More bad news for Google’s beleaguered spinoff Jigsaw, whose flagship project is “Perspective,” a machine-learning system designed to catch and interdict harassment, hate-speech and other undesirable online speech.
Continue reading “Training bias in AI “hate speech detector” means that tweets by Black people are far more likely to be censored”
Tag: jigsaw
Insiders claim that Google’s internet-fixing Jigsaw is a toxic vanity project for its founder, where women keep a secret post-crying touchup kit in the bathroom
In 2016, Google announced that it was renaming its small Google Ideas unit to “Jigsaw,” giving the new unit a much broader, “wildly ambitious” mandate: to tackle “surveillance, extremist indoctrination, and censorship.”
Continue reading “Insiders claim that Google’s internet-fixing Jigsaw is a toxic vanity project for its founder, where women keep a secret post-crying touchup kit in the bathroom”
Google releases Android encrypted DNS app that will help beat censorship
Google sister-company Jigsaw (previously) has released an Android app called Intra that encrypts DNS queries, which allows Android users to bypass one of the most common forms of internet censorship.
Continue reading “Google releases Android encrypted DNS app that will help beat censorship”
Authoritarians used to be scared of social media, now they rule it
A new report from the Institute For the Future on “state-sponsored trolling” documents the rise and rise of government-backed troll armies who terrorize journalists and opposition figures with seemingly endless waves of individuals who bombard their targets with vile vitriol, from racial slurs to rape threats.
Continue reading “Authoritarians used to be scared of social media, now they rule it”
The democratization of censorship: when anyone can kill as site as effectively as a government can
On the eve of the Stuxnet attacks, half a decade ago, I found myself discussing what it all meant with William Gibson (I’d just interviewed him on stage in London), and I said, “I think the most significant thing about any of these sophisticated, government-backed attacks is that they will eventually turn into a cheap and easy weapon that technically unskilled people can deploy for petty grievances.” We haven’t quite got there yet with Stuxnet, but there’s a whole class of “advanced persistent threat” techniques that are now in the hands of fringey criminals who deploy them at the smallest provocation.
Continue reading “The democratization of censorship: when anyone can kill as site as effectively as a government can”