From Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos to former Microsoft Corp chief executive Steve Ballmer, US tech executives have sought in recent days to dispel the notion there is a swift solution to the proliferation of spurious or insidious information on the Internet, a phenomenon critics said wields an outsized and unhealthy influence on public discourse and elections.
Baidu Inc (百度) president Zhang Yaqin (張亞勤) said China faces similar challenges, despite operating one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated online surveillance machines.
Companies in China, where freedom of speech is curtailed by censorship programs, have long used a mix of advanced technologies and human cybercops to police the Internet.
Baidu, China’s largest search engine, employs technology to spot potentially false information before turning to local agencies such as the Cyberspace Administration of China to verify items. One of the country’s three largest Internet players, it checks 3 billion claims of fake news every year.
“Every year we see somewhere around 3 billion claims, requests that we need to verify that might turn out to be fake news,” Zhang said. “We’re using a combination of technology and content authorization to minimize the fake news.”
From Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) to Sina Corp’s (新浪) Weibo (微博), China’s social media employ technology and armies of vetters to scour its services for undesirable content, which goes beyond rumors and unsubstantiated claims to include any and all information deemed harmful to social stability.
Yet, even the best-funded online operators have difficulty keeping up: China’s cybercops last month fined Tencent, Weibo and Baidu for carrying illegal content.
Days later, Weibo began recruiting and rewarding “supervisors” from among its own users to report problems.
“We have an obligation to make sure the user gets good content, but it continues to be a challenge for us, for other companies in China and companies in the US,” Zhang said.
The problem persists despite China having some of the strictest rules aimed at preventing the spread of “false news.”
It recently established regulations forcing forum-posters to register with their real identities and its laws threaten jail time for posting defamatory false information, Weibo’s latest annual report said.
However, Zhang said fixing the problem required the use of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and even closer cooperation with relevant government regulators.
Pressure is building on social media services from Google to Twitter to try and curb the proliferation of fake news and targeted ads.
Stamos last week said it was very difficult to spot fake news and propaganda using computer programs.
Executives from Alphabet Inc’s Google, Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc are scheduled to testify before US Congress on Nov. 1 about Russian use of their sites to influence last year’s US presidential election — a hot-button topic that the social media and Internet services are under pressure to address.
Stamos, who is handling Facebook’s investigation, said that technical solutions could have unintended consequences of ideological bias.
“I’m not sure you can say that is Facebook’s job, they’re not in the news business, they pass along other people’s news,” Ballmer said. “Same thing with Google. ”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day