OUR PICKSWhat AI Will Do to Elections | Red States Don’t Want Chinese Neighbors | The Specter of Family Separation, and more
· What AI Will Do to Elections
Depleted tech platforms, AI-enabled misinformation, and more than 50 countries voting in 2024. What could go wrong?
· Why America’s National Security Establishment Keeps Falling Short
There’s always much talent among the country’s high-powered foreign policy enthusiasts, but also much delusion in their attempts to unilaterally shape the destiny of other nations by force
· Red States Don’t Want Chinese Neighbors
Post-9/11 security justifications are being used to pass new Chinese Exclusion Acts
· Mo. Gov. Parson Bans China-Owned Agricultural Land Near Critical Military Facilities
According to a release from the governor’s office, for the purposes of this order, “critical military facilities” refers to all staffed military facilities in Missouri
· The Specter of Family Separation
Donald Trump and his allies have promised to restore their draconian zero-tolerance immigration policy
What AI Will Do to Elections (Rishi Iyengar, Foreign Policy)
Ahead of India’s last national election in 2019, internal teams at Twitter came across a rumor spreading on the platform that the indelible ink with which the country tags voters’ fingernails contained pig blood.
“That was a disinformation tactic that was intended primarily to disenfranchise Muslims and dissuade them from voting, and it wasn’t true,” Yoel Roth, the social media platform’s then-head of site integrity in charge of elections, recalled in an interview. “So Twitter adapted its policies to say that advancing that type of false voter suppression narrative is a violation of the site’s rules, and the posts would be removed, and the users would be sanctioned.”
Were that to happen today, Roth worries that the platform’s response would be quite different—or worse, nonexistent.
“Twitter,” for one, no longer really exists. The platform is now called X, renamed by billionaire Elon Musk soon after he paid $44 billion for it in 2022. Musk promptly laid off half the company’s employees, including most of the trust and safety teams Roth led—teams that kept misleading and harmful content off the platform. Roth himself resigned from Twitter (as it was then still known) in November 2022, less than a month after Musk took over. Musk’s policy of unfettered free speech, along with an overhaul of the verification system that previously helped users identify authoritative accounts, has led to a flood of disinformation and hate speech on the platform. (Roth himself has faced much of it.)
Requests to X’s press team on how the platform was preparing for elections in 2024 yielded an automated response: “Busy now, please check back later”—a slight improvement from the initial Musk-era change where the auto-reply was a poop emoji.
X isn’t the only major social media platform with fewer content moderators. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has laid off more than 20,000 employees since November 2022—several of whom worked on trust and safety—while many YouTube employees working on misinformation policy were impacted by layoffs at parent company Google. (Cont.)
