Saturday 27 April 2024

We must target the root cause of misinformation. We cannot fact check our way out of this.

Phone with social media apps on it

‘The underlying business model is rotten, and that ought to be the focus of our attention.’

One of the best tools we have to clean up this mess is already in our hands

There are once again calls for the government to Do Something about misinformation online, following the recent stabbings at Bondi Junction and the immediate spread of speculation and false claims on social media.

The previously ditched misinformation bill appears to be back on the cards. Even Peter Dutton has indicated support despite loud criticism from the Coalition towards the draft legislation last year. The original bill was itself, ironically, engulfed in misleading comments (misinformation, if you will). It remains to be seen what a revamped bill will contain.

The trouble is, the approach to tackling mis- and disinformation in Australia is fixated on surface level interventions. Legislative efforts that target the symptom, such as removal of content, factchecking and automated content moderation, however well intentioned, leave broader problems unaddressed. If we don’t deal with the underlying imperatives that make online mis- and disinformation so prevalent, we’ll just keep playing whack-a-mole.

There has always been some level of questionable information, spin, propaganda and lies disseminated via information technologies, be it through newspapers, television and radio, pamphlets and so on. But what makes mis- and disinformation so potent in the digital age is not just the speed and scale of it, but also its precision.

Because it’s not just about what you see, it’s about why you see it. Amplification, engagement and recommendation algorithms are the fuel on the fire of misinformation.

By now it is well known that social media platforms reward content that keeps people scrolling. The more time spent on a platform means more data generated and more ads sold. Polarising, controversial and sensationalist material performs well, and gets boosted accordingly. This is made worse by content recommendation systems used to curate experiences in the name of ‘personalisation’, which can take people down algorithmic rabbit holes where they are served more of the same, and increasingly extreme, content. Research suggests misinformation is possibly less effective at changing people’s beliefs than imagined, but is rather more likely to be taken as accurate when it aligns with their already-established political beliefs. The potential for recommender systems to intensify confirmation bias is worrying.

These algorithms are only possible because they are built upon vast quantities of data generated and collected by grace of lax privacy protections for decades. A United Nations report links the spread of disinformation with the rampant data collection and profiling techniques used by the online advertising industry. Misinformation as we currently experience it is in many ways a symptom of the data-extractive business model of digital platforms that prioritises engagement above all else.

On top of that, revenue sharing schemes create direct financial incentives for content creators (or anyone with an X Premium account) to create and share engaging content that is tailored for virality. That means people made money off spreading Islamophobic and antisemitic speculation after the Bondi Junction attack.

The impact of personalised disinformation is likely to be made worse in the future by developments in generative AI, which promises to deliver increasingly granular forms of customisation that until now had been impossible to achieve at scale.

If this all sounds like a disastrous mess, that’s because it is. Collective concerns such as the public interest, human rights and community responsibility can’t compete with the profit motive, and in practice are not prioritised by digital platforms.

The through-line is that these systems rely upon massive amounts of free flowing data in order to function. The commercial exploitation of personal data is a key driver of the business models of platforms that encourages and benefits from the production and spread of divisive, controversial or false content. It’s important to assess the causes of the problem at hand to identify pathways for meaningful intervention. We simply cannot fact check our way out of this.

But here is the good news: we do have the capacity to target this problem at its source. In lieu of dismantling capitalism and doing away with the profit motive entirely, one of the best tools we have at hand to put a stopper in the flow of data that fuels so many of the harmful consequences of digital platforms - including misinformation – is to create and enforce strong privacy protections. Privacy reform is on the agenda, and bold change has the potential to minimise data-extractive business models, improving our online media spaces as a result.

Verification tools and content moderation can play a role. But there are serious shortcomings of such an approach, including the risk of overreach and encroachments on rights such as freedom of expression. The underlying business model is rotten, and that ought to be the focus of our attention.

From domestic violence, to terrorism and war, social media is a thread that connects all the issues that now challenge us.

Extract from ABC News

ABC News Homepage

Analysis

7.30

By Laura Tingle

Posted 2 hours ago

We now face a perfect firestorm of issues that both challenge our community cohesion and present us with Australian society in all its ugliness.(Reuters: Gonzalo Fuentes/ABC News: Nick Haggarty, Matt Roberts/AAP: Mick Tsikas)

It has become a standard, if unfortunate, part of Australian politics in recent years for politicians to pick up and run with some incident to crystallise public sentiment on an issue and let the media debate rage on it.

Think African gangs, needles in strawberries, Woolworths not selling enough Australia Day merchandise.

You might notice that these have tended to be the preserve of the Coalition side of politics more than the Labor side.

That Labor doesn't do it so much may be a testament to their better angels, or to the fact they have just never been good at the particular style of politics.

But we now face a perfect firestorm of issues that both challenge our community cohesion and present us with Australian society in all its ugliness.

It is a particularly complex set of issues that cannot be untangled from each other.

That makes this particular modus operandi dangerous for both those who might be tempted to practice it — and the rest of us.

We all know social media has become an unwieldy force in politics around the globe. But our political leaders are now being forced to confront, in very specific terms, the really difficult questions thrown up about when enough is enough.

PM and Elon Musk feud over X's refusal to remove stabbing video.

A debate that has largely been framed in terms of freedom of speech has become conflated with a whole range of issues that now challenge us: from social cohesion, to terrorism, to domestic violence.

The killings, predominantly of women, at Bondi Junction and the stabbing attack on a bishop in the Western Sydney suburb of Wakeley have come at a time of horrendously relentless killings of women and amid heightened tensions provoked by the Gaza conflict.

Social media is a thread that has run through all these stories: from the misinformation and disinformation spread about the Bondi attacker while the attacks were still underway; to the live-streaming of the bishop's church service and subsequent misinformation that led to a violent riot; to questions about the growing aggression of misogynistic online content directed towards young men; to online abuse and threats of violence levelled at anyone on either side of the Gaza conflict.

Two mighty struggles

This week, e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant took on X and Elon Musk in the Federal Court seeking to force the platform to take down 65 postings of graphic footage of the Wakeley knife attack.

She is seeking to do that under the powers the parliament granted her — under the Morrison government — in the Online Safety Act in 2021.

Elon Musk has a serious expression as he looks to his right and clasps his hands together. — Australia's e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant took Elon Musk, the owner of X, to court this week. (Reuters: Gonzalo Fuentes)

While there had been a lot of political noise made in the wake of the Bondi attacks 48 hours earlier, about dealing with the disinformation and misinformation that had circulated at the time, social media platforms are currently only subject to voluntary codes of conduct about removing inflammatory commentary and misinformation.

Legislation dealing with these issues is currently being considered, as are changes to the Online Safety Act — which was already under review before these attacks all happened.

The ground has now shifted under the political debates about the specifics of both those legislative developments.

But in the meantime, there are now two mighty struggles going on over how we communicate and debate each other in future.

One concerns the fight in the courts with Musk and his assertion that, in trying to force his company to take down the posts, the Australian government is not only hindering free speech, it is over-reaching into an attempt to dictate what can be seen online outside Australia's borders.

The second struggle concerns the general position of our politicians about if, and how, we reset the terms of social media's social contract.

The challenges for Dutton

The political leader in the more difficult position on this is Peter Dutton, who not only faces divisions on this in his party — and in the conservative base — but also the problem of reconciling those divisions with his own strong views about social media when it comes to issues like law and order and child abuse.

It is instructive to look at comments Dutton made on April 8 — before the Sydney attacks — about social media and its role in facilitating things like young people posting crimes, like house breaking or car theft, online.

The social media companies, he said, have to "make sure that they take content down so that these young offenders don't get the publicity that they're seeking".

Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese cross paths in the House of Representatives. — Peter Dutton not only faces divisions in his party — and in the conservative base — but also the problem of reconciling those divisions with his own strong views when it comes to social media.(ABC News: Ian Cutmore)

The Coalition's private members bill would set up the power to do this, he said.

"Because at the moment, a lot of people are living in fear and they're worried about whether they're going to be broken into again. It's devastating, it's confronting to have somebody coming into your bedroom or coming into your living area, particularly when you've got young children."

In the wake of the Bondi Junction and Wakeley attacks, Dutton told Insiders on Sunday that there was "no question at all" that tougher action needed to be taken against social media companies and "I think there's a bipartisan position concerning this".

David Speers interviews Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.

"We know that the companies — and we've seen some of the comments from Elon Musk overnight — they see themselves above the law. The Australian law here should apply equally in the real world as it does online ... you would be sued for defamation and you would be taken before the courts under various acts for publishing some of that which freely flows on the internet.

"They're allowing paedophiles to distribute through their networks, images and videos of children being sexually abused, they're impeding the investigations of the police."

The more difficult question

This issue of removing explicit content is the same one Inman-Grant is trying to deal with over the bishop's stabbing.

For some, including Senate crossbenchers Pauline Hanson and Ralph Babet, and the Institute of Public Affairs, this amounts to an attack on free speech.

Dutton also faces questions about his approach from some in his own ranks.

julie inman grant speaks at a press conference — eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant and Peter Dutton are focused on the same issue. (ABC News: Adam Kennedy)

But he can't really go too far on the question of removing violent content, given his position on things like kids posting themselves breaking the law or child exploitation.

The fact that the Australian Federal Police and ASIO emerged this week to explicitly link the violent content with terror threats also highlights the difficulties for Dutton, given his tough line on national security.

Our national security officials told us the Wakeley footage could be used just as footage of the Christchurch terror attacks had been used by IS as part of their recruitment of young men.

And we subsequently saw the arrest of five teenagers linked to the Wakeley attacker, some of whom we were told had just as graphic content on their phones.

The even more difficult question becomes how parliaments and governments deal with misinformation and disinformation, since it involves not just removing graphic images but people's opinions and, therefore, becomes a much clearer debate about censorship and free speech.

When the government put up some draft laws to deal with this last year, the Coalition howled it down.

You would have to think the optics and the policy imperatives have changed.

Who wins and loses in the Federal Court is just one aspect of the battle ahead.

Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.

Thursday 25 April 2024

On Anzac Day you’ll hear stories of courage and mateship. It’s a way to rationalise war.

A man looks at a memorial wall in memory of Anzac soldiers who died during and after the Gallipoli campaign.

Paul Daley

Our leaders weave grand, often poetic, narratives around death on the battlefield – and then tragically we let it happen again.

Commemoration – and what has increasingly become an almost ecclesiastic celebration of Australia’s short martial history – on Anzac Day relies on a bedrock of numbers and dates. Dates on which began the wars that killed Australian men and women – horribly on the battlefield, behind the lines, of wounds and disease or, less visibly, behind closed doors or in lonely continental corners by their own hands.

And then there are the dates on which such wars – entered without heed to the lessons of the previous ones and on the coattails of one of two empires – came to an end.

1914. 1918. 1939. 1945. 1950. 1953. 1962. 1973. 2001. 2021.

Then come the less comprehensible numbers of deaths of those on deployment in various conflicts and other operations.

61,678. 39,657. 340. 3. 16. 12. 22. 2. 523. 47. 4. 3.

Some of those numbers are recited at times of national commemoration such as today. It is hard to equate each single one – 1 – with a likely horrible, squalid individual violent death (which is what war always delivers). There are just too many 1s to recount the experiences of, to emotionally account for, to understand the killings and deaths of.

That is why nations weave grander, often more poetic, narratives around all of those 1s, to storify the end of their lives more collectively in war into some sort of relatable – and justifiable – context. For it is only through bigger stories of battlefield courage and endurance, spirit and mateship and loss (rarely “death’’), and of the sacrifice of the fallen (rarely the “dead’’) that we can rationalise what happened in the context of war – and authorise our politicians to do it again.

For every time our politicians commit personnel to conflict or to outlandish spending on military hardware, so that we will be further interoperable with the empires that dictate our defence strategy in readiness for the next war, they are implicitly professing that the human cost of the last one and the one before it was somehow worth it.

There are few certainties in war. But an old and very good adage – that Chesterfield-bound politicians and their tough-talking minions theorise endlessly about wars and then start them so that young people can die in them – rings very true.

It was perhaps illustrative that on the approach to this year’s Anzac Day a tough-talking former security-establishment bureaucrat spoke quaintly of Australia’s need to develop a comprehensive national war plan – a “book of war’’ to “focus the national mind’’. To which I thought the best antidote could well be the development of a “book of peace’’.

Ignore the jingoistic nationalism about Anzac having birthed the nation

But I’ve digressed a bit here. And so back to this day when politicians – who get to commit to the wars and send the personnel – also get to lead the commemorations for the war dead.

You’ll hear a lot about courage and the reasons why so many young people, here and the world over, have somehow become fodder for the war machine, as if by accident. You’ll hear even more about the Australian participation in the invasion of Gallipoli 109 years ago – though not of defeat or retreat there, or of the 8,000-plus soldiers who arguably died needlessly in that folly.

You’ll probably see the lines of football (AFL and NRL) blurred by some who’d equate battlefield courage with sporting field tenacity. But the truth is that football, whatever code you choose, is a far more apt metaphor for peace than it should ever be for war.

Enjoy the match amid the peace, ignore the jingoistic nationalism about Anzac having birthed the nation (contrary to the truth of millennia of Indigenous continental civilisation and the brutal ugliness of the frontier wars and massacres upon which the federation was actually built) and take a minute or two of quiet reflection to consider that every collective reference to the dead comprises a series of individuals. Of ones.

And then, perhaps, consider the others who die needlessly at home because, having served and suffered, the war machine then turns its back on them.

Here is a number you probably won’t hear referenced today: one serving or former Australian Defence Force member has a suicide-related contact with emergency services every four hours in Australia. This is according to new research conducted for the royal commission into defence and veteran suicide.

Perhaps the most disturbing element of this research is its exposure of the suicide-related contact of serving defence force members (almost six times that of the general civilian adult population) with police and paramedics.

Many of them die.

That is a tragically forgotten part of the human toll of war – of the Anzac “story”, if you like.

But it’s always been the case. And until we start thinking differently as a nation about war, nothing will change.

In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800. Help for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is available on 13YARN on 13 92 76.

Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist

Watching sport frequently grows the happiness region of the brain.

Extract from The New Daily

John Elder
Apr 23, 2024, updated Apr 23, 2024

Watching sports, the researchers argue, ‘‘fosters a sense of community and belonging among audiences’’.

In 2017, the National Broadband Network commissioned a study that found Australians were watching 60 million hours of sport every week.

The study also found that seven million people ‘‘believe in-home experiences are better than at-stadium games and matches because it allows them to get closer to the action’’.

Apart from the accumulating chip crumbs and beer stains on the carpet, does this matter?

In the grand scheme of things – the tragedy and turmoil of our divided world – you would think probably not. But we’ll come back to that.

Watching a game of footy or cricket or the Olympics at home can be exciting and relaxing. There’s even an argument that watching sports, in the place of your choosing, is good for your wellbeing.

This might serve as a good excuse – or a weak try-on – when other members of the family turn up their noses at your armchair obsession.

But a new three-tiered study out of Japan finds there are health benefits in watching sports, and that these benefits are more pronounced in large gatherings.

Watching sports, the researchers argue, ‘‘fosters a sense of community and belonging among audiences’’.

This sense of connection ‘‘not only makes individuals feel good but also benefits society by improving health, enhancing productivity, and reducing crime’’.

(The ‘‘reducing crime’’ finding doesn’t appear to have been explored. But keep it in mind when travelling home by train with a pack of drunken yobs unhappy with how the game went.)

The new study

Firstly, the researchers from Waseda University in Tokyo analysed available data on the influence of watching sport on 20,000 Japanese residents.

Short version: Elevated wellbeing was associated with regular sport viewing. No surprise.

Secondly, an experiment, which involved exposing 208 participants to a variety of sport videos, assessed participants’ wellbeing both before and after viewing.

The main finding, again, wasn’t overly revelatory. Widely embraced sports, like baseball (this being Japan), “exerted a more significant impact on enhancing wellbeing compared to less popular sports, such as golf”.

This raises interesting questions about sport as religion that could have been further explored. At what point does a sport’s popularity take on a life of its own?

Also, do ardent fans of less-popular sports, with smaller crowds, experience a different kind of emotional high?

The most interesting aspect of this research was in the third study. This involved 14 participants whose brain activity was observed and measured using MRI neuroimaging. This occurred while the participants watched sports clips.

The brain scans showed that ‘‘sports viewing triggered activation in the brain’s reward circuits, indicative of feelings of happiness or pleasure’’.

But it went further. Participants ‘‘who reported watching sports more frequently exhibited greater grey matter volume in regions associated with reward circuits’’.

This suggested that regular viewing ‘‘may gradually induce changes in brain structures’’.

Notably, that the regions associated with happiness actually get bigger with repeated viewing of your favourite games.

Corresponding author Professor Shintaro Sato said: “Both subjective and objective measures of wellbeing were found to be positively influenced by engaging in sport viewing.

‘‘By inducing structural changes in the brain’s reward system over time, it fosters long-term benefits for individuals.’’

He said for those ‘‘seeking to enhance their overall wellbeing, regularly watching sports, particularly popular ones such as baseball or soccer, can serve as an effective remedy”.

Tuesday 23 April 2024

UNRWA report finds Palestinian aid group has robust neutrality framework, no evidence for Israeli claims of terrorist infiltration.

Extract from ABC News

ABC News Homepage

Posted 13 minutes ago

The UNRWA runs schools in refugee camps outside the Occupied Palestinian Territories and delivers aid inside Gaza.(AP Photo: Mohammed Zaatari, File)

An independent review of the neutrality of the UN agency helping Palestinian refugees has found that Israel has provided no evidence that a "significant number" of staff were involved in terrorist organisations, despite receiving a staff list annually since 2011.

The 48-page report, released on Monday, also found the agency had robust structures in place to ensure compliance with humanitarian neutrality principles, although issues remain.

The United Nations appointed former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna to lead the UNRWA neutrality review in February after Israel alleged that 12 UNRWA staff took part in the Hamas-led October 7 attacks, which triggered the Gaza war.

Israel stepped up its accusations in March, saying more than 450 UNRWA staff were military operatives in Gaza terrorist groups.

In a separate investigation, a UN oversight body is looking into the Israeli allegations against the 12 UNRWA staff.

A woman with short hair, wearing a dark blue blazer, speaks at a press conference. — Catherine Colonna urged the Israeli government not to discount the report.(AP: Hussein Malla, File)

Reuters reviewed a copy of the Colonna review's final report before it was made public.

The report said Israel had made public claims based on a UNRWA staff list provided to it in March that "a significant number" of UNRWA staff were members of "terrorist organisations".

"However, Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence of this," it said.

Israel's allegations against the dozen UNRWA staff led 16 states including Australia to pause or suspend funding of $700 million to UNRWA, a blow to an agency grappling with the humanitarian crisis that has swept Gaza since Israel launched its offensive there.

Israel has long complained about the agency, founded in 1949 to care for Palestinian refugees.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for UNRWA to be shut down.

UNRWA commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini in March warned of "a deliberate and concerted campaign" to end its operations.

Contracts terminated after alleged October 7 involvement

Israel launched its assault in Gaza after Hamas fighters rampaged through Israeli towns on October 7, killing 1,200 people according to Israeli tallies. Israel's campaign in Gaza has killed more than 34,000 people, according to Gaza health authorities.

UNRWA says it terminated the contracts of 10 of the 12 staff accused by Israel of involvement in the October 7 attacks, and that the other two are dead.

The agency employs 32,000 people across its area of operations, 13,000 of them in Gaza.

UNRWA shares staff lists annually with Lebanon, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Syria and Israel, the review said, but also noted that Israeli officials never expressed concern and informed panel members it did not consider the list "a screening or vetting process" but rather a procedure to register diplomats.

The report also said the Israeli Foreign Ministry had informed the panel that until March 2024, the staff lists did not include Palestinian identification numbers.

The report noted that UNRWA has "a more developed approach" to neutrality than other similar UN or aid groups.

"Despite this robust framework, neutrality-related issues persist," it found.

It said these included some staff publicly expressing political views, textbooks with problematic content being used in some UNRWA schools, and politicised staff unions making threats against UNRWA management and disrupting operations.

In Gaza, UNRWA's neutrality challenges included the size of the operation, with most personnel being locally recruited and also recipients of UNRWA services, the review said.

From 2017 to 2022, the report said the annual number of allegations of neutrality being breached at UNRWA ranged from seven to 55.

But between January 2022 and February 2024, UN investigators received 151 allegations, most related to social media posts "made public by external sources," it said.

YouTube Is famine already happening in Gaza?

Israel dismisses report, repeats claims of 'enormous' Hamas infiltration

Israel's Foreign Ministry on Monday called on donor countries to avoid sending money to the organisation.

"The Colonna report ignores the severity of the problem, and offers cosmetic solutions that do not deal with the enormous scope of Hamas's infiltration of UNRWA," ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein said.

"This is not what a genuine and thorough review looks like. This is what an effort to avoid the problem and not address it head-on looks like."

Ms Colonna, speaking at the United Nations as the report was released, said the panel had been well received by Israelis while conducting its review and she urged the Israeli government not to discount it.

"Of course, you will find it is insufficient, but please take it on board. Whatever we recommend, if implemented, will bring good."

A young man in distress crouches over a young boy covered by a blanket. — The report says UNRWA is pivotal in providing lifesaving humanitarian aid.(AP Photo: Abdel Kareem Hana)

The report stresses the critical importance of UNRWA, calling it "irreplaceable and indispensable to Palestinians' human and economic development" in the absence of a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and "pivotal in providing life-saving humanitarian aid and essential social services, particularly in health and education, to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank".

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric welcomed this commitment to UNRWA and said the report "lays out clear recommendations, which the secretary-general accepts".

UNRWA commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini said last week he accepted all recommendations.

As Israel has called for the break-up of the agency, Mr Lazzarini told the UN Security Council that dismantling UNRWA would deepen Gaza's humanitarian crisis and speed up the onset of famine.

International experts have warned of imminent famine in northern Gaza and said half the territory's 2.3 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation if the Israeli-Hamas war intensifies.

Some states had resumed UNRWA funding but had requested a reinforcement of existing neutrality mechanisms and procedures.

Following the Israeli allegations against UNRWA staff, the United States, UNRWA's biggest donor at $US300 million-$US400 million ($465 million-$620 million) a year, paused funding, then the US congress suspended contributions until at least March 2025.

Australia paused funding in late January, soon after announcing that UNRWA would receive $6 million out of $21.5 million in humanitarian support, but resumed in March.

Thousands gather to mark six months since start of war in Gaza.

Reuters/AP

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