Author: April Cowels

Following the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday, the internet erupted with jokes, memes, and, later, thirst posts for the insurance magnate’s shooter. The assassination was an event that could, for many, signal the start of a more critical look at corporations, how the people leading them treat the public, and how the public responds to those executives’ choices.Or it was just a perfect opportunity to laugh in the face of a bleak political and economic reality. The internet is as the internet does. Tweet may have been deleted But the online fete has stirred even more debate behind the scenes: In the age of re-contested free speech, where does content moderation (and platforms’ anti-violence policies) fit into the class conversation? SEE ALSO: Bluesky ramps up content moderation as millions join the platform Nowhere has that been more documented than on Reddit. According to a 404Media report, the platform has removed dozens of posts about the CEO’s death, tracked by a platform subbreddit known as r/undelete which grabs content that reaches the top 100 most popular on the site before being deleted. Many of the posts, the publication found, had thousands of upvotes and even more still exist on industry related subs like r/nursing and r/medicine. Subbredit moderators are struggling to curb the plethora of posts, which they say will inevitably be removed by Reddit for violating anti violence policies, if not first removed by moderators for violation of “no politics” and “no death” rules. There isn’t resounding…As some on the internet celebrate a CEOs murder, content moderators are at a crossroads

Dateline: Woking, 6th December 2024.Well, we’ve all stopped at a fountain, a lakeside or a bridge over a river and thrown a coin in to make a wish. I’ve done it more than once (and Woking are still not in the Premier League). The physicality, throwing things and watching splashes, was part of the fun. You can’t throw a contactless card int into a wising well, of course, but that does not mean that we need to keeps notes and coins in circulation.Personally I never give to charities in the street anyway as my charity donations are set up as direct debits from my bank account, but I certainly have paid progressive buskers on the London subway and elsewhere with a cheery tap on a contactless terminal. Digital money mavens like me still celebrate tradition and support charities. So what will we do about those places where cash is apparently irreplaceable?ShareCash Is Taking A BathThere is a real issue here. Take a look at the plight of the Roman Baths in Bath in England. They have reportedly lost more than £90,000 in donations since telling visitors not to throw coins into the 2,000-year-old cold plunge pool (which visitors used to treat like a wishing well) and to donate through contactless payments instead. I can understand why. Tossing a coin into a pool is a physical act, shared with onlookers. It is undoubtedly more satisfying than a tap-and-pay beep. There are places like this where physical cash still has a role….Three Bitcoins In A Fountain

Cameo is making room for more than celebrity greetings, expanding its personalised messaging service to let anyone sign up to make custom videos for money.Announced in a blog post on Tuesday, the platform has officially launched its CameoX initiative, which began a pilot program last May as a “strategic decision to allow just about anyone with a passion for engaging with fans to join the Cameo community.”Cameo has made millions through its celebrity video message offerings, seeing actors, athletes, musicians, influencers, multiple disgraced U.S. Congressmen, and racist far-right British politicians personalise greetings for varying rates — it was a particularly lucrative move for celebs during the COVID-19 pandemic and the SAG-AFTRA strike. In 2021, Cameo was valued at $1 billion. But celebrities have since reportedly left the platform in droves, for reasons including but not limited to pro-Russia propagandists tricking celebrities into spreading misinformation. Plus, Cameo had a run-in with the Federal Trade Commission for violating celebrity endorsement disclosures this year, which was not cheap. SEE ALSO: Matt Gaetz joins Cameo like disgraced congressman before him So, Cameo is pivoting to embrace more avenues of content creation and monetisation. Now, anyone can join Cameo through the company’s revamped onboarding process, which no longer focuses on Cameo team outreach or follower thresholds.”We realized we had missed out on thousands of talented individuals who could have made meaningful contributions to the marketplace,” said Cameo CEO Steven Galanis in a press statement. “We missed SAG-AFTRA actors who had applied before landing breakout roles…Cameo expands to all creators, not just celebs

Bluesky Social is having a moment, but that new influx of users is creating an impersonation problem. Thus, the decentralized platform is rolling out a “more aggressive” policy on parody accounts that aren’t clearly labeled. SEE ALSO: Bluesky has growing pains. Here’s what it can learn from X/Twitter In a thread on the platform’s safety account, Bluesky stated, “Parody, satire, or fan accounts are allowed on Bluesky, but they must clearly label themselves in both the display name and bio to help others know the account isn’t official.”Additionally, the platform is cracking down on “identity churning,” where accounts create impersonation profiles to gain followers and then rebrand themselves entirely.The changes to Bluesky’s terms of service aren’t without reason. In his newsletter Faked Up, Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, noted that “44 percent of the top 100 most-followed accounts on Bluesky had at least one doppelganger.”Bluesky’s unconventional approach to verification has become a fertile ground for copycats, especially as celebrities and political figures migrate over. Without a traditional verification process, users must “self-verify” with custom domain names. This manual process requires access by adding a string of text to the DNS record associated with the domain. For instance, major accounts like the New York Times use their own domains, such as @nytimes.com, instead of the default @person.bsky.social.This has created a new problem of “handle squatting” as outlets that do switch to custom names often have to squat on their old accounts to prevent…Bluesky is cracking down on parody accounts and impersonators

Bluesky replies will now default to appear by “hotness” in a contentious update to the social media platform.Announced this week as part of the app’s 1.95 software update, post replies will now appear as “hot replies first”, which is the new default setting. “With this release, you can now display replies by “hotness,” which weights liked replies that are more recent more heavily,” the app’s official Bluesky account posted. 📢 1.95 is rolling out now (2/6) With this release, you can now display replies by “hotness,” which weights liked replies that are more recent more heavily.[image or embed]— Bluesky (@bsky.app) November 27, 2024 at 9:10 PM Post reply settings also include sorting by oldest or newest replies, most liked, or a random setting labelled “Poster’s roulette”. SEE ALSO: Bluesky has growing pains. Here’s what it can learn from X/Twitter But while Bluesky’s announcement was delivered with excitement, a lot of users aren’t happy with the addition, especially as it’s now the default setting. Users protested the act of rewarding “clout farmers” and lamented this similarity to platforms like X — where many Bluesky users have fled from.”Prioritising ‘popular’ like this is one of the main reasons all the other social media sites became awful and encourages shitty behaviour,” wrote Phonogram author and illustrator Jamie McKelvie. Making “hotness” the default is a terrible change. Let’s not speed run to be X or FB, okay?— Marc Ruvolo (@marcruvolo.bsky.social) November 28, 2024 at 10:12 PM Most recent replied has always been the best system….Bluesky now displays replies by hotness

Dateline: Sinaia, 30th November 2024.Picture courtesy of Mirela Ciobanu.Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong made an interesting comment on TwiX, talking about how AIs cannot get bank accounts but can get cryptowallets. He was making the point that AI agents can now use USDC on Base to transact with humans, merchants or other AIs. While it is right to say that (for now) an AI cannot open a bank account, there’s nothing to stop an AI from using a bank account to make and receive payments.Subscribe nowMoneyGPTIn fact, thanks to open banking, it is actually quite easy for them to do this. Mike Kelly, who is both an expert on the UK’s open banking infrastructure (and something of a fintech nuts and bolts guy) demonstrated this some time ago when he built a plug-in to link ChatGPT to his bank account using the UK’s open banking APIs. The plug-in, called “BankGPT” can tell you your balance, find transactions, discuss your budgeting and even make payments.Connecting bots to banks is not by any stretch of the imagination rocket science: In fact it is an inevitable progression given the interplay with open banking initiatives around the world and AI systems that are becoming increasingly agentic: That is, capable of dynamically and independently carrying out actions toward goals over extended periods of time, without humans being in the loop or pre-specifying their actions or subgoals.As McKinsey say, chatbots are just the beginning of the evolution from the current knowledge-based, generative AI-based tools—such as chatbots that…Bots And Bank Accounts

In a long-anticipated Senate vote, Australian is banning children under 16 years old from using social media. It is the world’s strictest law protecting young people from the effects of social media.”Social media is doing harm to our kids and I’m calling time on it,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra earlier this month. “I’ve spoken to thousands of parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles. They, like me, are worried sick about the safety of our kids online.” SEE ALSO: Australia to ban social media for kids under 16 Social media companies already don’t allow children under the age of 13 to use their platforms, but that rule is often easily skirted by savvy young people who want to use the platform anyway. This ban, which passed the Senate by 34 votes to 19 votes on Thursday, will take effect in a year. It puts the onus on social media companies — instead of parents or kids themselves — to ban the use. Tech companies could be fined up to 50 million AUD, or $32.5 million, if they don’t comply, according to the BBC.The ruling is supported by many, many surveys and studies that detail the dangers social media can have on young people that ties social media use to mental health struggles. It’s not clear which specific social media platforms will be effected, but Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said earlier this month that it will likely include at least Instagram, TikTok, Facebook,…World’s strictest social media law targets users under 16 in Australia

Bluesky is already facing its first major AI scrape, despite the stance of its owners that it will never train generative AI on user data. Reported by 404Media on Nov. 26, one million public Bluesky posts — complete with identifying user information — were crawled and then uploaded to AI company Hugging Face. The dataset was created by machine learning librarian Daniel van Strien, intended to be used in the development of language models and natural language processing, as well as general analysis of social media trends, content moderation, and posting patterns. It contains users’ decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and even has a search function to find content from specific users.According to the dataset’s description, the set “contains 1 million public posts collected from Bluesky Social’s firehose API (Application Programming Interface), intended for machine learning research and experimentation with social media data. Each post contains text content, metadata, and information about media attachments and reply relationships.” SEE ALSO: Leaving X for bluer pastures? What to know about Bluesky’s owners and policies. Bluesky users didn’t opt-in to such uses of their content, but neither is it expressly prohibited by Bluesky. The platform’s firehose API is an “aggregated, chronological stream of all the public data updates as they happen in the network, including posts, likes, follows, handle changes, and more.” Bluesky’s API — coupled with the public and decentralized Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol the site is built on — means Bluesky content is open and available to the third party developers the platform…One million public Bluesky posts scraped for AI training

File this under nice problems to have: Bluesky is growing like gangbusters. But hiding beneath that nice problem is a whole viper pit of nasty ones, as any study of Twitter history will tell you. The Twitter-like social media underdog (or, given its logo, under-butterfly) zipped past the 20 million-user mark last week, with more than a quarter of those users arriving after the U.S. election. An election in which the owner of Twitter/X put his giant thumb on the scale for Donald Trump and made billions of dollars in a single day afterwards—events that led to what we might term an ongoing X-odus. Now leaving Musk’s sinking ship for Bluesky: Taylor Swift stans. More importantly, the new users are highly active, and there’s no sign of the trend abating. According to a live counter built atop Bluesky’s API, the service is nudging the 23 million-user mark, and could cross it by the time U.S. families sit down to their Thanksgiving meals. The growth rate is 4 to 8 new users every second. That could easily climb once crazy Republican uncles everywhere unload on their distraught Democratic kin. SEE ALSO: Leaving X for bluer pastures? What to know about Bluesky’s owners and policies. So what’s the problem? Say it with us now: content moderation. Bluesky doesn’t just have to deal with disinformation coming from fake accounts, taking advantage of its lack of account verification, but also an explosion in child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — from two confirmed cases in…Bluesky has growing pains. Heres what it can learn from X/Twitter

More users means more problems, and social media wunderkind Bluesky is no exception. On Monday, Bluesky announced new moderation efforts to address a growth in concerning user content amid its incredible growth.In an exclusive with Platformer, Bluesky explained that it would be quadrupling its content moderation team, currently a 25-person contracted workforce, in order to curb a worrisome influx of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other content that violates the sites’ community guidelines — cases that have so far fallen through the existing moderation systems and warrant human oversight. “The surge in new users has brought with it concomitant growth in the number of tricky, disturbing, and outright bizarre edge cases that the trust and safety team must contend with,” the company wrote. “In all of 2023, Bluesky had two confirmed cases of CSAM posted on the network. It had eight confirmed cases on Monday alone.” SEE ALSO: Leaving X for bluer pastures? What to know about Bluesky’s owners and policies. At large, the platform is navigating an explosion in user reports being handled by an extremely small company. On Nov. 15, the platform posted that it was receiving 3,000 reports per hour, compared to only 360,000 reports for all of 2023. “We’re triaging this large queue so the most harmful content such as CSAM is removed quickly. With this significant influx of users, we’ve also seen increased spam, scam, and trolling activity — you may have seen some of this yourself,” the platform wrote at the time. “We…Bluesky ramps up content moderation as millions join the platform