Tech News: X Marks the Spot (For Disinformation)

about X formerly known as Twitter. We've got a bunch of stories about it. So first up is one about misinformation and disturbing content. So during times of turmoil, we tend to see a lot more misinformation and outright disinformation flood social media platforms. That's kind of par for the course. That is the case. As Israel has gone to war with Hamas, it should come as no surprise that this war brings with it numerous instances of falsehoods and misleading

information spreading online across all different platforms. Even in the pre elon Musk days, Twitter would have to step up to deal with this sort of thing. But right Now it's even harder because Musk's X has famously made severe

job cuts to the content moderation teams. In fact, most reports say that those teams are effectively just gone that you might as well just say there is no content moderation team at X at this point, because it's it's been whittled down so much so that means there's not really a dedicated team in place to handle a crisis like this, and that means that these instances of misinformation and disinformation and disturbing matter can proliferate with very few

checks to prevent it from happening. Making matters more complicated are the various changes Musk has made to X in recent weeks. So, for example, he decided that article headlines really mess with the esthetic he's going for. So now when you post an article on X, it shows the lead image and maybe a small blurb, but you don't

get a headline. You don't get information about what the article is about, which makes it harder for reporters to actually get their stories out on X and have people read it, because those images don't necessarily convey the information that tells folks why they should read a particular story for outlets that haven't bowed to Musk's demand that they pay for a verification check, their reach has been sort of artificially limited, or maybe you could argue that if

they paid for the verification their reach would be boosted. Musk also hasn't helped matters because he has this awful tendency to promote accounts that have been linked to misinformation in the past, including one that has posted outright antisemitic messaging. So you can imagine in a war between Israel and Hamas, that's going to have some repercussions. Now, you contrast this with the role that Twitter played, say back during the

Arab Spring in the early twenty tens. Back then, people were able to use Twitter to communicate, they used it to organize, They used it to make sure aid was getting to places where it was needed and that you know, emergency services could could respond to the right place, and you know, it played a pivotal role in that particular, you know, very important political event. But with the chaotic mess that is X today, it's a very different story.

X's algorithm promotes posts that drive engagement, and unfortunately those posts often include ones with wildly inaccurate or false claims as well as disturbing imagery via photos or videos. It's enough to have some open source intelligence experts or osi in T experts say that x is essentially a lost cause for their line of work because of the sheer volume of disinformation present on the platform. You'd be spending

all your time trying to verify a point of information. Meanwhile, floods of more posts are coming in and you would never be able to get to a point where you actually know what's going on. So a lot of people are saying like it's just not even worth it to try and vet information on the former Twitter right now. Meanwhile, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC, has

sued Elon Musk again. So you might wonder why. Well, back in May of this year, the SEC served a subpoena to Musk to compel him to appear for the SEC and provide testimony with regard to his acquisition of Twitter. So the SEC is concerned that some people may have

committed securities fraud during the whole Twitter acquisition process. So this is an investigation into the acquisition and the deals that surrounded it, looking to see if any illegal activity was included in that Musk was supposed to appear before the SEC back in September, but he protested it and then he didn't show up. So now the SEC has sued Musk in an effort to compel him to provide testimony. This is not the first time the SEC and Musk

have clashed, not by a long shot. Musk has earned a reputation as a sort of a bad boy in the eyes of the SEC. So back in twenty eighteen, Musk posted to you know, Twitter that he had secured funding that would take the company Tesla private at the staggering price of four hundred and twenty dollars per share. Now this was probably in part a weed joke, a

bad one. Musk has a certain fixation associated with Mary Jane as well as the letter X. But the SEC takes this kind of stuff seriously because if the chairman of the board of directors for a company claims that the company has secured enough funding to go private and then doesn't do that, what it looks like is market manipulation.

Because think about it. If Tesla's shares were trading a I don't know, let's say Tesla shares were trading at three hundred dollars per share, but the chairman of the board announces that they've secured funding to take Tesla private at four hundred twenty dollars per share. Well, let's say

you're not an investor. You might think I need to sink as much money as I possibly can into Tesla right now because there's going to be a buyout, and that means like one hundred and twenty dollars on top of what I'm paying right now, So I need to buy as many shares as possible. This ends up being a rush in investment, which drives stock prices up. But if there's no deal there, well that just means that the chairman manipulated the stock price of their own company.

That's a huge no no. So the SEC filed a lawsuit against Musk. Eventually, Musk and the SEC settled out of court. Musk had to pay twenty million dollars and he was told to step down as the chair of Tesla's board and also to agree to not do that kind of thing again. He did later contest this and argue that he was he was forced into this agreement and that it was all an infringement upon his free speech.

You know, Elon Musk is very, very very concerned about free speech when it applies to him, for a guy who frequently holds the title of the wealthiest person in the world. Honestly, the SEC fine was a slap on the wrist. This new lawsuit really just comes down to making Musk testify in front of the SEC. And since the SEC has legitimate power to subpoena people, the general wisdom is that Musk eventually will have to do it because there's not really a legal reason why he could

have it thrown out. Now, we're not done with X just yet. The platform also has a new feature for those who subscribe and they get that little verification check. Now, a verified account holder can restrict posts so that only other verified accounts can reply to those posts. So if you don't have a verified account, well then your input is not welcome there. You do not get to be part of the discourse. Ya free speech. Musk says that the control should help with spam bots, which could actually

be a thing. And to be fair to X and to Musk, I'm being very very snarky here, but let's be honest. Twitter has actually done similar things in the past. It's not like this is totally new. It wasn't a verification thing. But back in twenty twenty, Twitter introduced a feature that would let you limit replies to your post to just accounts that you follow, So you could say, all right, only people that I follow can reply to this, so you cut out all the trolls and stuff, unless

you're following a lot of trolls, I guess. So if you were really active on Twitter, but you were only interested in having a discussion with the people that you are following, then you could do that. Or you could limit the replies so that only accounts that were mentioned in the original tweet could reply, So it becomes more of an actual one on one conversation that just happens

to be publicly viewable. So I do get a little snarky about this where it turns into a paid for feature, but it's not exactly unprecedented, so I'm not that head up about it. It does seem to me like it's another tactic to try and drive users to subscribe to get that verified status. And rounding out our ex news block is that Linda Yakarino, the CEO of X, canceled her appearance at the tech Live conference, which is happening

next week. So tech Live is a Wall Street Journal hosted event, and the Akarino was scheduled to speak there, but X sent the Journal a statement saying, quote, Linda Yakarina will be unable to attend the WSJ tech Live conference next week. With the global crisis unfolding, Linda and her team must remain fully focused on X end quote. Presumably the global crisis alluded to is this war between Israel and Hamas, and now X has been inundated with

horrific and misleading material. Certainly it would have been difficult to field the pointed questions that attendees might have had for X's CEO. The Verge points out that when she attended their Code conference, she quote deflected most questions in quote, so I imagine she wasn't keen to repeat that experience in an even more critical setting. I do hope that X's response to the crisis involves re establishing a content

moderation team and strategy. While I am very much an outspoken critic of Elon Musk and X, it's not that I want to see the platform fail. I would much rather see it improve and to make some decisions that end up demonstrably improving the service and protecting the people who use it and making it useful for as many people as possible. I just very much have the opinion that that has not been the direction of the company for the past year. Really, Okay, we're going to take

a quick break. When we come back, we've got some more tech news to talk about. We're back. So I mentioned in a previous tech News episode that the US Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, has put net neutrality back on the table. This was something that was a big deal during Obama's administration and then got tossed out during Trump's administration, and now it's coming background again. So ours TETNACA has a great article titled net Neutrality's court fate

depends upon whether broadband is telecommunications? Okay, so y'all. This gets a bit frustrating because it mostly ends up being about how we define things, and arguably this ultimately becomes an arbitrary distinction, right that we call something one thing versus another thing. And yet that arbitrary distinction can determine if the FCC actually has authority to reinstate net neutrality

or not. The gist of it is that any move by the FCC to regulate Internet service providers is likely to result in lawsuits against the FCC brought by those same ISPs that all contend that the FCC doesn't actually have the authority to make those regulations. And this all has to do with the classification of broadband services. If you classify them as a telecommunications service, then that means they fall under Title I of the Communications Act, and

the FCC has authority to regulate that industry. They would count as common carriers, so they'd have to follow certain rules, and the FCC would have the authority to enforce those rules, or at least to make those rules, and then you have other elements of the government enforce them. But right now, the ISP broadband industry tends to fall under the classification

of information services. This was something that was created back when the Communications Act was being hashed out out of concern that if you were to heavily regulate a new industry, that of Internet service providers, it could end up hurting innovation and adoption, and so, in an effort to avoid that, these were called information services, not telecommunication services. So the argument now is that these companies are far more than

just an information services company. It is a telecommunications company, and thus it should be classified as such, and the FCC would have authority. Obviously, the companies would oppose that. They would much prefer to operate without that regulatory authority

over them. In fact, a lot of the companies are also telecommunications companies, like they have a telecommunications business on top of their ISP business, and yeah, I mean they already have the experience of working under regulations, so they would much prefer it if they didn't have to do that.

There was a recent report that stated that the FCC may end up facing a reversal from the Supreme Court if they were to attempt to assert this authority, saying that the Supreme Court's conservative makeup at this point means

that more than likely it would be overturned. However, Ours Technica piece men that the legal experts who wrote this were paid by the broadband industry, or at least a couple of companies that are broadband companies, So you could argue that maybe there's a bit of poisoning the well going on here. Anyway, it should come as no surprise that we're seeing opposition from ISPs to this move. It pretty much comes with the territory, so we'll have to keep an eye on this and see how it develops.

I'm somewhat skeptical that it would go all the way to the Supreme Court. The court would have to choose to take out the argument, and I don't know that it would, so I think that it is possible that that report that was written was somewhat alarmist and meant to try and dissuade the FCC from pursuing this line of action in the first place. But we'll have to see. A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how the video game development world had turned on the company Unity.

Unity makes a popular, or at least a formerly popular game engine. So you can think of a game engine as a set of tools that game developers can use when they're building out the game that they want to make. So the developers don't have to create everything from scratch because they have this set of tools they can use. And as long as the set of tools supports whatever the gameplay is that the developers have in mind, everything

can go fairly smoothly. I mean, there'll always be hiccups and development, but you don't have to create everything from scratch anyway. Not too long ago, Unity changed its policy and said it would start charging developers what amounts to royalties as defined by installations. So, in other words, at a certain point, when someone installs a game that runs on Unity, that counts toward the royalties, and developers will have to pay Unity a certain amount of money for

that installation. Initial Unity was saying they would count every single installation, which means that if you, as a player, installed a game, then you uninstalled it, then you installed

it again, then that would count as two installations. So if you really hated a game company, ironically you could hurt it by buying a copy of their game, installing it, uninstalling it, and doing it again and again, over and over and over again, because that would mean that the company would have to pay out the royalties for each of those installations. Now, eventually Unity walked that back and then said, okay, well, we'll only count it for the

first install per device. So if someone installs it on like eighteen computers, that will still count as eighteen installations. But if then they were to uninstall and reinstall, those would not count as additional ones. On top of that, this still created a big kerfuffle in the game development world.

It flew in the face of Unity's earlier philosophy, like Unity had made a fairly big deal that they weren't going to charge for installations or sales of games or whatever, that there would just be kind of a flat fee that you would pay for a certain level of access to the Unity Engine and development tools, editing tools, that kind of thing. So there was this big negative reaction in the game development world. And now the CEO of Unity, a guy named John riche Tello, has become the former

CEO of Unity. He resigned from the company in a fairly sudden move, and now a guy named James M. Whitehurst is serving as the interim CEO and president of Unity while the company searches for a permanent replacement. How this is going to affect Unity in the long haul, obviously remains to be seen. I'm not sure how the game development community will respond. I know that there was a lot of trust lost as a result of this recent change, so I think it's going to take a

lot of work to repair those relationships. And I don't know how that meshes with the company's business strategy. Right, Like, if the business strategy depends upon pursuing this kind of revenue generation approach, then it's gonna be an uphill battle to repair those relationships. And now for a tiny bit of possible generative AI news, the jury's still out a

little bit. As befitting the god of mischief, the Verge reports that a promotional poster for season two of the Low Key series on Disney Plus may have been made at least in part by Generative AI. Further, it appears that the poster is using a stock image from Shutterstock as the background, so it's this background image that is

presumably created through generative AI. The image in question appears to be called Surreal Infinity Time Spiral Space Antique, a great name, and the details in the image have some of the tailtale signs of generative AI, like some like superfluous little scribble marks and stuff that make it look like it might have been created by AI, which can get a little messy when it's making stuff like little details can end up being kind of messy when you

look at it very closely. Now, this is a problem not necessarily for Disney, which, as far as I know, follow the rules for this stock image like you can purchase stock images for commercial use if you have the right license, and as far as I know, Disney did all of that. But Shutterstock has a policy that does not allow for AI generated images on the platform unless they were created through the platform's own AI generative tool.

And you might think, well, that seems like gatekeeping, but really it's to ensure a chain of IP ownership, because things get really complicated. This is a brave new world of AI generated content. So let's say you got an artist. This artist uses some other generative AI tool to help create their image. They do some work themselves, the AI generative tool does some of the work. Then they end up submitting that image to shutter Stock, and shutter Stock

puts it up in its marketplace. Well, there could potentially be a very messy disagreement as to who or what actually owns the IP of that image. So you could make the argument that the artist who submits that image to shutter Stock might not technically have the legal right to do it because this other generative AI tool took part in making that image. It's all very muddy, right.

It's indicative of how generative AI makes stuff like intellectual property and copyright and trademarks and all of these related subjects. It makes them much more complicated than they already were.

And then there's the issue of human artists, right, who are number one, concerned that work that normally would go to a person is at least in part being handled by algorithms, and that number two, those algorithms require training material in order to work, right, So the portfolios from human artists are in a way being used to help eliminate work for those human artists. Disney hasn't commented on any of this so far, and you know, you could argue that maybe Disney didn't know that it was an

AI generated image. See when it's on Shutterstock and it's being used through the actual AI tool on Shutterstock, the image gets a label that indicates that it was at least in part AI generated, so you don't you're not caught surprise when you're looking at Shutterstock's own library of AI generated images. But this one didn't have that. It appears to have been a case where someone was able to slip in an AI generated image and Shutterstock didn't

detect that and ran it as a normal one. So you could argue Disney didn't know although a lot of the reports I saw said, come on, they knew because the again it had those telltale signs of generative AI. All right, I've got a little bit more news for you, but before we can get to that, let's take another quick break to think our sponsors. Okay, we're back. So SpaceX's Starlink was never the only game in town when

it comes to satellite provided Internet connectivity. In fact, satellite connectivity has been around for quite some time, but SpaceX and starlink they use fleets constellations, if you will, of tiny satellites, as a new way to achieve that outcome as opposed to having a satellite in essentially geostationary orbit. You have this fleet of satellites and as they pass overhead, your antenna locks onto one, and then when it starts to pass out of view, it locks onto the next one.

So that's kind of SpaceX's approach with starlink. And now Amazon has launched literally a competitor to SpaceX's starlink service. Amazon's version is called Kuiper, named after the Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper, whose name also graces the Kuiper Belt. It's a disc in our solar system made up of these

small bodies of mostly frozen voladoles like ammonia and methane. Anyway, last Friday, and Atlas five launch vehicle carried a pair of Amazon proto type Kuiper satellites and its payload and delivered them to orbit, and Amazon said it was able to make contact with both of them within an hour of them having reached orbit. Amazon's plan is to use a constellation of more than three thousand of these satellites to provide Internet communication links, similar to how SpaceX's Starlink

does it. While satellite connectivity is a huge help to people who could be in remote areas who might find it difficult to get terrestrial Internet service because ISPs are, let us say, reluctant to provide infrastructure to remote areas, it does have a benefit. However, astronomers are really concerned that as we fill out our orbits with small spacecraft, it's going to make it harder to actually do astronomical research here on Earth. It certainly also creates a lot

of potential space debris if it's not handled properly. One thing I find really interesting is that this is explicitly an Amazon project it is not a Blue Origin project. So if you recall, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon dot Com, and while he no longer runs Amazon, he oversees the private space company Blue Origin. Yet Kuiper remains an Amazon project, not a Blue Origin project. So I just thought that

was kind of interesting. The FTC recently released a report that reveals victims have lost a total of around two point seven billion dollars to scams on social media platforms since twenty twenty one, so in two years, two point seven billion dollars. A lot of the scams fall into things like misleading ads for products. On the rare occasion that I pop on over to Facebook, I see these things all the time in my feed. I'll scroll down and I'll see some ad that's clai to be a

fire sale or a clearance sale of some sort. And it's funny because if I go away and I come back, I'll see an ad that uses the exact same image, very similar verbiage, but it'll have a different business name associated with it. And I remember seeing one specifically about a going out of business sale for some vinyl records store, and I actually did a search to see if the story even existed. It doesn't, and then I saw the exact same images and a very similar ad but with

a different company name, same thing. They all claim to be selling stuff at absurdly low prices. If you do a little searching, you'll see that the claimed sales price are usually like a fraction of what the actual market value is for whatever the product is in question, And a lot of these images are actually using pictures of like artists' works, like one of a kind pieces that an artist has produced, but the ad is showing up off as if it were some sort of mass produced product.

If you actually were to order something from one of those sites, it typically unfolds in one of two ways. You either eventually get something that is a very cheap knockoff of whatever the original item was, or you get nothing at all, or maybe you get a box with just some random junk in it. Well, these are some of the most widespread scams. They tend to be on the smaller scale when it comes to how much money a person might actually lose personally, because it's normally not

that much, notine the grand scheme of things. For the really big hits to the wallet, the scams that take the most from victims, you have to turn to classic investment scams. I think the proliferation of cryptocurrency, of blockchain, of NFTs, and all that kind of stuff along those lines has really created the perfect environment for scams. Not to be clear, I'm not saying everything related to crypto is outright a scam, at least I don't feel comfortable

saying that definitively. I think a lot of stuff with crypto is a scam, and I definitely do not have a high opinion of crypto in general. But what I am saying is that crypto is kind of cryptic. It's hard to understand. It's got a lot of elements to it that are difficult to describe to someone who is new to the concept, and as such, it is a

perfect opportunity for a conton artist. Right the scammer can count on the fact that the target doesn't have a full understanding of the subject matter, and by depending upon base human features like greed, the con man can set up a trap that a lot of people are going to fall into. Overall, the FTC's report reinforces something that I think most of us already know, which is that

scams are abundant on social media. So it really does pay to be a critical thinker and to ask important questions, even just to yourself, before you start sinking money into anything, whether it's a product that seems to be priced way below its value, or some investment opportunity or something along

those lines, ask these questions, do some research. I've also seen this, by the way, targeting people who are doing things like job searching, which really it really grinds my gears, y'all, because obviously anyone who's doing a job search is trying to make an improvement in their life. They're actually taking real effort, and that requires a lot of investment of your time and energy, right, it's not easy to do. Anyone who has actively gone into a job search knows

that can be a grueling experience. So to prey upon people who are in this vulnerable position and who likely have the most to lose and can least afford to lose any of it that it just really hits me as being pure evil. It's hard to I don't really believe in evil per se, but I mean that's about

I can get to it. Business Insider reports that Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram and all that has been hiring famous folks, particularly people who are famous on the Internet or celebrities as I like to call them,

to model for the company's AI assistance. So the idea is that in the future, you'll be able to interact with an AI assistant on Meta's various platforms, and the assistant will be modeled after I don't know, like mister Beast, And then I assume mister Beast will sue you if you ask him to recommend a good burger joint or something. Anyway, Meta is also working with quote unquote real celebrities too, like Tom Brady, and apparently agreeing to be part of

this ends up being some big money. The Information reports that one creator earned five million dollars paid out over two years for putting in the equivalent of six hours of work in a studio. Five million dollars for six hours of work. Meta, why haven't you reached out to me, you know, beloved online personality Jonathan Strickland. I'm sure we

could cut a deal. I'm sorry for all those times I called you a predatory, dangerous company that trades upon personal information to make heaps of cash, well simultaneously making us miserable. I'm sure we can come up with a figure that will convince me to compromise my stance on the matter. No, I'm just kidding. There's no such figure. They couldn't offer me enough money anyway. As it stands, the AI assistants are just text based for the moment, so I guess they just text like Tom Brady and

mister Beast. But obviously the plan in the future is to incorporate AI generated video assistants, probably animated ones if I had to guess, complete with a voice or a synthesized voice that belongs to these you know, famous people, and y'all, I've got a lot of thoughts about this. I'm actually concerned that it will create an even more

dangerous parasocial tendency. In general, we already see parasocial relationships among fans and famous people that never turns out well like it's bad, it's not healthy, and I fear that this is going to take it a step further. But then, what do I know. I'm not important enough to be bribed, so who really cares what I think? Finally, I've got a trio of articles to recommend to you all today, So first up is a piece by Amanda Hoover. It's over on Wired and it's titled New York's Airbnb ban

is descending into pure chaos. So, just for context, New York City passed some rules to crack down on folks who are renting out living space for short term stays in the area because this has contributed to a real estate crisis in the city. Setting aside properties for visitors means that New York City residents don't have a shot at those homes, and there's a shortage of real estate

for people who actually need a place to live. So the piece goes into detail about how the cities move to really cut back on Airbnb's operation within New York City has now precipitated an effort among former Airbnb hosts to dive into a sort of black market for short term visitors. It's really interesting. Next up, we have a piece by Alex Coma of the Washington City Paper that's

Koma for Alex's last name. The article is titled the rent is Too Damn Algorithmic, So it kind of dovetails with what I was just talking about in a way like it's a related issue. This is about an attorney general's fight with a company called real Page. That company's business is to help landlords set rent prices in various regions. So the idea is that this algorithm helps landlords s rent so that it is in a competitive area with

other landlords in the space. They don't price themselves out of the market, and they don't underprice themselves to a

point where they're cutting into their revenue too much. But the argument is that this has actually created an anti competitive landscape because all the landlords are using this particular tool, and the algorithm essentially ends up just being a price fixing tool where everybody has kind of agreed on a very narrow range of rent for specific areas and specific properties, and that means that there's no real competition going on,

and it essentially becomes collusion through algorithm. Now, the last article that I have to recommend to you today is from The Guardian. It was written by pramad Arcaria and Michael Hudson, and my apologies for my attempt to pronounce that name, but it is titled revealed Amazon linked to trafficking of workers in Saudi Arabia. This is a very sobering report. There are a lot of horrific experiences and

tragic circumstances that are listed within this article. But I think it's really important to read because we need to know the full impact that these huge tech companies can have all over the world, not just to our own personal lives, but how are they operating in other parts of the world. How much of the company's success is predicated upon human suffering. I think it's important to know that. I think you need to know that so that you

are when you're making choices, you're making informed choices. And if you're fine with making choices knowing these things, then you know that's your own personal decision. But at least you're doing it with knowledge, as opposed to remaining blissfully ignorant and potentially perpetuating harm through your choices. You know,

not on purpose, but effectively. You know, purpose doesn't really matter when you're talking about human suffering, right, you need to really think about how to how to mitigate and

end that. So sorry for my soap boxing, but it's just this stuff is important to me, and I think that this article is a great revelation on how Amazon's operations in this one particular part of the world really lead to some awful conditions that need to be understood and revealed, and companies need to be held accountable for

these kinds of operations. They need to actually take responsibility for that, because otherwise, you know, we're just going to see it perpetuated in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and that's just that's really not acceptable, at least not in my opinion. Okay, I'm done proselytizing. I hope y'all. I'll have a great day and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech

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