Laughing Squid: How Social Media Causes People to Choose Sides by Overwhelming the Human Brain. “The incredibly insightful animated video series Kurzgesagt looks at the role social media has played in sowing tribal discord around the world and how the use of filter bubbles only makes us see the worst in each other.”
Associated Press: Brazilian city enacts an ordinance that was secretly written by ChatGPT. “City lawmakers in Brazil have enacted what appears to be the nation’s first legislation written entirely by artificial intelligence — even if they didn’t know it at the time. The experimental ordinance was passed in October in the southern city of Porto Alegre and city councilman Ramiro Rosário revealed this week that it was written by a chatbot, sparking objections and raising questions about the role of artificial intelligence in public policy.”
National Security Archive: Henry Kissinger: The Declassified Obituary. “This special posting also centralizes links to dozens of previously published collections of documents related to Kissinger’s tenure in government that the Archive, led by the intrepid efforts of William Burr, has identified, pursued, obtained and catalogued over several decades. Together, these collections constitute an accessible, major repository of records on one of the most consequential U.S. foreign policy makers of the 20th century.”
Associated Press: Former Google executive ends longshot bid for Dianne Feinstein’s US Senate seat in California. “A former California tech executive is ending her longshot campaign for the U.S. Senate seat once held by the late Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, she announced Tuesday. Democrat Lexi Reese said in a statement that she has been unable to raise the many millions of dollars needed for a first-time candidate to introduce herself to voters across the nation’s most populous state.”
Brookings Institution: AI can strengthen U.S. democracy—and weaken it. “In this first part of a new series on the risks and possibilities of the confluence between AI and democracy, we provide an overview of three principal areas where AI may transform democratic governance and its execution. Subsequent installments of the series will offer deeper dives into these topics and policy recommendations for lawmakers.”
New Indian Express: Fake letters on social media keep leaders on tenterhooks. “Fake news, in the form of letters, being spread on social media platforms is not only creating confusion in political circles but also causing a big headache for the leaders.”
Centre for Economic Policy Research: The political economy of social media: A new eBook. “The emergence of social media has reshaped the way humans communicate, interact and coordinate with each other. Assessing the impact of this transformation on politics has been one of the great social science questions of the last or decade or so, and will continue to occupy researchers for a long time to come. A new CEPR eBook provides a snapshot of how economists have been trying to answer this question.”
Rolling Stone: We Spied on Trump’s ‘Southern White House’ From Our Couches. “We didn’t have to risk life and limb, posing as the help and smuggling information out through a well-funded spy ring. All we had to do was sign up for an online service, enter the address of Mar-a-Lago, and click a button. Within a few minutes, we had a report profiling thousands of visitors to Trump’s club over the course of an entire year, including details like where they likely live and work, their ages, incomes, ethnicities, education levels, where they were immediately before visiting, and where they spent their time on the property once they got there.”
Business Insider: Former Google engineer and Trump pardonee Anthony Levandowski relaunches his AI church. “Anthony Levandowski, a pioneer of self-driving cars and controversial Silicon Valley figure, announced the return of his AI-dedicated church in an episode of Bloomberg’s AI IRL podcast. Levandowski started his ‘Way of the Future’ church in 2015 while he was working as an engineer on Google’s self-driving project Waymo.”
Virginia Tech: How certain media talk about AI may have everything to do with political ideology. “In the recently published research “Partisan Media Sentiment Toward Artificial Intelligence,” authors from the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business – Angela Yi, Shreyans Goenka, and Mario Pandelaere – examined the varied reactions to AI by analyzing partisan media sentiment. Their work was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. The researchers found that articles from liberal-leaning media have a more negative sentiment toward AI than articles from conservative media.”
CNBC: Elon Musk’s X is ‘profiting off violent content’ by Hamas, House Democrats allege. “More than two dozen House Democrats on Tuesday accused Elon Musk’s X of ‘profiting off violent content by a terrorist organization’ and demanded that Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino address Hamas-related content on the social media platform. “The platform has become a hotbed of misinformation and terrorist propaganda,” wrote the group of 27 Democrats, led by Reps. Dan Goldman of New York and Jamie Raskin of Maryland, in a letter obtained by CNBC.”
Bloomberg: Trump’s Truth Social Parent Company Sues 20 Media Outlets. “The company behind former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social wants $1.5 billion in damages from news organizations which reported that the platform had lost $73 million. Lawyers for Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. said in a lawsuit filed Monday in state court in Sarasota County, Florida, that the number was ‘an utter fabrication’ and accused 20 news outlets of a ‘deliberate, malicious, and coordinated attack’ against Truth Social.”
CT Insider: Connecticut attorney general blasts X, leaves social media site. “Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, citing a litany of charges against X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, left the site last week over what he said was owner Elon Musk’s divisive posts.”
Washington Post: In rare show of force, senators enlist U.S. marshals to subpoena tech CEOs. (This link is to a gift article.) “A Senate panel announced Monday it subpoenaed the CEOs of Discord, Snap and Elon Musk’s X to testify at a hearing on children’s online safety next month after ‘repeated refusals’ by the tech companies to cooperate with its investigation into the matter.”
The Hill: Campaigns are using AI. Tech companies are figuring out how to disclose what’s real.. “Meta and YouTube are crafting disclosure policies for use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in political ads as the debate over how the government should regulate the technology stretches toward the 2024 election.”
