AIs serve up ‘garbage’ to questions about voting and elections

A number of major AI services performed poorly in a test of their ability to address questions and concerns about voting and elections. The study found that no model can be completely trusted, but it was bad enough that some got things wrong more often than not. The work was performed by Proof News, a […]

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YouTube declares war on US election misinformation… a month late

As Twitter and Facebook scrambled to institute new policies for the 2020 election, YouTube was… mostly quiet. The platform didn’t make any flashy announcements about a crackdown on election-related misinformation, nor did it really fully grapple with its massive role in distributing information during what was widely regarded as an extremely volatile time for American democracy.

Former Vice President Joe Biden won the presidential election on November 7, but YouTube decided to wait until the “safe harbor” deadline, when audits and recounts must be wrapped up at the state level, to enforce a set of rules against election misinformation.

In a new blog post out Wednesday, the world’s second biggest social network explained itself — sort of:

“Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come.”

YouTube clarified that while its users were allowed to spread misinformation about an undecided election, content claiming that “widespread fraud or errors” influenced the result of a past election will not be allowed. And from YouTube’s perspective, which accommodated the Trump administration’s many empty challenges to the results, the election was only decided yesterday.

The four days between November 3 and November 7 were fraught, plagued by false victory claims from President Trump and his supporters and concerns about political violence as online misinformation, already a pervasive threat, kicked into overdrive. Rather than wading into all that as Twitter and even the ever reluctant-to-act Facebook did, YouTube mostly opted to sit back and wait for history to take its course. The company was more comfortable universally pointing users toward real information than making tough calls and actively purging false claims from its platform.

YouTube doesn’t go to great lengths to explain itself these days, much less make realtime platform policy decisions in a transparent way. Twitter has pioneered that approach, and while its choices aren’t always clear or decisive, its transparency and open communication is admirable. If Twitter doesn’t always get it right, YouTube fails to even step up to the plate, making few real efforts to adapt to the rapidly mutating threats posed by misinformation online.

YouTube’s opaque decision making process is compounded by the also opaque nature of online video, which is vastly more difficult for journalists to search and index than text-based platforms. The result is that YouTube had largely gotten away with relatively little scrutiny compared to its stature in the social media world. It’s bizarre to see Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey called before the Senate Judiciary Committee without even a passing thought to bringing in YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki as well. In spite of its massive influence and two billion users, the social video behemoth is barely on the radar for lawmakers.

If YouTube’s strategy is that communicating less attracts less attention, unfortunately it appears to be working. The company is bound to be anxious about getting dragged into federal and state-level antitrust investigations, particularly with state lawsuits that could try to force Facebook and Instagram apart.

The Justice Department is already targeting Google with a historic antitrust suit focused on its search business, but that doesn’t preclude other antitrust actions from taking aim at YouTube. Keeping its head down may have worked for YouTube during four years of Trump, but President-Elect Biden is more interested in inoculating people against misinformation rather than super-spreading it.

Trump didn’t concede, but he will move Biden’s transition forward

With an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots, election results took a bit longer this year than usual. But if Americans were expecting an election week, November stretched on into a month of election drama, with President Trump mounting an unprecedented effort to undermine election results and stall the transition process, even as states certified Biden’s win.

President Trump at last appeared to accept the election results Monday, but not in so many words. It certainly wasn’t a concession speech, but it was probably the closest thing yet.

“… In the best interest of our Country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same,” Trump tweeted, seeming to contradict a fresh claim made by GSA Administrator Emily Murphy that the White House did not influence her decision to block the transition. The General Services Administration (GSA) plays a role in making election results official and moving the transition forward on the federal level.

 

President-elect Biden’s transition work proceeded in spite of the roadblocks, with the incoming leader introducing aspects of his plan to get COVID-19 under control and working out the names of officials he plans to appoint. But with the head of the GSA refusing to release $6.3 million in federal funds for the transition, Biden’s hands were tied in some important ways. Murphy’s extremely unusual refusal to recognize the election results also blocked the president-elect’s ability to access secure government devices and receive briefings from federal agencies, including those involved in the pandemic response.

Apart from getting Biden’s transition on track, Trump’s words and GSA’s belated cooperation could help the nation move on in another important way. For weeks, election conspiracies have roiled the internet, inspiring a number of Trump supporters to denounce mainstream social networks, which reminded users of the election results and cracked down on some forms of misinformation. Those conspiracy theories were often spread right from the top, with President Trump promoting baseless claims of fraud involving mail-in ballots and voting machines as he refused to concede.

The president’s online supporters may not move on from the election quickly, but they’re likely to follow his lead — and for now at least, it looks like Trump will signal defeat.

More voting software FUD falls flat after Trump highlights dubious data

Reports that Dominion Software, which provides voting tabulation tools to about half the states in the U.S., “deleted” millions of votes have been soundly rebuffed after outgoing President Trump parroted numbers from a random internet forum.

Tweeting Thursday morning about baseless claims of election fraud, Trump cited OANN, a right-wing news outlet, which itself seemed to have found its numbers in a thread on pro-Trump Reddit knock-off thedonald.win. (The tweet was quickly wrapped in a warning that the contents are disputed.)

The anonymous person posting there claimed to have compared numbers from Edison Research, a company that does exit polls and other election-related measures, to those from Dominion, and come up with very different sums. The methods are not very well explained, nor are the results. It’s not really clear what is being compared to what and why, or for what reason this alleged fraud was published publicly by the company supposedly perpetrating it. No one has verified (if that’s the word) this analysis in any way.

In a comment to Politifact, Edison President Larry Rosin wrote that “we have no evidence of any voter fraud,” and that it pretty much has no idea what the purported analysis is referring to.

Dominion attracted attention earlier in the week when it seemed that a glitch had caused a number of votes to be registered for President-elect Joe Biden instead of Trump. But the miscount was immediately caught and found to be the result of human error. The company has dedicated a page to combating the misinformation around its software.

Politifact rated Trump’s claim “Pants on Fire,” calling it “ridiculous” for good measure. It’s worth noting that the tweet didn’t even state the numbers of the supposed fraud correctly.

There doesn’t seem to be any merit to the “analysis” at all, but it provides an excellent example of how people who are unfamiliar with how the voting apparatus works — which is to say almost everyone not directly involved — tend to find the software portion inherently untrustworthy.

Yet there is no way to count, tabulate and verify millions of ballots in hours or days after an election that does not rely heavily on private software tools, and it is in fact highly reliable and secure. The process of elections is bipartisan and extremely closely monitored.

Elections commissioners and state leadership have been unanimous in declaring the election a surprisingly smooth one considering the difficulties of holding one during a pandemic and with extremely high turnout both in person and by mail.

A major federal committee under the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency today called last week’s election “the most secure in American history… There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. We can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too.”

Despite accusations from a dwindling number of highly placed individuals in the government, there has been no evidence presented that there was any significant voter fraud or other irregularities in last week’s election, which resulted in the victory of former vice president, now President-elect Joe Biden.

Twitter labeled 300,000 US election tweets — around 0.2%

Just over a week after the U.S. elections, Twitter has offered a breakdown of some of its efforts to label misleading tweets. The site says that from October 27 to November 11, it labeled some 300,000 tweets as part of its Civic Integrity Policy. That amounts to around 0.2% of the total number of election-related tweets sent during that two-week period.

Of course, not all Twitter warnings are created equal. Only 456 of those included a warning that covered the text and limited user engagement, disabling retweets, replies and likes. That specific warning did go a ways toward limited engagement, with around three-fourths of those who encountered the tweets seeing the obscured texts (by clicking through the warning). Quote tweets for those so labeled decreased by around 29%, according to Twitter’s figures.

The president of the United States received a disproportionate number of those labels, as The New York Times notes that just over a third of Trump’s tweets between November 3 and 6 were hit with such a warning. The end of the election (insofar as the election has actually ended, I suppose) appears to have slowed the site’s response time somewhat, though Trump continues to get flagged, as he continues to devote a majority of his feed to disputing the election results confirmed by nearly every major news outlet.

His latest tweet as of this writing has been labeled disputed, but not hidden, as Trump repeats claims against voting machine maker, Dominion. “We also want to be very clear that we do not see our job as done,” Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead Vijaya Gadde and Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour wrote. “Our work here continues and our teams are learning and improving how we address these challenges.”

Twitter and other social media sites were subject to intense scrutiny following the 2016 election for the roles the platforms played in the spread of misinformation. Twitter sought to address the issue by tweaking recommendations and retweets, as well as individually labeling tweets that violate its policies.

Earlier today, YouTube defended its decision to keep controversial election-related videos, noting, “Like other companies, we’re allowing these videos because discussion of election results & the process of counting votes is allowed on YT. These videos are not being surfaced or recommended in any prominent way.”

Twitter labeled 300,000 US election tweets — around 0.2%

Just over a week after the U.S. elections, Twitter has offered a breakdown of some of its efforts to label misleading tweets. The site says that from October 27 to November 11, it labeled some 300,000 tweets as part of its Civic Integrity Policy. That amounts to around 0.2% of the total number of election-related tweets sent during that two-week period.

Of course, not all Twitter warnings are created equal. Only 456 of those included a warning that covered the text and limited user engagement, disabling retweets, replies and likes. That specific warning did go a ways toward limited engagement, with around three-fourths of those who encountered the tweets seeing the obscured texts (by clicking through the warning). Quote tweets for those so labeled decreased by around 29%, according to Twitter’s figures.

The president of the United States received a disproportionate number of those labels, as The New York Times notes that just over a third of Trump’s tweets between November 3 and 6 were hit with such a warning. The end of the election (insofar as the election has actually ended, I suppose) appears to have slowed the site’s response time somewhat, though Trump continues to get flagged, as he continues to devote a majority of his feed to disputing the election results confirmed by nearly every major news outlet.

His latest tweet as of this writing has been labeled disputed, but not hidden, as Trump repeats claims against voting machine maker, Dominion. “We also want to be very clear that we do not see our job as done,” Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead Vijaya Gadde and Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour wrote. “Our work here continues and our teams are learning and improving how we address these challenges.”

Twitter and other social media sites were subject to intense scrutiny following the 2016 election for the roles the platforms played in the spread of misinformation. Twitter sought to address the issue by tweaking recommendations and retweets, as well as individually labeling tweets that violate its policies.

Earlier today, YouTube defended its decision to keep controversial election-related videos, noting, “Like other companies, we’re allowing these videos because discussion of election results & the process of counting votes is allowed on YT. These videos are not being surfaced or recommended in any prominent way.”

Facebook extends its temporary ban on political ads for another month

The election is settled, but the nation is far from it.

Before Election Day in the U.S., Facebook hit pause on all political and social issue ads. At the time, the company made it clear that the precautionary measure designed to turn off one potential faucet of misinformation would be temporary, but it couldn’t say how long the policy would remain in effect.

Now, Facebook says the temporary ban will continue for at least another month. The decision to extend the special policy was implemented Wednesday, four days after Joe Biden’s election victory — and four days after it became clear that Trump had no intention of conceding a lost election.

“The temporary pause for ads about politics and social issues in the US continues to be in place as part of our ongoing efforts to protect the election,” the company wrote in an update to its previous announcement. “Advertisers can expect this to last another month, though there may be an opportunity to resume these ads sooner.”

Facebook’s ongoing political ad pause throws a wrench into things in Georgia, where two January runoff elections will decide which party will control the Senate heading into President-Elect Biden’s administration. A friendly Senate is essential for many of Biden’s biggest proposals, including a $2 trillion climate package that could reshape the American economy and push the country toward an electrified future that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels.

Over the last few days, a shocking number of Republicans have “humored” the president’s refusal to transfer power in spite of an unambiguous election call and Biden’s decisive win in Pennsylvania, which cut off any potential paths to victory for his opponent. The Trump campaign’s last-ditch flurry of legal challenges have presented little of substance so far, and they might ultimately be more about dividing a nation and sowing doubt than prevailing in court.

‘Free speech’ social network Parler tops app store rankings following Biden’s election win

Chafing at new misinformation safeguards and a lost election, dejected Trump supporters flocked to the alternative social network Parler over the weekend. Parler’s homepage promises that users can “Speak freely and express yourself openly, without fear of being ‘deplatformed’ for your views.”

Parler shot up the charts across Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store in the days following official election results. An Android app called “Parlor” was also trending Monday, likely due to misspelled searches for Parler.

Joe Biden prevailed on Saturday, picking up the critical state of Pennsylvania to become president-elect. Biden’s win followed a tense five days of vote tallying, as Trump repeatedly attacked the U.S. election process.

Parler sat at #7 in the App Store on Saturday, November 7, according to mobile app market analysis from Sensor Tower. By the next day, it shot up to #1 — a first for the app. It remains in the top slot now, in contrast to its position a week ago as the 1,023th most downloaded app.

The story is similar in Google’s own app marketplace, where Parler climbed from #51 on Saturday to #5 on Sunday, topping out in the #1 slot today. The Fox News competitor Newsmax TV and the self-described “next-gen social network” MeWe also sat in Google’s top 5.

Parler’s ascent is notable but not totally new. Accounts anticipating a ban have been pointing their followers toward Parler and other far-right havens with every new platform policy change that Twitter and Facebook make. Gab, which describes itself as “the free speech social network” is also vying for Trump loyalists.

“It’s crazy to believe that only a handful of Silicon Valley companies will have complete control over the flow of information, communication and news forever,” Gab CEO Andrew Torba wrote in a blog post Sunday.  Torba was booted from Y Combinator’s alumni network for threatening comments and harassment shortly after the 2016 election.

But in spite of calls for a mass exodus, many prominent conservative figures accusing Twitter and Facebook of censorship have maintained their presences on the platforms, knowing that their reach would be dramatically limited on the alternative social networks.

Fox News contributor and Trump enthusiast Dan Bongino called for his own supporters to move to Parler last week, warning that “Fakebook” might act against his page. On Facebook, Bongino’s content regularly ranks in the top performing posts on the platform and his page has nearly four million followers. Notably, Bongino announced an ownership stake in Parler earlier this year.

Over on Parler, the Trump campaign is raising donations for an “election defense task force,” but according to the fine print half of every donation will go toward existing debt. The campaign doesn’t appear to have made much original content on the niche social network lately, instead reposting very similar messages over and over.

For the many Trump supporters pushing dangerous false claims about the election, the writing was on the wall. Facebook made a rapid-fire series of policy changes in the months preceding the election, banning QAnon, cracking down on violent militias and introducing new tools to slow the spread of misinformation, which metastasized on the social network over the last four years.

As it became clear that Trump’s effort to delegitimize the election was picking up steam, Facebook cracked down. The company began hiding search results for the #StopTheSteal hashtag and removed one of its popular groups over “calls for violence” made by some members.

In spite of his loss, President Trump has refused to concede the election. But by Monday, Biden’s transition team had already kicked into high gear, announcing members of a coronavirus task force that will seek to rein in the deadly virus where Trump has failed.

With election results settled, the vast machinery of the U.S. government moved steadily toward January’s transfer of power, as it has in every other election.

Joe Biden wins the 2020 US presidential election

Following a tense week of vote tallying, Joe Biden won the state of Pennsylvania and vaulted ahead in the race to become the next president of the United States. Biden’s win in the critical state put him over the threshold of 270 electoral votes, cutting off all avenues for his opponent.

Biden prevailed by flipping key states that went to Trump in 2016, including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump again won in Florida and Ohio, but in the end was unable to chart a path to an electoral victory. Biden also leads by millions in the popular vote, with a record number of votes cast this year, many through the mail.

As his vice president, Kamala Harris will make history in myriad ways, becoming the first woman — and the first woman of color — to occupy the office. Harris, a California senator and the state’s former attorney general, built a career in the tech industry’s front yard.

Shattered barriers aside, this year’s election will likely go down in infamy for many in the U.S. The race was the strangest in recent years, characterized by rising storms of misinformation, fears over the fate of scaled-up vote-by-mail systems and a deadly virus that’s claimed well over 230,000 American lives. Biden’s campaign was forced to adapt to drive-up rallies and digital campaigning instead of relying on door-knocking and face-to-face interaction to mobilize the vote.

The circumstances of the election also created the perfect ecosystem for misinformation — a situation made worse by President Trump’s false claim of victory early Wednesday morning and ongoing claims of Democratic voter fraud. Trump appears to be in no mood to concede the election, but in the end the vote is what it is and Joe Biden will take office on January 20, 2021.

While a sitting president rejecting that unwritten democratic norm would be alarming, Trump’s decision will have little bearing on the ultimate political outcome. Whatever the coming days hold, the U.S. is entering into a new and unprecedented phase of uncertainty in which misinformation abounds and political tensions and fears of politically-motivated violence are running high.

The former vice president’s win brings a four year run of Trumpism to an abrupt end, though its effects will still reverberate throughout American politics, likely for decades. It also ushers in a new era in which Joe Biden plans to draw on the influence of an unlikely coalition of Democrats from across the political spectrum. The Senate still hangs in the balance with two tight races in Georgia headed to January runoffs.

Biden has laid out plans for sweeping climate action, and a healthcare extension that would cover more Americans and provide an opt-in Medicare-like public option. But his ability to enact most of those grand plans would hinge on a Democratic Senate. While either party was likely to continue pursuing more aggressive regulation for the technology industry, we’ll be watching closely for signals of what’s to come for tech policy.

But even without the Senate, the president-elect may be capable of making a swift and critical impact where it’s most needed: the coronavirus pandemic. In the continued absence of a national plan to fight the virus and a White House that downplays its deadliness and discourages mask-wearing, COVID-19 is raging out of control in states across the country, signaling a very deadly winter just around the corner.

Steve Bannon’s show pulled off Twitter and YouTube over calls for violence

Former presidential advisor and right-wing pundit Steve Bannon had his show suspended from Twitter and an episode removed by YouTube after calling for violence against FBI director Christopher Wray and the government’s leading pandemic expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Bannon, speaking with co-host Jack Maxey, was discussing what Trump should do in a hypothetical second term. He suggested firing Wray and Fauci, but then went further, saying “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats.”

This may strike one at first as mere hyperbole — one may say “we want his head on a platter” and not really be suggesting they actually behead anyone. But the conversation continued and seemed to be more in earnest than it first appeared:

Maxey: Just yesterday there was the anniversary of the hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia. These were Quaker businessmen who had cohabitated, if you will, with the British while they were occupying Philadelphia. These people were hung. This is what we used to do to traitors.

Bannon: That’s how you won the revolution. No one wants to talk about it. The revolution wasn’t some sort of garden party, right? It was a civil war. It was a civil war.

Whether one considers this only nostalgia for the good old days of mob justice or an actual call to bring those days back, the exchange seems to have been enough for moderators at YouTube and Twitter to come down hard on the pair’s makeshift broadcast.

Twitter confirmed that it has “permanently suspended” (i.e. it can be appealed but won’t be restored automatically) the account for violating the rule against glorifying violence.

YouTube removed the episode from “Steve Bannon’s War Room” channel Wednesday afternoon after it was brought to their attention. A representative for the platform said “We’ve removed this video for violating our policy against inciting violence. We will continue to be vigilant as we enforce our policies in the post-election period.”

Online platforms have struggled with finding the line between under and over-moderation. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and others have all taken different measures, from preemptively turning off features to silently banning hashtags. Facebook today took down a group with more than 300,000 members that was acting as an amplifier for misinformation about the election.

While the platforms have been vigorous in at least some ways in the labeling and isolation of misinformation, it’s more difficult for video platforms. Just minutes ago Trump took to YouTube to detail a variety of unfounded conspiracy theories about mail-in voting, but the platform can’t exactly do a live fact-check of the president and shut down his channel. More than with text-based networks, video tends to spread before it is caught and flagged due to the time it takes to review it.