Obama Warns Us About The Evil Of Misinformation

The following op-ed is by Zeeshan Aleem at MSNBC.com: 

On Thursday, former President Barack Obama traveled to Silicon Valley and delivered one of his bluntest critiques yet of tech companies, which he said have fostered discord and disinformation at the expense of democracy.

Tech analysts correctly pointed out that Obama’s speech had its shortcomings — that it was vague on key details about solutions and didn’t advance a novel analysis of the way social media companies operate. But he did make nuanced points about the origins of and scope of the problem.

Most importantly, he used his enormous influence to counsel the public to think proactively about tech not just as consumers, but also as citizens. He eloquently made the case against “fatalistic” despair about technology, and encouraged people to think about how technology can be reshaped to serve, and not undermine, democracy.

Obama's speech, which he delivered at Stanford University, had the potential to be a stream of clichés about how we’re so divided as a society because we’re all glued to our phones and read different news sites. Fortunately, it wasn’t that. He took care to point out that major social media platforms exacerbate pre-existing divisions in our democracy, which emerged and persist for many reasons, including economic displacements from automation and globalization, the nationalist backlash against multiculturalism, dysfunction in our political system, and the ways in which the rise of successful authoritarian regimes such as China have made it easier “to discount democracy’s appeal.”

Looking back on his time in office, the former president said he regretted his “failure to fully appreciate at the time just how susceptible we had become to lies and conspiracy theories” — and he said he thinks Russian-backed social media disinformation operations in the run-up to the 2016 election exploited divisions that were already pervading domestically. Referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, he said, “Putin didn’t do that. He didn’t have to. We did it to ourselves.”

With those qualifications — and with a general acknowledgement of the positive qualities of the tech revolution — Obama argued that the business models of social media platforms have now decisively tilted the experience of the internet toward less understanding and more rage:

Twenty years ago, pillars of web search were comprehensiveness, relevance and speed. But with the rise of social media and the need to better understand people’s online behavior, in order to sell more advertising, companies want to collect more data. More companies optimized for personalization, engagement and speed. And unfortunately, it turns out that inflammatory, polarizing content attracts and engages.

Over the course of his speech, Obama called for democratic oversight of social media companies while protecting free speech rights. He endorsed the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, a bill that would require social media companies to disclose data to independent researchers on how their products work. He also called for the reform of Section 230, a law that protects companies from legal liability for what’s on their platforms. And he argued that there need to be explicit criteria for how to reform social media companies that go beyond discussing profit models:

The way I’m going to evaluate any proposal touching on social media and the internet is whether it strengthens or weakens the prospects for a healthy, inclusive democracy; whether it encourages robust debate and respect for our differences; whether it reinforces rule of law and self-governance; whether it helps us make collective decisions based on the best available information; and whether it recognizes the rights and freedoms and dignity of all our citizens.

As a number of tech experts expressed, Obama’s proposed solutions are vague. For example, it’s unclear how he wants to tweak Section 230. A mandate for tech companies to moderate content couldpotentially restrict free expression in ways that are at odds with the First Amendment, and it could encumber smaller companies far more than bigger ones. And Obama’s guiding principles of creating rules that strengthen healthy democracy are vague enough that companies like Facebook — no virtuous friend of civic health — can claim they’re already upholding some of them. They’re also broad enough to support diametrically opposed views on issues like content moderation. For example, less content moderation might be seen as the best defense for political dissent — a clear measure of the health of democracy; more aggressive moderation might be argued to be the best way to protect against harassment and incitement to violence. Obama presented us with dilemmas, but he did not pierce through them.

But that may be because he, himself, isn’t really clear on the answers. (That’s the case for me as well.) And on balance, Obama pushed the debate in a distinctly positive direction by encouraging people to shake off a sense of “grimness” regarding social media. Leaning into his signature optimism, he encouraged the public to think of technology as a tool, not just the way the world is.

“The handwritten sign was a tool. TV’s a tool. The internet is a tool. Social media is a tool,” he said. “At the end of the day, tools don’t control us. We control them, and we can remake them.”

“It’s up to each of us to decide what we value and then use the tools we’ve been given to advance those values,” he continued. “And I believe we should use every tool at our disposal to secure our greatest gift: a government of, by, for the people, for generations to come.” That's a paradigm I can get behind.

Adults Over 65 Showed Huge Tech Increase In Last Decade

The chart above is from the Pew Research Center. They questioned 1,502 adults nationwide between January 25th and February 8th of 2021, and the survey had a 2.9 point margin of error.

It shows that Americans over 65 years old are using technology more. There has been a huge rise in use in the last decade. The number owning a smart phone rose from 13% to 61%. The number using social media rose from 11% to 45%. And the number owning a tablet computer rose from virtually none to about 44%.
 

Should Facial Recognition Technology Be Banned?

(The image on the right is from knowyourmeme.com.)

Facial recognition technology is not something debated very much by the media or the public -- but it probably should be.

The technology is growing fast, and is being used by our government (and many other governments), especially in law enforcement -- and now is available to the general public.

But the technology is not always reliable. One anti-facial recognition group recently took the technology to Congress. It recognized one person as being Roy Orbison -- a singer who died in 1988.

Do we really want an unreliable technology turned loose in our society -- especially one that can be so easily abused and misused. We should at least be debating this, and debating whether its use should be banned.

Here, from Vox.com, is the case for banning facial recognition technology:

Facial recognition software has encountered a growing backlash over the past few months. Behemoth companies like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft have become mired in controversy over it. San Francisco, Oakland, and Somerville have all issued local bans.

Meanwhile, some of the Democratic presidential candidates have articulated how they’d handle the tech if they’re elected. In August, Sen. Bernie Sanders became the first candidate to call for a total ban on the use of facial recognition software for policing. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Kamala Harris, and former housing secretary Julián Castro have noted that they’d regulate the technology; they did not promise to ban it. 

Some argue that outlawing facial recognition tech is throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Advocates say the software can help with worthy aims, like finding missing children and elderly adults or catching criminals and terrorists. Microsoft President Brad Smith has said it would be “cruel” to altogether stop selling the software to government agencies. This camp wants to see the tech regulated, not banned.

Yet there’s good reason to think regulation won’t be enough. The danger of this tech is not well understood by the general public, and the market for it is so lucrative that there are strong financial incentives to keep pushing it into more areas of our lives in the absence of a ban. AI is also developing so fast that regulators would likely have to play whack-a-mole as they struggle to keep up with evolving forms of facial recognition.

Then there’s the well-documented fact that human bias can creep into AI. Often, this manifests as a problem with the training data that goes into AIs: If designers mostly feed the systems examples of white male faces, and don’t think to diversify their data, the systems won’t learn to properly recognize women and people of color. And indeed, we’ve found that facial recognition systems often misidentify those groups, which could lead to them being disproportionately held for questioning when law enforcement agencies put the tech to use.

In 2015, Google’s image recognition system labeled African Americans as “gorillas.” Three years later, Rekognition wrongly matched 28 members of Congress to criminal mug shots. Another study found that three facial recognition systems — IBM, Microsoft, and China’s Megvii — were more likely to misidentify the gender of dark-skinned people (especially women) than of light-skinned people.

Even if all the technical issues were to be fixed and facial recognition tech completely de-biased, would that stop the software from harming our society when it’s deployed in the real world? Not necessarily, as a recent report from the AI Now Institute explains.

Say the tech gets just as good at identifying black people as it is at identifying white people. That may not actually be a positive change. Given that the black community is already overpoliced in the US, making black faces more legible to this tech and then giving the tech to police could just exacerbate discrimination. As Zoé Samudzi wrote at the Daily Beast, “It is not social progress to make black people equally visible to software that will inevitably be further weaponized against us.”

Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger, a law professor and a philosophy professor, respectively, argued last year that facial recognition tech is inherently damaging to our social fabric. “The mere existence of facial recognition systems, which are often invisible, harms civil liberties, because people will act differently if they suspect they’re being surveilled,” they wrote. The worry is that there’ll be a chilling effect on freedom of speech, assembly, and religion.

The authors also note that our faces are something we can’t change (at least not without surgery), that they’re central to our identity, and that they’re all too easily captured from a distance (unlike fingerprints or iris scans). If we don’t ban facial recognition before it becomes more entrenched, they argue, “people won’t know what it’s like to be in public without being automatically identified, profiled, and potentially exploited.”

Luke Stark, a digital media scholar who works for Microsoft Research Montreal, made another argument for a ban in a recent article titled “Facial recognition is the plutonium of AI.”

Comparing software to a radioactive element may seem over the top, but Stark insists the analogy is apt. Plutonium is the biologically toxic element used to make atomic bombs, and just as its toxicity comes from its chemical structure, the danger of facial recognition is ineradicably, structurally embedded within it, because it attaches numerical values to the human face. He explains:

Facial recognition technologies and other systems for visually classifying human bodies through data are inevitably and always means by which “race,” as a constructed category, is defined and made visible. Reducing humans into sets of legible, manipulable signs has been a hallmark of racializing scientific and administrative techniques going back several hundred years.

The mere fact of numerically classifying and schematizing human facial features is dangerous, he says, because it enables governments and companies to divide us into different races. It’s a short leap from having that capability to “finding numerical reasons for construing some groups as subordinate, and then reifying that subordination by wielding the ‘charisma of numbers’ to claim subordination is a ‘natural’ fact.”

In other words, racial categorization too often feeds racial discrimination. This is not a far-off hypothetical but a current reality: China is already using facial recognition to track Uighur Muslims based on their appearance, in a system the New York Times has dubbed “automated racism.” That system makes it easier for China to round up Uighurs and detain them in internment camps.

A ban is an extreme measure, yes. But a tool that enables a government to immediately identify us any time we cross the street is so inherently dangerous that treating it with extreme caution makes sense.

Instead of starting from the assumption that facial recognition is permissible — which is the de facto reality we’ve unwittingly gotten used to as tech companies marketed the software to us unencumbered by legislation — we’d do better to start from the assumption that it’s banned, then carve out rare exceptions for specific cases when it might be warranted.