Like most kids his age, 15-year-old Hassan spent a lot of time online. Before the pandemic, he liked playing football with local kids in his hometown of Burewala in the Punjab region of Pakistan. But Covid lockdowns made him something of a recluse, attached to his mobile phone. “I just …
Read More »This New Tool Aims to Keep Terrorism Content Off the Internet
Terrorist groups have found a home on smaller, less well-known online platforms in recent years where they store, share, and link to content such as violent beheading videos and recruitment propaganda. Those platforms have struggled to deal with the problem due to a lack of resources and expertise, but a …
Read More »Sweeping New Powers Could Let the UK Block Big Tech Platforms
The UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, says it is prepared to “disrupt” tech platforms that don’t comply with the country’s controversial new Online Safety Act, including cutting them off from payment systems or even blocking them from the UK. The act—a sprawling piece of legislation that covers a spectrum of issues, …
Read More »Here’s How Violent Extremists Are Exploiting Generative AI Tools
Extremist groups have begun to experiment with artificial intelligence, and in particular generative AI, in order to create a flood of new propaganda. Experts now fear the growing use of generative AI tools by these groups will overturn the work Big Tech has done in recent years to keep their …
Read More »Big Tech Ditched Trust and Safety. Now Startups Are Selling It Back As a Service
Massive layoffs across the tech sector have hit trust and safety teams hard over the past year. But with wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East and more than 50 elections taking place in the next 12 months, experts worry that a nascent industry of startups created to keep …
Read More »How Telegram Became a Terrifying Weapon in the Israel-Hamas War
At around 8 am local time the morning of October 7, Haaretz’s cyber and disinformation reporter, Omer Benjakob, was woken by his wife at their home in the historic port city of Jaffa. Something was happening in southern Israel, she said, but Benjakob shrugged it off, presuming “another round of …
Read More »Inside Elon Musk’s First Election Crisis—a Day After He ‘Freed’ the Bird
The day after Elon Musk closed his deal to buy Twitter, the company’s Seattle office held a Halloween party for employees and their children. Rebecca Scott Thein dressed in bright green to play an alien to her daughter’s Buzz Lightyear. Thein, whose job at Twitter (now X) was to help …
Read More »The UK’s Controversial Online Safety Act Is Now Law
Jeremy Wright was the first of five UK ministers charged with pushing through the British government’s landmark legislation on regulating the internet, the Online Safety Bill. The current UK government likes to brand its initiatives as “world-beating,” but for a brief period in 2019 that might have been right. Back …
Read More »The AI-Generated Child Abuse Nightmare Is Here
A horrific new era of ultrarealistic, AI-generated, child sexual abuse images is now underway, experts warn. Offenders are using downloadable open source generative AI models, which can produce images, to devastating effects. The technology is being used to create hundreds of new images of children who have previously been abused. …
Read More »The Hamas Threat of Hostage Execution Videos Looms Large Over Social Media
For the past decade, social media platforms have struggled to stop the spread of extremist violence livestreamed on their platforms. Now they face a much different problem: This time, they know what’s coming. In the days after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, the group’s military wing said it would …
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