Month: July 2023

Elon Musk spent the weekend further alienating Twitter users with more drastic changes to the social media giant, and he is facing a new challenge as tech nemesis Mark Zuckerberg prepares to launch a rival app this week.

Zuckerberg’s Meta group, which owns Facebook, has listed a new app in stores as “Threads, an Instagram app”, available for pre-order in the United States, with a message saying it is “expected” this Thursday.

The two men have clashed for years but a recent comment by a Meta executive suggesting that Twitter was not run “sanely” irked Musk, eventually leading to the two men offering each other out for a cage fight.

Since buying Twitter last year for $44 billion, Musk has fired thousands of employees and charged users $8 a month to have a blue checkmark and a “verified” account.

On the weekend, he limited the posts readers could view and decreed that nobody could look at a tweet unless they were logged in, meaning external links no longer work for many.

He said he needed to fire up extra servers just to cope with the demand as artificial intelligence (AI) companies scraped “extreme levels” of data to train their models.

But commentators have poured scorn on that idea and marketing experts say he has massively alienated both his user base and the advertisers he needs to get profits rolling.

In another move that shocked users, Twitter announced Monday that access to TweetDeck, an app that allows users to monitor several accounts at once, would be limited to verified accounts next month.

John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University, told AFP that plenty of people wanted to quit Twitter for ethical reasons after Musk took over, but he had now given them a technical reason to leave too.

And he added that Musk’s decision to sack thousands of workers meant it had long been expected that the site would become “technically unusable”.

‘Remarkably bad’

Musk has said he wants to make Twitter less reliant on advertising and boost income from subscriptions.

Yet he chose advertising specialist Linda Yaccarino as his chief executive recently, and she has spoken of going into “hand-to-hand combat” to win back advertisers.

“How do you tell Twitter advertisers that your most engaged free users potentially will never see their ads because of data caps on their usage,” tweeted Justin Taylor, a former marketing executive at Twitter.

Mike Proulx, vice president at market research firm Forrester, said the weekend’s chaos had been “remarkably bad” for both users and advertisers.

“Advertisers depend on reach and engagement yet Twitter is currently decimating both,” he told AFP.

He said Twitter had “moved from stable to startup” and Yaccarino, who remained silent over the weekend, would struggle to restore its credibility, leaving the door open to Twitter’s rivals to suck up any cash from advertisers.

‘Open secret’

The technical reasons Musk gave for limiting the views of users immediately brought a backlash.

Many social media users speculated that Musk had simply failed to pay the bill for his servers.

French social data analyst Florent Lefebvre said AI firms were more likely to train their models on books and media articles than social network content, which “is of much poorer quality, full of mistakes and lacking in context”.

Yoel Roth, who stepped down as Twitter’s head of security weeks after Musk took over, said the idea that data scraping had caused such performance problems that users needed to be forced to log in “doesn’t pass the sniff test”.

“Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access,” he wrote on the Bluesky social network — another Twitter rival.

“We knew about it. It was fine.”

 
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U.S. President Joe Biden says he wants every American to have access to high-speed internet. VOA’s Julie Taboh has our story about the United States’ more than $40 billion-dollar investment to expand the service.
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STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN — Sweden on Monday ordered four companies to stop using a Google tool that measures and analyzes web traffic, as doing so transfers personal data to the United States. One company was fined the equivalent of more than $1.1 million. 

Sweden’s privacy protection agency, the IMY, said it had examined the use of Google Analytics by the firms following a complaint by the Austrian data privacy group NOYB (none of your business), which has filed dozens of complaints against Google across Europe. 

NOYB asserted that the use of Google Analytics for web statistics by the companies resulted in the transfer of European data to the United States in violation of the EU’s data protection regulation, the GDPR. 

The GDPR allows the transfer of data to third countries only if the European Commission has determined they offer at least the same level of privacy protection as the EU. A 2020 EU Court of Justice ruling struck down an EU-U.S. data transfer deal as being insufficient. 

The IMY said it considers the data sent to Google Analytics in the United States by the four companies to be personal data and that “the technical security measures that the companies have taken are not sufficient to ensure a level of protection that essentially corresponds to that guaranteed within the EU.” 

It fined telecommunications firm Tele2 $1.1 million and online marketplace CDON $27,700.  

Grocery store chain Coop and Dagens Industri newspaper had taken more measures to protect the data being transferred and were not fined. 

Tele2 had stopped using Google Analytics of its own volition, and the IMY ordered the other companies to stop using it. 

IMY legal adviser Sandra Arvidsson, who led the investigation, said the agency has the rulings “made clear what requirements are placed on technical security measures and other measures when transferring personal data to a third country, in this case the United States.’ 

NYOB welcomed the IMY’s ruling. 

“Although many other European authorities (e.g., Austria, France and Italy) already found that the use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR, this is the first financial penalty imposed on companies for using Google Analytics,” it said in a statement. 

At the end of May, the European Commission said it hoped to conclude by the end of the summer a new legal framework for data transfers between the EU and the United States. 

The RGPD, in place since 2018, can lead to penalties of up to $21.8 million, or 4% of a company’s global revenue. 
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Airline passengers who have endured tens of thousands of weather-related flight delays this week could face a new source of disruptions starting Saturday, when wireless providers are expected to power up new 5G systems near major airports.

Aviation groups have warned for years that 5G signals could interfere with aircraft equipment, especially devices using radio waves to measure distance from the ground and which are critical when planes land in low visibility.

Predictions that interference would cause massive flight groundings failed to come true last year, when telecom companies began rolling out the new service. They then agreed to limit the power of the signals around busy airports, giving airlines an extra year to upgrade their planes.

The leader of the nation’s largest pilots’ union said crews will be able to handle the impact of 5G, but he criticized the way the wireless licenses were granted, saying it had added unnecessary risk to aviation.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently told airlines that flights could be disrupted because a small portion of the nation’s fleet has not been upgraded to protect against radio interference.

Most of the major U.S. airlines say they are ready. American, Southwest, Alaska, Frontier and United say all of their planes have height-measuring devices, called radio altimeters, that are protected against 5G interference.

The big exception is Delta Air Lines. Delta says 190 of its planes, which include most of its smaller ones, still lack upgraded altimeters because its supplier has been unable to provide them fast enough.

The airline does not expect to cancel any flights because of the issue, Delta said Friday. The airline plans to route the 190 planes carefully to limit the risk of canceling flights or forcing planes to divert from airports where visibility is low because of fog or low clouds.

The Delta planes that have not been retrofitted include several models of Airbus jets. The airline’s Boeing jets have upgraded altimeters, as do all Delta Connection planes, which are operated by Endeavor Air, Republic Airways and SkyWest Airlines, the airline said.

JetBlue did not respond to requests for comment but told The Wall Street Journal it expected to retrofit 17 smaller Airbus jets by October, with possible “limited impact” some days in Boston.

Wireless carriers including Verizon and AT&T use a part of the radio spectrum called C-Band, which is close to frequencies used by radio altimeters, for their new 5G service. The Federal Communications Commission granted them licenses for the C-Band spectrum and dismissed any risk of interference, saying there was ample buffer between C-Band and altimeter frequencies.

When the Federal Aviation Administration sided with airlines and objected, the wireless companies pushed back the rollout of their new service. In a compromise brokered by the Biden administration, the wireless carriers then agreed not to power up 5G signals near about 50 busy airports. That postponement ends Saturday.

AT&T declined to comment. Verizon did not immediately respond to a question about its plans.

Buttigieg reminded the head of trade group Airlines for America about the deadline in a letter last week, warning that only planes with retrofitted altimeters would be allowed to land under low-visibility conditions. He said more than 80% of the U.S. fleet had been retrofitted, but a significant number of planes, including many operated by foreign airlines, have not been upgraded.

“This means on bad-weather, low-visibility days in particular, there could be increased delays and cancelations,” Buttigieg wrote. He said airlines with planes awaiting retrofitting should adjust their schedules to avoid stranding passengers.

Airlines say the FAA was slow to approve standards for upgrading the radio altimeters and supply-chain problems have made it difficult for manufacturers to produce enough of the devices. Nicholas Calio, head of the Airlines for America, complained about a rush to modify planes “amid pressure from the telecommunications companies.”

Jason Ambrosi, a Delta pilot and president of the Air Line Pilots Association, accused the FCC of granting 5G licenses without consulting aviation interests, which he said “has left the safest aviation system in the world at increased risk.” But, he said, “Ultimately, we will be able to address the impacts of 5G.”
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Elon Musk announced Saturday that Twitter would temporarily restrict how many tweets users could read per day, in a move meant to tamp down on the use of the site’s data by artificial intelligence companies. 

The platform is limiting verified accounts to reading 6,000 tweets a day. Non-verified users — the free accounts that make up the majority of users — are limited to reading 600 tweets per day.  

New unverified accounts would be limited to 300 tweets. 

The decision was made “to address extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation” by third-party platforms, Musk said in a tweet Saturday afternoon, as some users quickly hit their limits. 

“Goodbye Twitter” was a trending topic in the United States following Musk’s announcement. 

Twitter would soon raise the ceiling to 8,000 tweets per day for verified accounts, 800 for unverified accounts and 400 for new unverified accounts, Musk said. 

Twitter’s billionaire owner did not give a timeline for how long the measures would be in place.  

The day before, Musk had announced that it would no longer be possible to read tweets on the site without an account. 

Much of the data scraping was coming from firms using it to build their AI models, Musk said, to the point that it was causing traffic issues with the site. 

In creating AI that can respond in a human-like capacity, many companies feed them examples of real-life conversations from social media sites. 

“Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience,” Musk said.  

“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” he said.  

“It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation,” he said. 

Twitter is not the only social media giant to have to wrangle with the rapid acceleration of the AI sector. 

In mid-June, Reddit raised prices on third-party developers that were using its data and sweeping up conversations posted on its forums. 

It proved a controversial move, as many regular users also accessed the site via third-party platforms and marked a shift from previous arrangements where social media data had generally been provided for free or a small charge.
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If you logged onto social media over the past few months, you may have seen it – a video of the Russian Embassy on a gray, overcast day in Washington with the sounds of passing cars and buses in the background.

A man’s voice asks in English, “Do you want to change your future?” Russian subtitles appear on the bottom of the screen and the narrator makes note of the first anniversary of “Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine.”

As somber music begins to play, the camera pans to the left and takes the viewer down Wisconsin Avenue, to the Adams Morgan Metro station and on through Washington, ending at FBI headquarters, a few blocks from the White House.

“The FBI values you. The FBI can help you,” FBI Assistant Director Alan Koehler says as the video wraps up, Russian subtitles still appearing on the screen. “But only you have the power to take the first step.”

The video, put out by the FBI’s Washington Field Office, first appeared as a posting on the field office’s Twitter account on February 24. Another five versions started the same day as paid advertisements on Facebook and Instagram, costing the bureau an estimated $5,500 to $6,500.

That money may seem like a pittance for a government agency with an annual budget of more than $10 billion, but it was not the first nor the last time the FBI spent money to court Russian officials.

The video is part of an expansive, long-running campaign by the FBI to use social media advertisements to recruit disgruntled Russian officials stationed across the United States and beyond, in part to sniff out Americans who have betrayed their country in order to aid Moscow.

A VOA analysis finds the FBI has paid tens of thousands of dollars, at minimum, to multiple platforms for social media ads targeting Russian officials, with the pace of such ad buys increasing just before and then after Moscow launched its latest invasion of Ukraine.

Multiple former U.S. counterintelligence officials who spoke to VOA about the FBI’s efforts described the advertising as money well spent.

The FBI wants to find well-placed Russian officials who can “help identify where American spies may be,” said Douglas London, a three-decade veteran of the CIA’s Clandestine Service.

“It seeks Russian agents to catch and convict American spies and Russian illegals,” he told VOA, describing the mission as a part of the bureau’s DNA.

Another veteran CIA official, Jim Olson, agreed, telling VOA the goal of the FBI’s outreach to Russian officials is unmistakable.

“I call that hanging out the shingle,” said Olson, a former counterintelligence chief.

“For every American traitor, every American spy, there are members of that intelligence service who know the identity of that American or know enough about what the production is to give us a lead in doing the identification,” Olson said.

‘All available tools’

The FBI declined to comment directly on its decision to spend several thousand dollars to run the two-minute-long video as an ad on Facebook and Instagram, simply saying it “uses a variety of means” to gather intelligence.

“The FBI will evaluate all available tools to protect the national security interests of the United States,” the FBI’s Washington Field Office told VOA in an email. “And we will use all legal means available to locate individuals with information that can help protect the United States from threats to our national security.”

Some of the FBI’s earlier forays into social media advertising did get some public attention, first in October 2019 and then again in March of last year.

However, a review of publicly available data indicates the bureau’s use of social media for counterintelligence is more expansive than previously understood.

According to data in the Meta Ad Library, which contains information on Facebook and Instagram ads dating back to May 2018, the FBI and its field offices have so far spent just under $40,000 on ads targeting Russian speakers, generating as many as 6.9 million views.

While most of the ads targeted specific locations, like Washington and New York, some were seen much further afield, getting views across much of the United States and even in countries like Spain, Poland, Nigeria, France and Croatia.

It would also appear the FBI’s paid ads ran on platforms other than Meta.

Nicholas Murphy, a 20-year-old second-year student at Georgetown University in Washington, was in his dorm room last March searching for news about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when he saw an ad on YouTube, the video-sharing social media platform owned by Google.

“[It was] just text with a kind of a strange like background to it … all in Russian,” said Murphy, a Park City, Utah, native who does not speak Russian and who used a translator app to decipher the ad.

“At the time I didn’t know if it was coming from the Russian government, if it was coming from our government, if it was kind of propaganda, if it was fake,” Murphy told VOA. “It conjured up a lot of thoughts about Russian influence over Facebook ads in the [2016 U.S.] election.”

Murphy said he came across the ad another two to three times over the ensuing weeks. And, it turned out, he was not alone. A handful of other students were also starting to see some of the ads, including a couple of classmates in a Russian literature class.

Just how many ads the FBI paid to run on YouTube, or via Google, is unclear.

A search of Google’s recently launched Ad Transparency Center shows the FBI paid to run the Russian language version of its two-minute-long video most recently on April 28. But the database only shows information for the past 30 days and Google says it does not share information on advertiser spending.

It is also unclear whether the FBI paid to run any ads on Twitter in addition to pushing out information through its own Twitter accounts. Twitter responded to an email from VOA requesting information with its now standard poop emoji.

The FBI itself refused to provide details regarding the scope of its social media advertising efforts although the Washington Field Office did acknowledge to VOA via email that it uses “various social media platforms.”

The Washington Field Office also defended its use of social media advertising despite indications that the ads themselves, like the one seen by Georgetown University student Nicholas Murphy, do not always reach the intended audience.

“The FBI views these efforts as productive and cost effective,” the FBI’s Washington Field Office told VOA. The office declined to be more specific about whether any spies have been identified as a result of the ads.

“Russia has long been a counterintelligence threat to the U.S. and the FBI will continue to adapt our investigative and outreach techniques to counter that threat and others,” it said. “We will use all legal means available to locate individuals with information that can help protect the United States from threats to our national security.”

The Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to calls or emails from VOA seeking comment about the FBI’s use of social media advertisements to target Russian officials in the U.S. But Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov did respond to a March 2022 article by The Washington Post about FBI efforts to send ads to cell phones outside the Russian Embassy in Washington.

“Attempts to sow confusion and organize desertion among the staff of @RusEmbUSA are ridiculous,” Antonov was quoted as saying in a tweet by the embassy’s Twitter account.

Some former U.S. counterintelligence officials, though, argue Russia has reason to be worried.

“I think people will come out of the woodwork,” said Olson, the former CIA counterintelligence chief.

FBI agents “see what we all see, and that is that there must be a subset of Russian intelligence officers, SVR officers, GRU officers, who are disillusioned by what’s going on,” he told VOA.

“I think some good Russians are embarrassed, shocked, ashamed of what Putin is doing in Ukraine, killing brother and sister Slavs. And I think that there will be people who would like to strike back against that.”

London, the longtime CIA Clandestine Services official and author of The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence, likewise believes the FBI’s persistent efforts to reach disgruntled Russians on social media will pay off.

“Generally, the Russians who have worked with us have done so out of patriotism … they were upset with the government,” he said.

And the Russian officials that the FBI hopes to reach just need a bit of nudge.

“They’re aiming this at Russians who are already there mentally but just haven’t crossed,” London said, adding it is not a coincidence that many of the FBI ads show Russians exactly how to get in touch, whether via encrypted communication apps like Signal or by walking right up to the bureau’s front door.

“They’re not doing metaphors here,” he said. “They don’t want anything subject to interpretation.”

Even the language used by the FBI appears to be designed to build trust.

“It’s very much not native,” according to Bradley Gorski, with Georgetown University’s Department of Slavic Languages.

But given the overall quality of the language in the ads, Gorski said it is quite possible all of it is intentional.

“It might be a canny strategy on their part,” he said of the FBI. “If they are reaching out to Russian speakers and want to both communicate with them but let them know who is communicating with them is not a Russian speaker, but is a sort of American doing their best, then this kind of outreach with a little bit stilted, though correct, Russian might communicate that actually better than fully native sort of fluent speech.”

Whether the FBI’s spending on social media advertisements is achieving the desired results is hard to gauge. Public metrics such those provided by social media companies like Meta can give a sense of how many people are seeing the ads, and where they are, but do not shed much light on who is ultimately interacting with the ads to the point of a response.

When pressed, FBI officials tell VOA only that the bureau views the ad campaigns as productive.

Others agree.

“Relative to the hardcore military aid the U.S. has provided, that’s a small chunk of change,” said Jason Blazakis, a senior research fellow at The Soufan Center, a global intelligence firm.

And Blazakis, who also directs the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, thinks the FBI’s social media ads might be having an impact even if few Russian officials ever come forward with information.

“Part of it is also messaging to the broader Russian public,” he told VOA, pointing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “There is this influence operational component to it, part of this PR [public relations] battle that is happening on the periphery of the conflict.”
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