AI - Social Media Resources

Major figures predicting the future

• 2025, Eric Schmidt (past Apple CEO) AI revolution is Underhyped (TED, 25min) predicting Super-intelligence

• 2024,  Mustafa Suleyman  (CEO Microsoft AI) TED talk on "What is AI" (really his projection into the future)

• 2025, Sam Altman, CEO Open AI TED talk "AI agents and superintelligence "

• 2024 counter point to the "AI hype" - concerns about going after AGI: "The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence"  

• July 2025 Stanford report on AI and Jobs "What workers really want from AI" and <full Future of Work with AI Agents paper>

•  June 2025 The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity; Apple research
  (summary video with related observations:  https://youtu.be/jr1dz6cOnDM?si=SnXsJruGN-seyNM2  )

• 
  

1. 2020 Netflix documentary "/The Social Dilemma" <trailer>  <Forbes review>
   and the 2023 "The AI Dilemma" on YouTube that outlines the new challenges from generative AI.

2. 2017 Zeynep Tufekci TED:  We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads (23:00)

3. 2019 Yuval Noel Havari TED: why_fascism_is_so_tempting_and_how_your_data_could_power_it (17 min)

4. 2020 PBS 4 part documentary "Hacking Your Mind"

5. 2022 PBS documentary Tic-Toc-Boom -- impact on digital natives

6. 2020: MIT Deep Fake "Nixon announcing Apollos moon landing disaster";
   and Scientific American 30 Min program on related issues; or
   Deep fake videos - example thanks to Buzzfeed, "Obama PSA" ("R" for language;  1:12)

7. (ongoing updates) Media Bias Chart now at https://www.adfontesmedia.com/

8. 2022 Book: Max Fisher; The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World  (Podcast Interview with Rich Roll touches on key points, 2.5 hours) 

9. Not so much as documentary, but getting some of the message across, this video/song:
   Social media stalker song - from The Security Awareness Company (4 min)

10. Prof. Geoffrey Hinton - 2/2024 "Will digital intelligence replace biological intelligence?"  <On Youtube 40 min>

2024 Resource pointers

• AI in the year 2040, Imagining the Digital Future, March 2024

Generative AI's emerging -- A few sources (Be aware, the generated results can be incorrect, fabricated -- or worse)

TED talk: Why AI is incredibly smart and shockingly stupid (April 2023)

AI Tools to try some are "open source models" you can download, perhaps even train on your data source selections. In this case links to online (free) versions are provided here so you are not loading software onto your machine.
Text Generation

• OpenAI - Chat_GPT  also used in Microsoft Bing Chat/CoPilot  (requires registration, Bing also does images)

• Google Bard now Gemini

• For search style responses with citations: Perplexity 

• Meta/Facebook entry: Llama2.ai 

• Sudowrite for longer pieces, short stories, poems, novels, scientific papers

Image Generation

• OPEN ai Dall-e  also used in  Microsoft Bing Image (DALI-E now is paid service, still free with Microsoft Bing)

• Stable Diffusion (10 images a day "free" on web version)

• Google Gemini image generation, turned off Feb 24 ("too woke"), on but free version does not offer images with people

• Midjourney

• Canva: "with limitations on the number of images you can generate per month" (Gemini recommendation)

• VEED.IO: "generate images directly from text descriptions. It's a good option for beginners as it provides a straightforward interface" (Gemini recommendation)

• Fotor: "offers a variety of options, including up-scaling existing images and creating artistic variations. While it has a free plan, some features are limited." (Gemini recommendation)

Video Generation

• Sora from OpenAI 

• Model Scope with Hugging Face site

• Gen 1 from Runway

• Gemini recommendations:

  • Kapwing: This online platform offers a free AI video generator. You can input a topic or idea, and Kapwing will assemble a short video with stock footage, subtitles, music, and transitions. While convenient, customization options are limited in the free version.

  • Synthesia: They provide a free trial of their AI video generator. You can choose a template, add a short script, and receive a video in return. This option allows some creative control over the script and the avatar used in the video. However, the free trial has restrictions on the video length and watermark presence.\

  • Invideo AI: This platform offers a limited free plan for its AI video generation tool. You can provide a basic idea and the tool will craft a video with script suggestions, stock footage, and background music. Editing capabilities are restricted in the free tier. 

Deep Fake considerations (images, audio, video)

• 2024 US Gov GAO report and information on Deep Fakes: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-107292

• 2020 Deep Fake of the Queen (4 min) and BBC's "making of " video (5min)

• 2020: MIT Deep Fake "Nixon announcing Apollos moon landing disaster"; and Scientific American 30 Min program on related issues

•  Deep fake face image tests and spot deep fakes thanks to U.W. Calling BS project (also from UW, deep fake resource list) 

Info & disinformation

• • The Global Disinformation Index info at https://disinformationindex.org/

  • 2020: Eisenstat, Yael; How Facebook Profits by Polarization, TED talk 13min

  • NYT 29 March 2020:How Russia’s Troll Farm Is Changing Tactics Before the Fall Election

  • Deep fake videos - example thanks to Buzzfeed, "Obama PSA" (faked, 1:12)

  • Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth; "Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data and What the Internet can Tell Us About Who We Really Are", 2017 

  • Singer and Brooking LikeWar: The Weaponization Of Social Media (2018)
    and NPR Fresh Air interview with authors -(36 min) key points and recent developments

  • Stengel, R; Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It

  • Twitter, 2014 --Protecting Twitter users (sometimes from themselves) (TED 9 Min )

  • Natl Academy Symposium: Human Rights in Age of Social Media, Big Data, and AI - Sept. 23, 2019

Real News --- how can you tell? Who can you trust? - list of verification resources 

• Twitter Official Explains Blue Exclamation Marks On Potentially Misleading Content (3/2020 NPR 3 min)

• Facebook, and others have joined in a Deepfake Detection Challenge to

• encourage tools to identify deep fakes (IEEE Spectrum posting, Dec 2019)

• Sinan Aral; How_We_Can_Protect_Truth_in_the_Age_of_Misinformation -- TED Nov 2018

• USA Facts is a site created by Steve Ballmer to help track relevant data from authoritative sources

• Tips for analyzing news sources from TEDx (NH) speaker Randall Mikkelsen, Reuters notes and

  • list of problematic “news sources” http://bit.ly/2iXg1ZV

• Media Bias Chart (Venessa Otero) now at https://www.adfontesmedia.com/

  • Best seem to include AP, Reuters, NPR, ABC; BBC, CBS, NY Times, WSJ

• Source identified in OLLI class on 2020 primaries: https://theconversation.com/us

Social/economic/Job impact

• World Economic forum evaluation (2023)

• Leslie, D., Burr, C., Aitken, M., Cowls, J., Katell, M., and Briggs, M. (2021). Artificial intelligence, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law: a primer. The Council of Europe (A Primer on AI concepts from the Alan Turing Institute)

• Employment and an economic pressure cooker 

  • Yang, Andrew; The War on Normal People; 2018

  • Gore, Al; 2013 - The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change

The Challenges 

•  Think More, Click Less to Thwart AI Manipulation - 3/15/22 column, J.Isaak 

• PBS documentary (2022) Tic-Toc-Boom -- impact on digital natives

• The Attention Economy  [An expansion of issues here is available in my commentary section]

  • 2022 Book: Max Fisher; The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World -- This one is a painful "Must Read"  (Podcast Interview with Rich Roll touches on key points, 2.5 hours) 

  • 2021 PBS Independent Lens documentary on AI and Bias: Coded Bias

  • 2020 Sinan Aral, MIT book "The Hype Machine", PBS interview on Open Mind

  • 2020 PBS 4 part documentary "Hacking Your Mind"

  • 2020 Netflix documentary "/The Social Dilemma" <trailer>  <Forbes review>

  • 2014 documentary "Killswitch: The Battle to Control the Internet" points to the abuse of the information by government(s) and the use of policy/laws/selective enforcement to silence descent 

The First Amendment Issues and Challenges

• Sept. 2019 Panel on Social Media and the First Amendment (CSPAN/Georgetown U)

• Renee DiResta - many papers/essays on web site including:

  • Democracy: Fixing It is Up to Us Personal Democracy Forum 2018 keynote

  • Free Speech Is Not the Same As Free Reach

  • Computational Propaganda: If You Make It Trend, You Make It True

  • Information Operations are a Cybersecurity Problem: Toward a New Strategic Paradigm to Combat Disinformation

The Political Side of things

• Perlroth, Nichole; This is How They Tell Me the World Will End: The Cyber-Weapons Arms Race; 2021 -- outlines the background and ongoing activities of nation states such as Russia, Iran, China, North Korea affecting elections, privacy and our security.

• Astroturfing (faking "Grassroots" support) -- a factor in the "Go back to work campaigns" April 2020 Article

• NYT March 30, 2020 - Google, Facebook, etc address 2020 election challenges

• Oct 2, 2019 Cybersecurity (CSpan/Washington Post -- Diverse experts) on 2020 election security, social media considerations...

• Yuval Noel Havari  (Also author of "Sapians", "HomoDeus" and "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" - insightful historian)

  • TED 2019: why_fascism_is_so_tempting_and_how_your_data_could_power_it (17 min)

  • Also from Havari:

    • • Homo Deus: A Brief History of the Future; TED 2017 (~20min)

      • 21 Lessons for the 21st Century TED 2018 (~20 min)

      • TED Dialog Interview (Feb 2017, 1 hour);

      • TED presentation on Sapiens TED 2015 (20 min)

      • And in a double header: Yuval Noah Harari and Tristan Harris interviewed by Wired 2018 (56 min)

• Examples, reports

  • Aug. 2020, US Senate report on Russian interference, NY Times article points to full report

  • NYU report on Disinformation and the 2020 Election - summary - full report (Sept 2019, 28 pages)

  • Dec 2018, US Senate reports on Russian use of social media

• • • The IRA and Political Polarization in the United States, (Dec 2018, 47 pages)

    • The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency, (Dec 2018, 101 pages)

• • Russia in 2016:

• • • TED talk: Laura Galante - How (and why) Russia hacked the US election

    •  Russian connections (they are in this for the long term) Wired, 2017

• • 2016 

• • • Bloomberg's In the Trump Bunker  2016

    • Project Alamo "These websites were created in among other countries Macedonia and worked as the source for articles that were untrue, exaggerated or improved the image of Donald Trump. This was published in a mixture with everything else that was entirely true"

• • BBC on Big Data in Elections -- and behavioral microtargeting 

  • Brexit

• • • An UnCivil War; Channel 4/HBO docu-drama on "Vote Leave" campaign & Dominic Cummings 

    • journalist Carole Cadwallad

      • TED: "Facebook's Role in Brexit and the threat to democracy:"

      • BBC: The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked

• • 2019 May EU Elections -- fake news noted by Wired, Politico

• Organizations seeking to manipulate elections

  • Analytics firms providing services (typically just to one side for reasons of preference, or conflict of interest)

  • (I find some of these folks by looking at my Facebook settings for Ads and specifically, "Advertisers who have uploaded and shared a list with your info")

• • • i360

    • L2 Gartner 

    • Nation Builder

• • AggregateIQ, funded by Bob Mercer, used in 2018 by Ted Cruz, associated with Cambridge Analytica, Brexit player

  • Cambridge Analytica, funded by Mercer, Bannon on Board, used by Cruz(16), Brexit, Trump .. interesting online videos

• • • MIT Technology Review, April 2018, has a good outline of the events and issues associated with Facebook/CA

    • Christopher Wylie previous Cambridge Analytica Tech director

      •  UK The Guardian series on this provides more details related to Brixit, 2016 and Russia?

      • Presentation before UK Parliament (2:30 hours) May 2018

      • CBS coverage including Wylie March 2018

      • Book:  “Mindf(asterisk)ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America”; Oct 2019

    • Cambridge Analytica is out of business, May 2018  -- but Long live Emerdata

    • Dec 2018 - Washington DC Attn General sues Facebook for privacy violation in Cambridge Analytica situation

    • BBC: On Nigle Oakes - and CA

    • Cambridge Analytica CEO describes the application of Big Data to affect U.S. elections  June 2016) (11 Min video) 

    • this particular video provides a bit more insight on the sources and range of big data involved

    • March 2017 Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analytica CEO presentation on 2016 results in March of 2017, (30 minute video)  and is faced with some challenging questions from the German audience at his presentation.

    • March 2018 UK Channel 4 'traps' Nix into offering unusual services to manipulate elections

    • UK parliament presentation June 2018 (3 hour+)

    • 60 Minutes segment on Aleksander Kogan, Sept. 2018

    • NBC news report about Cambridge Analytica "abuse" of Facebook data (3/2018)

Privacy - we are being tracked and analyzed across the web and beyond

• MIT demonstration of WiFi used to detect motion though walls (2020)

• PBS Series on "Networld" March 2020 -- expands on digital surveillance, advertising and persuasion as a threat to democracy paralleling the 1400's printing press.

• NY Times series on "One Nation, Tracked" Dec 2019 special section 26 Jan 2020
  12Million Phones; Your phone betrays democracy, How to Track Trump, Total Surveillance , Children,

• What you need to know about Stalkerware, Eva Galperin  TEDWomen (12 min)

• Social media stalker song - from The Security Awareness Company (4 min)

• UK Guardian - on tracking, and influence Google example (Dec. 2016) 

• Dr. Michal Kosinski -- once Cambridge researcher (now Stanford) who pioneered the "Facebook Analytics" psychographics analysis

  • “Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion”; Proceedings of the National Academy , 11/2017

  • Expresses concern about the psycho profiling (as a founder of the field) (30 min video)

  • Discussion of digital footprints at Computer Museum May 2017 (1 hr 10 min)

  • https://applymagicsauce.com/demo Cambridge Univ. evaluate your personality

• What does Facebook know about us

  • ProPublica article:  "Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them", 2016

  • 3/18 WSJ Tech column

What you can do -- some personal actions 

• • 2021: Consumer Reports has a "Security Planner" tool available at https://securityplanner.consumerreports.org/  and a corresponding articles in it's Feb 2021 issue: challenges of  People-search sites, and Removal from these

  • Recommendations from "the Center for Humane Technology" (also see info below on CHT)

  • Browser Ad-ons that help you get control

    • Privacy Badger from the Electronic Freedom Foundation

    • News site "flagging" - https://www.newsguardtech.com/ (monthly fee except for MS Edge currently, as of Jan 2021)

    • Duck Duck Go is a search engine that uses ad revenue, but claims to not use personal profiling

  • The SIFT process to evaluate online stuff and avoid propagating problematic content/Memes

  • RAND corporation report on Tools that Fight Disinformation Online which curates a large list of tools that serve various purposes online.

  • Privacy Settings insight from Canadian Government, Privacy tsar

  • Consumer Reports:  Deleting unneeded accounts,

  • Firefox now has "enhanced tracking protection", which builds on the tracker tracking service, "disconnect.me" )

  • Related 2019 Wired article with recommendations)

  • Major Player "SETTINGS" to control privacy, ad use/abuse, etc ... at least some level of control

  • https://www.facebook.com/settings

  • https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-personalization

  • https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/privacy  (also /advertising)

• The loop: How Technology is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back; Jacob Ward; 2022

• HBO documentary "The Perfect Weapon" 2020 broad look at past uses/abuses of the net/web

• Nov 2019 - PBS Frontline, "In the Age of AI" is very good

• Article on Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine, Feb 2017; Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath

• AI Propaganda Machine,  Medium.com The rise of the AI Propaganda Machine

• IEEE Spectrum article on Computational Propaganda (Nov 2018) and related research

  • Computational Propaganda in Russia: The Origins of Digital Misinformation,” by Sergey Sanovich (June 2017)

  • “Junk News on Military Affairs and National Security: Social Media Disinformation Campaigns Against U.S. Military Personnel and Veterans,” by John D. Gallacher, Vlad Barash, Philip N. Howard, and John Kelly (October 2017)

  • “Polarization, Partisanship and Junk News Consumption Over Social Media in the U.S.,” by Vidya Narayanan, Vlad Barash, John Kelly, Bence Kollanyi, Lisa-Maria Neudert, and Philip N. Howard (February 2018)

  • “Computational Propaganda in the United States of America: Manufacturing Consensus Online,” [PDF] by Samuel C. Woolley and Douglas Guilbeault (2017)

  • “Algorithms, Bots, and Political Communication in the U.S. 2016 Election: The Challenge of Automated Political Communication for Election Law and Administration,” by Philip N. Howard, Samuel Woolley, and Ryan Calo, Journal of Information Technology & Politics (April 2018)

  • “Challenging Truth and Trust: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation,” by Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard (2018)

Advertising Business Model - Sharing fear and outrage for profit

• Zeynep Tufekci, TED 2017; We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads (23:00)

• Why we keep forgiving Facebook, 1A on NPR 7 Feb 2019 -- policy statements, and Facebook/Help

•  Roger McNamme 

  • "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe";Feb 2019

  • Jan 19, 2019 Time Magazine cover;   "I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg"

• Tristan Harris (Ex Google Ethicist & current champion of protecting humans vs exploiting them) (17:00)

  • How do you ethically steer the thoughts and actions of two billion people’s minds every day?

  • Center for Humane Technology  --Podcasts on related issues

  • How Technology hijacks our minds - Center for Humane Technology (Tristan Harris, et al)

  • Ted Talk: How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day-- the "Race to the bottom of the brain stem"

• The Ad Archives and related social media actions

• NYU evaluation of these Archives: "An Analysis of United States Online Political AdvertisingTransparency" (Feb 2019)

  • Propublica independent ad collection - tool set/concept;  actual ad database

  • Facebook/Instagram ad archive; independent oversight board; 

  • Google/Youtube ad transp"arency report; Ad Database in cloud

  • Twitter Ad Archive,

• PBS Frontline "The Facebook Dilemma", Oct 29 & 30, 2018