Tech News: The 150 Billion Dollar Facebook Lawsuits

used to be known as Facebook. One of those class action lawsuits is in the United States and the other one is in the United Kingdom, and together the lawsuits are seeking around a hundred fifty billion dollars in damages. I don't know why I put a d at the end of billion there. The Rohinga are a Muslim people, and extremist Buddhists in Myanmar, encouraged by the country's government, had sought to Why about those people? Uh, the atrocities

are just absolutely horrifying anyway. The lawsuits claim that Facebook exacerbated an already deadly situation in Myanmar, facilitating the spread of hate speech and misinformation, and that this contributed to various users in Myanmar growing more extreme and organizing acts of unspeakable violence and cruelty and brutality. They further alleged that Facebook did nothing to remove posts from Myanmar's government

offices that essentially called for the extermination of the Rohinga people. Further, the lawsuit alleges that Facebook's algorithm, which is the one I was talking about in yesterday's episode of Tech Stuff, encouraged people to join groups that aligned with user beliefs. So let's say there's someone in Myanmar who joins Facebook and that this person already harbors negative views about the

Rohinga people. Facebook's algorithm starts to recommend groups for this person to join, and these are groups filled with others who harbor racist or xenophobic beliefs about the Rohinga and the user joins the group and becomes part of an echo chamber that escalates matters, and it drives people who are already prejudiced toward extremism and adding fuel to an

already dangerous fire. And meanwhile, Facebook was profiting off the whole thing, because, as I mentioned in yesterday's episode, the whole business purpose of Facebook is to keep as many people on the platform for as long as possible to serve up as many ads as possible. So the lawsuit claims Facebook execs didn't care that the platform was contributing to a hostile situation, to put it lightly, because it

was a profitable situation. At least in the company's ledger, the plaintiffs wrote, quote to maximize engagement, Facebook does not merely fill users news feeds with disproportionate amounts of hate speech and misinformation. It employs a system of social rewards that manipulates and trains users to create such content. End quote. The complaint goes on to say that Facebook was made aware of the anti Rohinga material on the site as far as back as two thousand thirteen, but failed to

do anything about it. Here in the US, the plaintiffs hope to have the matter tried under Burmese law. Now. The reason for that, you know, under Burmese lawns of US laws, because the United States famously has the Communications Decency Act, which contains section to thirty. Uh that's the infamous section that grants platforms immunity from liability for the stuff that their users post, at least under certain situations.

The case law on the matter is a little bit muddled. Meanwhile, some scientists and academics have sent an open letter to Meta Slash Facebook and to Mark Zuckerberg, calling on the company to share research that staff have done to determine the mental health impact that products like Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp can have on the young, and by young, I

mean like kids to teenagers. The group also asks that met us seek out an independent third party to review that research to help protect against bias, because obviously any company that conducts research on itself has a potential conflict of interest going on there. This follows the news reports about leaked internal documents from the company that indicated Instagram use might be mentally harmful, particularly for young women, that it could potentially lead to problems like body image issues,

eating disorders, and anxiety. The documents obviously caused a lot of concern, but at the same time, the group of scientists say that without independent scrutiny, the methodology might not be rigorous enough to give insight into the scope of the problem or even you know, if there is a problem, because it's possible that those who were surveyed for the internal research were already dealing with mental health issues independent

of their usage of Facebook's products. Maybe those products exacerbated existing issues, maybe they created them. It's impossible to say based upon the limited research. So the point that scientists are making is that it is a matter of concern and should be investigated more thoroughly and with transparency, and

to behave otherwise is unethical, irresponsible, and potentially cruel. The letter points out that platforms like Facebook have a global reach and thus any effects it might have upon mental health are a worldwide concern. But because big tech companies like Meta Slash Facebook, because they rarely share research with the scientific community, it is impossible to ascertain if an effect is present and if so, to what extent. No

word on if Zuckerberg has written back yet. Now let's give Facebook a little bit of credit in our next news story. And this news story is actually from last week, but it broke after we had published our news episode, and it's about how Facebook identified and removed a disinformation

campaign that was originating out of China. Now, Facebook reps didn't go so far as to say that this was a state backed disinformation campaign, but it was a campaign conducted by state backed companies and it was amplified by state back media. But you know, Facebook left a little bit of wiggle room there before saying, like the Chinese government itself ordered the campaign. It's kind of like when you say the word allegedly before you say something about someone.

I do that a lot on this show anyway. The campaign was centered on a Swiss biologist named Wilson Edwards, who had posted a claim that the United States government had resorted to quote enormous pressure and even intimidation end quote to force scientists around the world to blame China for the origin of the coronavirus, essentially to implicate China

as being the place where the coronavirus first emerged. Essentially, the campaign was saying that the scientific community had only directed any attention towards China at all because the US government was forcing it to. A bunch of accounts on Facebook emerged and engaged with this content, liking it and reposting it, and then the Chinese media picked up the

story and ran with it. Only it turns out there is no Swiss biologists named Wilson Edwards, and that hundreds of those Facebook accounts were created all around the same time. They were all like posting at close to the same time, sometimes with identical messages. In one case, a an account accidentally posted the directions for how to spread this disinformation and that the whole thing was in fact a manufactured story.

Facebook subsequently removed more than six hundred accounts connected with this attempt, and security officials say that this was pretty par for the course as far as Chinese disinformation campaigns go, Uh saying that it was pretty clumsy, it was shoddy work, and that these campaigns lack the sophistication and effectiveness that we typically see with Russian disinformation campaigns, which are far

more effective. So, in other words, the Chinese have room for improvement when it comes to spreading misinformation, and I have no doubt they will work hard to get up to speed with, you know, like Russia. On a related note, Twitter and Meta slash Facebook have revealed that both of these companies have removed thousands of accounts connected to various

state backed disinformation campaigns and coronavirus misinformation campaigns. Twitter has removed around two thousand accounts that were spreading misinformation about human rights issues in China. That is, these were Twitter accounts that we're pushing the state backed messaging that there are no human rights issues going on in China, and Meta has removed three other coordinated inauthentic behavior or see i B operations in addition to the one I just

covered a second ago. So that whole misinformation campaign about the United States pressuring the scientific community that would be one of the coordinated in authentic behavior or c i B operations. Meta also said that some campaigns involved creating a ton of accounts and then mass reporting a target

account in an effort to get Meta to remove it. So, for example, let's say that there's an activist in Vietnam, they might find that their account has been targeted by one of these mass reporting campaigns in an effort to silence them. So, in other words, some groups starts creating a bunch of accounts and uses all the accounts to report the activist with the goal of getting them banned or removed. Meta also identified another form of harassment it

calls brigading. This is when a bunch of folks some are brigading. I guess uh. This is when a bunch of folks, sometimes hundreds or thousands of people coordinate to harass targets in an effort to silence them. It's kind of like we've seen this before where it wasn't necessarily an organized campaign. Things that have grown organically where a bunch of people pile on start harassing a specific person.

I remember, like during the Me Too movement that was really ugly, like there were a lot of women getting targeted by groups of people who kind of organically, we're doing this, Well, this is a more coordinated effort to do that, one that potentially state backed, so it's a mass intimidation tactic. Meta pointed out a situation that emerged in Europe, specifically in Italy and in France, in which anti vaxers were brigading against medical professionals and politicians and

folks like journalists. And you know, there was a time when I really thought the idea of social networks, like online social networks, that that was a good thing, that it was connecting people together, that was the democracy of the web, and it would allow for the freedom of expression on a scale never before seen. But y'all, it's really hard for me to look at online social networks today as anything other than toxic. It could be that I'm just getting too old and too cynical, but yeah,

um ugly stuff. I'm glad to see that the companies are trying to fight against that. Obviously, it will be a never ending battle that there will always be entities out there that are trying to use these platforms to further their own agenda. But I'm glad to see, at least in this case, that there are some actions being taken. Microsoft announced that it has sees servers that the company says, we're being used by a group of hackers based out

of China. Microsoft has called the group Nickel, and the company says it had been tracking Nickel's activities since two thousand and sixteen. The group have been focused on gathering intelligence with these servers, primarily as a way to find

effective means to silence or compromise targets. So you might say, well, what kind of targets, Well, you know, this is a China based hacker group, So, as I'm sure all of you have guessed, the targets are typically people and entities that the Chinese government has viewed as being a problem,

including human rights organizations and journalists. So the hacker group typically performs reconnaissance on these targets to determine what kind of software and technology they are using that gives them the information they need in order to start hunting for potential exploits that they can use to compromise the targets devices and perhaps do surveillance or lock down the devices,

et cetera. Microsoft obtained a court order allowing the company to seize the servers and redirect traffic so that it doesn't go to Nichols hackers. Instead, the traffic will go to Microsoft, which will then use the information to study the hackers techniques and potentially their goals. Now does that mean that Nicol is out of commission because all these servers got seized. Not hardly. Microsoft warns that the group is still very much capable of acting against targets. This

was just part of their operations that's now been disrupted. Essentially, the intelligence gathering part of their operations has hit a snag. So the hackers still have the tools to attack targets through malware and exploits, they just don't have the same ability to gather information about their targets as they used to,

and even that is probably a temporary situation. Microsoft has become one of the leading companies crusading against hackers, particularly hackers that are financially motivated and that target companies and you might wonder, well, how did this happen? Why did

Microsoft take the torch on this one? Well, you gotta remember a lot of those companies happen to be Microsoft customers, and in some cases, Microsoft is doing this because it doesn't want its own products to be uh the gateway that hackers used to get access to a potential client's systems. So there's a pretty big motivator going on right there. Alright, we have some more news stories to cover in this episode. Before we get to that, let's take a quick break.

We're back. So about a year ago, word got out that a Russian backed hacker group And yeah, I know, there's a lot about hackers in this episode. Not my fault, they just keep making the news. Anyway, a year ago, this Russian backed hacker group, actually two groups, had managed to compromise a product from the company's Solar Winds and through an exploit, we're able to target around one hundred

of Solar Winds high profile clients. They're able to infect thousands of clients, but they were specifically targeting around a hundred of them, which included like nine federal agencies in the United States. The hackers were able to create what was called a supply chain attack, So they were focusing not on their ultimate targets right list of one hundred organizations. Instead, they were focusing on a trusted vendor that all of those targets were using. They all were buying software from

Solar Winds. So the thought the hackers had was, well, if we can infect the software that everyone is purchasing, then we can infiltrate all these systems without having to target each one individually. By compromising the vendor, the hackers were able to exploit the trust that these companies had in that vendor and then use maliciously altered products to gain access to the targeted systems. Now, the hacking groups responsible for that attack are targeting cloud solution providers or

c sps. These are companies that, as the name says, they provide cloud computing solutions to customers. So the ideas infiltrate the CSP and you know, make sure you're hiding from detection, and then you can snoop on that CSPs customers. You can potentially develop techniques to infiltrate systems that way. Because so much of companies work nowadays moved to the cloud, so it's another way to get access to targets without

having to focus on them individually. Security researchers have pointed out that the hacker groups are quick to develop and adopt new techniques, which makes them particularly difficult to combat. It's also a drastic contrast with the shoddy disinformation campaign

out of China we talked about earlier their nine and Day. Really, here in the United States, there's an ongoing political battle that frames itself as a freedom of speech battle, and what it really comes down to is whether social networking platforms have the right to moderate content that is objectionable. Now, I don't want to get too political on here. First of all, I think everyone here knows how I lean politically. It's not really a secret, and I don't want to

impart my bias on this story. But essentially this was ah There was a law in Texas that was proposed and passed and signed into law that was created by conservatives who objected to platforms like Facebook and Twitter that were removing posts and banning accounts belonging to mostly conservative politicians who were adamant on passing on misinformation on everything from the elections to COVID nineteen Texas passed a law that said platforms would be banned from doing that. They

were saying that the platforms were effectively censoring uh individuals. Well, now a federal judge has placed an injunction against that law, meaning it cannot be enforced, saying that the law has hypocritically effectively censored the social network platforms when it says they're not allowed to moderate users submitted content. The judge said that the law is quote replete with institutional defects, including unconstitutional content and speaker based infringement on editorial discretion,

and onerously burdensome disclosure and operational requirements end quote. Now, according to Ours Technica, the law as it was written wouldn't apply to conservative social networks like Parlor and gab because this law specifically targeted platforms that had at least fifty million monthly users, and Parlor and gab are below

that threshold. One Texas senator proposed lowering that to twenty five million monthly users, and that would have in fact lumped Gab and Parlor into all the others, but the Senate rejected that proposal, which does make it sound like this was less about guaranteeing the right of free speech for conservatives and more about restricting the moderating policies of

larger social networks. Over in the UK, the High Court has ruled that Uber's business model is unlawful and the company must comply with rules set out by the Private Higher Vehicle sect. That act actually predates Uber, it was first passed into law back in UK courts had previously overruled Uber's claim that drivers are contractors and not workers. According to UK courts, they are workers and thus Uber

is responsible for meeting obligations as an employer. This new ruling says that Uber's attempts to have its contractual approach made lawful are just done and dusted. It's a no go, which means Uber will need to make fundamental changes in how it operates in the UK in order to be

a legal business. See Part of Uber's argument was that when a passenger uses Uber to book a ride, Uber acted only as like an agent to connect a driver to a passenger and then handle payment and that's it, and that the actual contract of passage would just be between the driver and the passenger and Uber would be out of the picture. But the court says, no, my, that's not how it exitn't it Yep, the contract and does have the legal obligations relating to that contract. I

don't know why they talk like that. And so now ride hailing companies like Uber, at least in London will have to pay more taxes per trip, which likely means we're gonna see price hikes in Uber in London in

the near future. It might also mean that Uber will reevaluate operating in the UK at all, because it could be in that, you know, without having these loopholes or at least in this case uh illegalities in place, Uber will be unable to quote unquote disrupt I mean, compete with taxi services, So we'll have to see the company, Samsung is making a big change, but it's just an internal change. The company is dividing into two internal divisions,

so still one company, but two internal divisions. One is going to focus on semiconductors and the other is going to focus on consumer electronics like televisions and phones. Each division will have its own CEO. So this organizational change will likely mean that we won't see much change on

the outside, at least nothing that's really obvious. But the thought is this will allow each internal division to have a more unified and focused strategy in the in its individual market, rather than having to craft an overall strategy

for a large company with very different divisions. When you do that, when you're trying to create big strategies for companies that have a lot of diverse departments, it can mean that you end up with a strategy that's okay, but not really great for any one division because you can't prioritize anything. If you do, then you end up leaving others behind. So this is a way to really prioritize each of those divisions and focus on them without

having to worry about leaving something else behind. Cannon, the Camera Company, has announced it has developed an image sensor that can take high quality photographs even in the arc. Now that's a pretty huge development. It's a tricky one because image sensors are, you know, by definition, reliant on light. The sensor can reportedly capture color photographs, and it uses a technology called a single photon avalanche diode. Now I would love to tell you how that works, but honestly,

it's beyond me. Apparently it acts kind of like an amplifier, except instead of taking an incoming electric signal and then boosting it with a transistor or vacuum tube. This tech can take a single incoming photon and use it to

generate a large number of electrons. The company plans to enter mass production with the sensor late next year, and I'm really curious to learn more about this tech, though I can't claim I'll actually understand how it works any better than I do right now, which is to say I don't, I don't, I don't. In a previous news episode, I talked about how NASA launched a special spacecraft that will act as kind of like a battering ram in an effort to move an asteroid out of its orbital

path around a different asteroid. This asteroid is not on any sort of collision course with the Earth, but the project is a test to see if this would be a working strategy to deflect any incoming meteor or asteroid

so that it doesn't hit the Earth in the future. Well, adding onto that story is the fact that NASA has unveiled and impact monitoring algorithm called Century too, and yes, it is replacing an earlier algorithm called century So the purpose of this algorithm is to analyze the paths of any as that stands for near Earth asteroids, and then calculate impact probabilities, like what is the probability that one

day this particular asteroid will collide with the Earth. Now, as we know, the Earth has been hit with massive objects from space before, so it's really just a matter of time before it happens again. However, that matter of time could be measured in millions of years. Still, it's best to know about these things as early as possible to give us the best chance to prevent an impact

from happening. Century too, is meant to calculate those risks to give scientists enough warning time to develop a plan should any in e A have a high probability of colliding with the Earth. Of course, this algorithm will only work with the n e as we know about, and a lot of NASA's other work in this field is all about expanding our knowledge of the neighborhood and looking

out for other possible planet party crashers. Finally, I've talked on the show several times about quantum computing and how it has the potential to revolutionize how we deal with certain computational problems. I've also mentioned that it could with the right algorithmic approach spell an end to modern cryptography. Well, now a company called Cambridge Quantum is making hay while the sun shines, announcing that it has developed a way

to generate superior cryptographic keys. Now, from what I can tell, these are still traditional cryptographic keys. They're just a more robust ursion with a lot more randomness thrown in. So random number generation is a very tricky thing to do with machines. Because machines rely on sets of instructions in order to process operations, it is hard to write instructions

that create randomness. Usually we just manage pseudo randomness. So in fact, you could argue that instructions are kind of anti random right they are ordered anyway, these are not quantum cryptographic keys. I did once to see a presentation about quantum cryptography that was so fascinating and incomprehensible that I cannot even start to explain it here. So this

is not the cryptography of the future necessarily. However, the company does imply that its platform will generate cryptographic keys that are more secure than the ones that we typically use today, and will also be able to generate them at a rate faster than other methods. So that's pretty cool. And that's the news for Tuesday, December at the one. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me.

The what best way to do that is over on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.