Author: Jamie Condliffe / Source: New York Times
Pau Barrena/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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Hi, I’m Jamie Condliffe. Greetings from London.
Here’s a look at the week’s tech news:In the quest to clean up the web, the gray area between good and bad will be hard to handle.
As the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris burned last Monday, a YouTube effort to fight misinformation failed. The platform’s automated fact-checking feature — a box that shows facts to help viewers contextualize footage — incorrectly displayed information about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks alongside live streams of the fire.
“These panels are triggered algorithmically, and our systems sometimes make the wrong call,” YouTube said in a statement. The company said it had no further details about what went wrong.
The failure raises a question: If a platform can’t provide facts reliably, how can we trust it to take down bad content correctly?
Facebook, YouTube and other Big Tech companies say malign content will have to be policed automatically, because it’s too big a job for humans. But algorithms will struggle against our subjectivity.
This is a hard problem. In a profile by my colleague Daisuke Wakabayashi, YouTube’s chief executive, Susan Wojcicki, said borderline content — material that is potentially harmful but does not break rules — was particularly hard to police.
Rasmus Nielsen, a professor of political communication at Oxford University who studies misinformation, said, “The problem will never be solved, if solving it means getting rid of all the bad stuff, because we can’t agree on what the bad stuff is.”
Accept that, and a hard question follows. “Knowing that things won’t be perfect, what do we feel is most desirable?” Mr. Nielsen asked. “A system that errs on the side of caution, or one that errs on the side of being permissive?”
Decisions on that appear set to be shaped by regulation, such as draft legislation approved by the European Union on Wednesday that would require platforms to take down terrorist content within one hour of notification from the authorities, or this month’s proposals from Britain to fine tech companies if they don’t remove “harmful” content quickly.
This quickly descends into the thorny issue of potentially infringing rights of free speech to ensure that platforms remain clean. Lawmakers will have to wrestle with what kinds of algorithms they want deployed to enforce their regulation, and there is no easy solution.
Apple’s big 5G backdown
For years, Apple and Qualcomm were locked in bitter patent battles across three continents. The iPhone maker sought $27 billion in damages; its former chip supplier wanted $15 billion.
My colleagues Don Clark and Daisuke Wakabayashi reported on Wednesday that the companies had agreed to dismiss their litigation. The settlement includes a multiyear agreement for Qualcomm to supply chips to Apple, and an undisclosed one-time payment to Qualcomm from Apple.
Why the change? Playing a…
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