Is Facebook Moving Into A.I.?

Facebook Inc is developing a way to automatically flag offensive material in live video streams, building on a growing effort to use artificial intelligence to monitor content, said Joaquin Candela, the company’s director of applied machine learning.

The social media company has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies this year, from facing international outcry after removing an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity, to allowing the spread of fake news on its site.

Facebook has historically relied mostly on users to report offensive posts, which are then checked by Facebook employees against company “community standards.” Decisions on especially thorny content issues that might require policy changes are made by top executives at the company.

Candela told reporters that Facebook increasingly was using artificial intelligence to find offensive material. It is “an algorithm that detects nudity, violence, or any of the things that are not according to our policies,” he said.

The company already had been working on using automation to flag extremist video content, as Reuters reported in June.

Now the automated system also is being tested on Facebook Live, the streaming video service for users to broadcast live video.

Using artificial intelligence to flag live video is still at the research stage, and has two challenges, Candela said. “One, your computer vision algorithm has to be fast, and I think we can push there, and the other one is you need to prioritize things in the right way so that a human looks at it, an expert who understands our policies, and takes it down.”

Facebook said it also uses automation to process the tens of millions of reports it gets each week, to recognize duplicate reports and route the flagged content to reviewers with the appropriate subject matter expertise.

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg in November said Facebook would turn to automation as part of a plan to identify fake news. Ahead of the Nov. 8 U.S. election, Facebook users saw fake news reports erroneously alleging that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump and that a federal agent who had been investigating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was found dead.

However, determining whether a particular comment is hateful or bullying, for example, requires context, the company said.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/facebook-developing-artificial-intelligence-to-patrol-live-videos.html

Hackers Creating Networking Website

Anonymous, which has taken credit for several high-profile cyber attacks in recent months, plans to launch what it says will be a new social networking site called AnonPlus.

The group’s move was apparently spurred by Google’s decision to shut down Anonymous’ Google+ account for community standard violations, a report by Mashable says.

For the moment, at least, AnonPlus appears to be little more than a single, somewhat poorly formatted page explaining what the site will be about.

“This lil info dump of a site is here simply to dispence (sic) info, soon the actual site will go up and you can begin to interact with it,” a message on the site notes.

“This project is not overnight and will take many of those out there who simply want a better internet,” the message noted. “We will not be stopped by those looking to troll or those willing to stop the spreading of the truth.”

The message doesn’t mention Google shutting down Anonymous’ Google+ account, but it does promise members that with AnonPlus there would be no fear of “censorship”, “blackout” or “holding back.”

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