúnez 🇺🇾🇦🇷, to mention a few of the #journalim community, more than one #podcast episode by @Tim Pritlove and @linuzifer, or some lifetime legal cases for @Max Schrems are at hand.

What we are facing now is the fact that we need to protect our and our users data and privacy because of the advanced capabilities of #LLM. We basically are forced to consider to change to private/restricted posts and close down our servers as not only the legal jurisdictions are way to scattered over the different countries and ICANN details, but legislation and comprehension by the legislators is simply none existent, as @Anke Domscheit-Berg could probably agree to.

Like to say, it looks like we need to go dark, a fact that will drive us even more into disappearing as people will have less chance to see what we are all about, advancing further the advantages off the already established players in the social web space.
Just like Prof. Dr. Peter Kruse stated in his take about on YT The network is challenging us min 2:42 more than 14 years ago:
"With semantic understanding we'll have the real big brother. Someone is getting the best out of it and the rest will suffer."

Twitter’s Birdwatch is Fundamentally Flawed

Earlier this week, Twitter announced an initiative to combat misinformation on their platform that they call Birdwatch.

How Birdwatch works: Volunteers sign up (assuming they meet all the requirements) and can add notes to fill in context on misleading tweets. Other users can rate these contextual tweets as helpful or not helpful. All of these “notes” and ratings of notes are completely transparent.

Credit: the Birdwatch website
Credit: the Birdwatch website

At its face, Birdwatch is an attempt to scale up the existing fact-checking capability used during the 2020 U.S. Elections while also crowdsourcing this decision-making.

I will give Twitter credit for two things, and only two things, before I get into the problems with their design.

1. They’re distributing the power to fact-check bad tweets to their users rather than hoarding it for themselves.
2. They correctly emphasized transparency as a goal for this tool.

But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

The Fatal Flaw of Birdwatch’s Design

There’s an old essay titled The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security, that immediately identifies two problems with Birdwatch’s design. They also happen to be the first two items on the essay’s list!

1. Default Permit
2. Enumerating Badness

This is best illustrated by way of example.

Let’s assume there are two pathological liars hellbent on spreading misinformation on Twitter. They each tweet unsubstantiated claims about some facet of government or civil service. Birdwatch users catch only one of them, and correctly fact-check their tweet.

What happens to the other liar?

What happens if Birdwatch users can only identify one out of ten liars? One out of a hundred? One out of a thousand?! Et cetera.

(Art by Khia.)

To be clear: The biggest flaw in their product design is simply that their “notes” and “fact-checks” are negative indicators on known-bad tweets.

This will create a dark pattern: If a tweet slips past the Birdwatch users’ radars, it won’t be fact-checked. In turn, users won’t realize it’s misinformation. A popular term for the resulting conduct is coordinated inauthentic behavior.

This already happens to YouTube.

https://youtu.be/1PGm8LslEb4

Hell, this is already happening to Twitter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-1RhQ1uuQ4

How To Fix Birdwatch

I wrote an entire essay on Defeating Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior at Scale in 2019. I highly recommend anyone at Twitter interested in actually solving the misinformation problem to give that a careful consideration.

(Art by Swizz.)

But in a nutshell, the most important fix is to change the state machine underlying Birdwatch from:

• No notes -> trustworthy
• Notes -> misinformation

…to something subtly different:

• No notes -> unvetted / be cautious
• Notes ->
  
  • Negative notes -> misinformation
  • Positive notes -> verified by experts

  
  

This effectively creates a traffic light signal for users: Tweets start as yellow (exercise caution, which is the default) and may become green (affirmed by notes) or red (experts disagree).

What Would This Change Accomplish?

Malicious actors that accomplish Birdwatch evasion will only manage to encompass their message in caution tape. (Metaphorically speaking, anyway.)

If their goal is to spread misinformation while convincing the recipients of their message that they’re speaking the truth, they’ll have to get a green light–which is ideally more expensive to accomplish.

Bonus Round

I would also recommend some kind of “this smells fishy” button to signal Birdwatch contributors that this tweet needs fact-checking. Users might self-select into filter bubbles that Birdwatch users are totally absent from, and in turn come across things that are completely unvetted and possibly ambiguous.

While I have your attention, here’s a quality of life suggestion, on the house:

Being able to link claims together (e.g. reposted images with a false claim, n.b. like how the minions memes on Facebook) to deduplicate their claims about reality would save a lot of unnecessary headache.

(Anyone who has used Stack Overflow will appreciate the utility of being able to say “this is a duplicate of $otherThing”.)

What If These Fundamental Flaws Remain Unfixed?

Although Birdwatch will probably meet the immediate goal of scaling up the fact-checking efforts beyond what Twitter can provide (and satisfy the public relations requirements of tangibly doing something to combat this problem), propagandists and conspiracy theorists will simply become incentivized to evade Birdwatch contributors’ detection while spreading their lies.

As I said above, coordinated inauthentic behavior is already happening. This isn’t some abstract threat that only academics care about.

To the aid of the malicious, most users will confuse tweets that evaded detection with tweets that didn’t warrant correction. This might even lead to users trusting misinformation more than they would before Birdwatch. This would be a total self-own for the entire Birdwatch project.

#bullshit #computerSecurity #enumeratingBadness #misinformation #SocialMedia #Technology #Twitter

I sure hope this finally kills #Twitter.

Elon Musk says X will charge users ‘a small monthly payment’ to use its service

X owner Elon Musk today floated the idea that the social network formerly known as Twitter may no longer be a free site. In a live-streamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, Musk said the company was “moving to a small monthly payment” for the use of the X system. He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.

“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” explained Musk. “Because a bot costs a fraction of a penny — call it a tenth of a penny — but even if it has to pay…a few dollars or something, the effective cost of bots is very high,” he said. Plus, every time a bot creator wanted to make another bot, they would need another new payment method.

Musk didn’t say what the new subscription payment would cost, but described it as a “small amount of money.”

I find one of the most helpful ways you can encourage people to leave hellsites like #Twitter and #Facebook to try out #mastodon / the #fediverse / etc isn't to just tell them "join mastodon" and hope they end up picking a good instance. Actually go the extra step of finding an instance that, to you, an experienced user, seems well moderated, and at least somewhat aligns with that person's interests so they'll find other people's content to keep them interested, and suggest that one directly. @eldritch.cafe remains the first Mastodon instance I ever joined, after my friend and I specifically looked for a server that allows nonsexual female nipples without being focused on actual sex work, and all in all it's been a great experience (and has completely ruined me towards any server with less than a 5,000 character limit, haha).

Especially considering how tech-inclined so many (pre-Twitter-migration) fedi users are--keep in mind that most of us (me included) are not so knowledgeable about this stuff straight out the gate 😜 We need a little extra guidance, and if you truly think that the fedi is a better alternative, you need to make the extra effort in improving #accessibility to your chosen platform. (It also helps tremendously in making sure that someone's first interaction with mastodon isn't on a huge server with little to no moderation, opening them way more up to attacks from racists, etc than if they had started on a heavily moderated server that is already #defederated from instances that allow that abhorrent behavior)