16AR21-37

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AR 21:37 - Will your online ministry be moderated by AI?

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FREEDOM OF SPEECH - Google: from "don't be evil" to fighting evil

Apologia Report 21:37 (1,310)

October 21, 2016

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

"The Digital Justice League: Google is on a mission to protect the Internet's most vulnerable" by Andy Greenberg -- "For years now, on Twitter and practically any other freewheeling public forum, the trolls have been out in force. ...

"Mass harassment online has proved so effective that it's emerging as a weapon of repressive governments. In late 2014, Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro reported on Russia's troll farms, where day laborers regurgitate messages that promote the government's interests and inundate opponents with vitriol on every possible outlet, including Twitter and Facebook. ...

"All this abuse, in other words, has evolved into a form of censorship, driving people offline, silencing their voices." To address this, "a small subsidiary of Google named Jigsaw is about to release an entirely new type of response: a set of tools called Conversation AI. The software is designed to use machine learning to automatically spot the language of abuse and harassment - with, Jigsaw engineers say, an accuracy far better than any keyword filter and far faster than any team of human moderators."

Greenberg describes the operation of Google's AI software and sprinkles the text with simple credibility tests that he creates - and results that are less than impressive.

"Conversation AI represents just one of Jigsaw's wildly ambitious projects. The New York–based think tank and tech incubator aims to build products that use Google's massive infrastructure and engineering muscle not to advance the best possibilities of the Internet but to fix the worst of it: surveillance, extremist indoctrination, censorship. ...

"One of the moon-shot goals ... set for Jigsaw is to end censorship within a decade, whether it comes in the form of politically motivated cyberattacks on opposition websites or government strangleholds on Internet service providers. And if that task isn't daunting enough, Jigsaw is about to unleash Conversation AI on the murky challenge of harassment, where the only way to protect some of the web's most repressed voices may be to selectively shut up others. [The prime objective is] applying artificial intelligence to solve the very human problem of making people be nicer on the Internet."

Greenberg mentions a number of related "practical products" that Jigsaw is working on. One, "an initiative, aimed at deradicalizing ISIS recruits, identifies would-be jihadis based on their search terms, then shows them ads redirecting them to videos by former extremists who explain the downsides of joining an ultraviolent, apocalyptic cult."

Alphabet Inc. (marketed as Alphabet) is an American multinational conglomerate established on October 2, 2015, by the two founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Jigsaw is just one of Alphabet's efforts. It functions as "Google's blue-sky, human-rights-focused skunkworks. At the group's launch, [former Google CEO Eric] Schmidt declared its audacious mission to be 'tackling the world's toughest geopolitical problems' and listed some of the challenges within its remit: 'money laundering, organized crime, police brutality, human trafficking, and terrorism.' In an interview in Google's New York office, Schmidt (now chair of Alphabet) summarized them to me as the 'problems that bedevil humanity involving information.'

"Jigsaw, in other words, has become ­ Google's Internet justice league, and it represents the notion that the company is no longer content with merely not being evil. ...

"For a tech executive taking on would-be terrorists, state-sponsored trolls, and tyrannical surveillance regimes, Jigsaw's creator [Jared Cohen] has a surprisingly sunny outlook on the battle between the people who use the Internet and the authorities that seek to control them. 'I have a fundamental belief that technology empowers people,' Jared Cohen says. ... 'It's hard for me to imagine a world where there's not a continued cat-and-mouse game. But over time, the mouse might just become bigger than the cat.'"

Regarding Cohen's travels (through Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq in the early 2000s as a Rhodes scholar) and what he calls "children of the jihad," he writes that "Society has changed, and technology has opened their eyes in ways that their parents cannot begin to understand." Later, "Cohen became the youngest person ever to join the State Department's Policy Planning Staff in 2006.... [Condoleezza] Rice would describe Cohen in her memoirs as an 'inspired' appointment. Former Policy Planning director Anne-Marie Slaughter, his boss under Clinton, remembers him as 'ferociously intelligent.' ...

"The story Cohen's critics focus on, however, is his involvement in a notorious piece of software called Haystack, intended to provide online anonymity and circumvent censorship. They say Cohen helped to hype the tool in early 2010 as a potential boon to Iranian dissidents. After the US government fast-tracked it for approval, however, a security researcher revealed it had egregious vulnerabilities that put any dissident who used it in grave danger of detection. Today, Cohen disclaims any responsibility for Haystack, but two former colleagues say he championed the project."

Cohen admits that "inserting Google into thorny geopolitical problems has led to new questions about the role of a multinational corporation." He appeals to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's director of international free expression, Jillian York. Even so, "For all its altruistic talk, [York] points out, Jigsaw is part of a for-profit entity. ...

"Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has accused Cohen of continuing to work as a de facto State Department employee, quietly advancing the government's foreign policy goals from within Google, and labeled him the company's 'director of regime change.'"

And Cohen is well aware that "Technology has unintended consequences. ... Conversation AI, meant to curb that abuse, could take down its own share of legitimate speech in the process. ...

"Throwing out well-intentioned speech that resembles harassment could be a blow to exactly the open civil society Jigsaw has vowed to protect. ... But on the question of how its judgments will be enforced, they say that's up to whoever uses the tool. 'We want to let communities have the discussions they want to have,' says Conversation AI cocreator Lucas Dixon. And if that favors a sanitized Internet over a freewheeling one? Better to err on the side of civility." Wired, Oct '16, pp110-117, 124. <www.goo.gl/mN81If>

In "Google vs. ISIS and Freedom of Information" Russell P. Johnson describes efforts of Google's program to redirect its users "away from pro-ISIS websites and toward informational websites, anti-ISIS testimonials, and fact-filled YouTube videos that expose the hypocrisy and false ideology of the Islamic State movement. ... The program is at the very least successful enough that Jigsaw has made plans to expand and extend it to combat the recruitment efforts of American white supremacist groups. ...

"Insofar as ISIS's recruitment efforts depend on deceit and falsehood, Green argues, Google has a duty to dissuade potential converts. ...

"People enlist in groups like ISIS not simply out of blind hate or misdirected zeal, but because they find ISIS's description of the world reasonable and compelling."

Johnson argues that "there is reason to be leery of Google's self-appointed mission to steer users away from certain ideological stances. Given that the dream of the Internet is a pure democracy of information and opinion, do we trust Google to be the gatekeeper of theopolitical correctness? ...

"The dilemma is this: everyone is pro-information, but we tend to see only the information that supports our particular worldview. ... Stephen Colbert quipped that 'reality has a well-known liberal bias.' Proponents of either political perspective might in the name of information wish to redirect Google users away from the other, and it is worth discussing whether and to what extent this should be possible." <www.goo.gl/PtxSCs>

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