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I have been predicting this day would come for decades. It is still chilling to see it arrive.
Both today’s Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday carry the story of an ordinary woman whose life was nearly ruined by an AI-edited version of some doorbell footage that falsely showed her uttering racist abuse. The Mail’s story is here. It has the original video without a paywall, but I had started writing this post using the Sunday Times version before I was made aware by commenter JuliaM that the Mail had the same story, so in what follows I will mostly quote the Sunday Times story, ‘I doorknocked for Labour then racist deepfake ruined my life’. An archived version can be found here.
It started harmlessly enough. A PE teacher called Cheryl Bennett said that she would help deliver leaflets for her colleague, Quasim Mughal, who was standing as a Labour candidate in the local elections in May last year.
For that display of friendship, she has paid a heavy penalty. What happened that morning — or, rather, did not happen — has changed her life forever. For a time, it cost Bennett her reputation and her career. She was at risk of a criminal conviction too, and police visited her home to arrest her.
As she approached the door of a household in nearby Dudley, she was accompanied by two people: Mughal, the candidate who is of south Asian heritage, and her previous head teacher, who is not. At first, the owner did not answer.
By the time the door was opened, both colleagues had moved on to the next property, leaving Bennett to ask the person whether they intended to vote. Unbeknown to her, a CCTV camera perched above the door was filming.
Within days, a short segment of the footage had been leaked, edited to remove Mughal, and given subtitles. The resulting video falsely depicted Bennett launching into a racist tirade against the homeowner, with subtitles declaring: “F***ing p*kis. P*kis,” as she walked away from the front door.
Nobody has been able to establish who maliciously doctored the footage, but it was given to Akhmed Yakoob, a Lamborghini-owning criminal solicitor, nicknamed the “TikTok lawyer”, who was an independent pro-Gaza candidate for West Midlands mayor and had close links with George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain.
Yakoob posted a narrated version of the fake video on TikTok. He also posted Bennett’s name and place of work.
The video caused a sensation. Within days, it had received 2.1 million views across TikTok, Facebook and X, and prompted hundreds of people, including dozens of parents at her school, which has a large British-Pakistani community, to demand she be sacked. Yakoob and his followers cited Bennett as an example of Labour and Sir Keir Starmer’s lack of interest in Muslim and minority ethnic voters in the wake of the Israel-Gaza war. She was forced into hiding.
Yakoob has since paid substantial damages for his publication of the video.
For a time, however, it looked as though vindication might never come. Within a short time of Yakoob’s TikTok post at 7.30pm, her phone started to vibrate while she was at a friend’s house.
“My phone just started going off like I’d just stepped out of Love Island or I’d just become famous. It was going absolutely berserk on the table. So I picked it up thinking: ‘Family, is there something going on?’ So I looked at my phone and I had loads of work emails going through.”
Most of them contained abuse. Some were written by children at her own school. “Appalling,” one pupil said. “Being racist is harmful because it disregards the inherent worth and dignity of individuals solely based on their race.” Another wrote: “I didn’t expect a teacher of your standard to be discriminative of races.” Bennett, confused, protested that she had said no such thing, but the messages kept on coming through Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. “Stop lying.” “Ur not getting away with this.” “Racist little bitch.”
Then came the formal complaints, as well-meaning parents wrote to the head teacher demanding an investigation and threatening to contact the board of governors. The secondary school received 800 complaints in a short time, some from parents at her school, others from her previous school.
Within hours, the head teacher had told Bennett not to return to work for her own safety. She was not safe at home either, where she lived alone. Strangers arrived at the homes of her parents and her grandmother demanding information as to her whereabouts. Even her car number plate was circulating online.
She stayed at a friend’s home that night. At about 2.30am, West Midlands police went to her home to arrest her, putting a postcard through her door asking her to call them.
The Mail’s version of the story makes it clearer that Ms Bennett having fled to a friend’s house was the reason that she was not present when the police arrived at her home to arrest her at 2.30am. Even if she had been guilty, I do not see why the police thought it was necessary to turn up at that hour to arrest a woman for a non-violent crime.
The Sunday Times account continues:
“I was just constantly in survival mode. I was just trying to get through every single day. And it’s only because I’ve been raised by a very strong family, by very strong women, in terms of you keep fighting and pushing through. Because there was days where I just thought: ‘Would it be easier if I was to just end my life?’ Just because I felt like my career would never be same.”
Before long, police discovered the video was a hoax. They obtained the original doorbell footage, which specialist officers could see bore no resemblance to the subtitles in the video. On May 8, a spokesman for the force said they had found “no evidence of any racist slurs or language used”.
Lucky for her the original footage was still available. How long do they keep it on file? Round here we tend to assume surveillance is bad in itself, but we may soon end up being grateful for it more often than not.
Of course, it is not just YouTube that cannot be trusted (which is why when I link to video content I expect YouTube to take down at some point, I tend to download it & upload it to BitChute), but this is a prime example of why.
The Guardian reports,
Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content
Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.
A reminder that on February 8th 2021, Facebook’s own blog announced:
Today, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Since December, we’ve removed false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts. Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
– COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
– Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
– It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
– Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism
Emphasis added.
On May 21st 2021, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity” posted an update reversing the above:
Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:
In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.
The first of the claims that were described as “debunked” in the earlier post and banned from being made on Facebook, that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured”, is now the mainstream view. The next claim, about vaccines (vaccines in general, not just Covid-19 vaccines) not being “effective”, is a matter of degree. Some vaccines are more effective than others, which means that some vaccines are less effective than others. Turning to the third claim, for some categories of people, particularly children, it was indeed safer to get Covid-19 than the vaccine against it. The fourth claim is the only one that I would confidently say is simply false. Obviously, my confidence in its falsity, previously close to 100%, has been damaged by that claim being bracketed in with other claims that were described as obviously false and debunked by experts, but which have turned out to be probably true. When Zuckerberg said that the “fact-checkers” he hired “have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”, he was right. Censorship always destroys trust. Better late than never in admitting it.
I am convinced that wannabe “Twitter aka X” replacement “Threads” is mostly threads started by AI bots trained on the Guardian & NYT, replied to by a mix of other bots and assorted NPCs whose political philosophy came from a fortune cookie. Nothing will convince me otherwise 😀
Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation and its implications for our understanding of the last four years, and what it means for the future.
On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes.
And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so.
This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be.
– Jeffrey Tucker
Professor Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL sent this tweet at 8:01 AM · Aug 10, 2024:
My entire @facebook account has been deleted, seemingly (no reason given) because I tweeted that genetically male boxers such as Imane Khalif (XY undisputed) should not fight women in Olympics. Of course my opinion is open to civilised argument. But outright censorship?
For the second time in two posts, I find myself saying, “Thank God for Elon Musk”. Professor Dawkins very much would not say this. That’s fine. Those interested can debate on Musk’s platform whether God exists or whether boxers with one X- and one Y-chromosome should fight boxers with two X-chromosomes. For now, until Commissioner Mark Rowley of the Metropolitan Police has Musk extradited.
Update: Dawkins’ Facebook page is back. Facebook says it was a technical problem.
John Naughton, in an Observer article called “Closing the Stanford Internet Observatory will edge the US towards the end of democracy”, writes
“To make things worse, we also invented a technology that enables every Tom, Dick and mad Harry to publish whatever they like on opaque global platforms, which are incentivised to propagate the wildest nonsense. And to this we have now added powerful tools (called AI) that automate the manufacture of misinformation on an epic scale. If you were a malign superpower that wanted to screw up the democratic world, you’d be hard put to do better than this.”
Worse? It is strange how the writer of an article saying how the ability of everyone to publish whatever they like makes things worse claims to be so concerned for democracy. If he would deny mad Harry the right to publish what he likes and read what he likes, why would he grant Harry the right to vote?
Naughton continues,
At the root of all this are two neuroses. One is the Republicans’ obsessive conviction that academic studies, like those of DiResta and her colleagues, of how “bad actors – spammers, scammers, hostile foreign governments, networks of terrible people targeting children, and, yes hyper-partisans actively seeking to manipulate the public” use digital platforms to achieve their aims is, somehow, anti-conservative.
The other neurosis is, if anything, more worrying: it’s a crazily expansive idea of “censorship” that includes labelling social media posts as potentially misleading, factchecking, down-ranking false theories by reducing their distribution in people’s social media feeds while allowing them to remain on a site and even flagging content for platforms’ review.
Down-ranking theories deemed to be false by secretly stopping them from being communicated freely is not a crazily expansive idea of censorship, it is censorship. The censors’ kindness in allowing the censored material to remain on site so long as nobody sees it is akin to the kindness of the 1960s London gangster Charlie Richardson, who, having had a man beaten bloody in front of him, would make a gift to his victim of a nice clean shirt to go home in.
A year ago, Fraser Longden, the Chief Operating Operator of the DIY store Wickes, was in the news. On 16 June 2023, Internet Retailing magazine ran this story: “Wickes hits back at boycott campaign over COO’s comments that trans-critical shoppers ‘are not welcome’ in stores.”
I was aware of the boycott but did not join in. We do buy stuff from Wickes on occasion. It is useful that they open at 7am and close at 8pm. I certainly was not going to give up that utility because the company had gone woke. If I were to boycott all the companies who waste their substance by hiring “inclusion and diversity” teams and whose senior staff members gush about it to the media, I would have to live like a hermit. Still, it was foolish of Fraser Longden to first tell Pink News that “Creating a culture where everybody can feel welcomed – can be their authentic self, can be supported – is about modernising our business” and then tell the same Pink News that, in his estimate, ten percent of the UK population are “not welcome in our stores anyway”. I did not know whether my position on these issues, which I like to think of as nuanced, would have allowed him to welcome me through the rainbow-festooned portals of Wickes. Nor did I care. Wickes can hate me and still sell me screws.*
No, the thing that has made me decide to boycott Wickes happened a mere seven months ago, but I must have missed the story at the time. On 4 November 2023, the Telegraph reported, “DIY giant Wickes fails to shut down website accusing it of being ‘woke’”
The DIY giant Wickes has been accused of stifling freedom of speech after its boss tried unsuccessfully to shut down a website criticising it as “woke” after its boss told trans-critical “bigots” to shop elsewhere.
[…]
In response [to Mr Longden’s comments], Timothy Huskey set up the protest site featuring the headline “Woke Wickes” and claiming “the UK calls for a boycott of Wickes” due to its “highly controversial sexual agenda”, claiming that the company “hates” customers who think there are only two genders.
[…]
In July, the home improvements store’s lawyers contacted Nominet, the body which oversees UK domain names, to complain that the website was abusing the company’s trademarked name, contained “malware capabilities” and was being used for “phishing”, a reference to the use of emails and online platforms for fraudulent behaviour.
Papers filed with the watchdog also said the site was set up for commercial gain and intended to “unfairly disrupt” Wickes’s business.
In response, Mr Huskey, who is American, said he set up the site as “legitimate criticism” of Wickes, and made it “abundantly clear” it is not connected to the company, even offering visitors the address for the company’s official website if anyone wanted to shop with them. He insisted it was not used to make money or for any phishing fraud and contained no malware.
The adjudicator, who ruled on the dispute, found the use of the word “boycott” in the protest site’s name meant visitors would not think it was linked to the official Wickes’s site.
They concluded the company’s claims the site was malicious or set up for “phishing” fell “well short of what is required to support its serious allegation”.
They added that Wickes had not proven that the criticism on the website was “of such an exceptional nature” to merit the site to be shut down. They were also satisfied it was not set up for commercial or illicit purposes.
Wickes’ use of obviously spurious claims about malware and phishing to attempt to silence a critic enrages me. I am glad the attempt failed; https://www.boycottwickes.co.uk/ is still there. Mind you, so is Fraser Longden. Obviously the earlier boycott did not damage their bottom line that much. And I do not delude myself that my little mini-boycott will leave their accountants a-tremble. Mr Longden is right about one thing, most grand resolutions fizzle out when it’s 6:30pm, everywhere else is closed, and you desperately need a screw.
Nonetheless, given that companies will count an expensive advertising campaign a success if it increases custom by one or two percent, they would be wise not to do things that cause even a few of their customers to get into the habit of looking elsewhere first. That is how most of my “boycotts” end up. In 2019 Nigel Farage had a milkshake thrown over him for the first time. Someone in Burger King’s social media team proved their worth by putting out a tweet saying, “Dear people of Scotland. We’re selling milkshakes all weekend. Have fun. Love BK. #justsaying”. The net worth of most companies’ social marketing teams is negative: until then I had often used the Burger Kings at motorway service stations because, like Wickes, they remain open when other outlets are closed, and because a family member gets a discount, but their encouragement of political violence led me to declare a boycott. Predictably, my resolve wavered. I have eaten several Burger King burgers at motorway services since then, when BK was the only place selling food open, or because it was what other members of the party wanted. But five years of looking elsewhere first adds up.
*I meant the type of screw that comes in Metric, Imperial or Whitworth. Although having started that line of thought, I did not have the strength not to follow the Wikipedia link that told me that all screws have inherent male gender.
“Leading German politician calls for the state to issue “revocable social media licenses” for the privilege of commenting online”. The eponymous Eugyppius of Eugyppius: A Plague Chronicle describes how Mario Voigt, the head of the centre-right CDU in Thüringen, plans to protect democracy:
Stung by this failure [an uninspiring performance in a debate against an AfD politician called Björn Höcke], Voigt has set off to find other means of defending democracy. This week, in the Thüringen state parliament, he gave an amazing speech outlining a five-point plan to protect German democracy from that other great menace, the free and open internet:
So how do we protect democracy in the area of social media? There are five approaches:
Ideally, we should agree to ban bots and to make the use of fake profiles a criminal offence.
There is also the matter of requiring people to use their real names, because freedom of expression should not be hidden behind pseudonyms.
Then there’s the question of whether we should create revocable social media licences for every user, so that dangerous people have no place online.
We need to consider how we can regulate algorithms so that we can revitalise the diversity of opinions in social networks.
And we also have to improve media skills.
For all that Björn Höcke is supposed to be a “populist authoritarian” opposed to representative government, I’ve never heard him say anything this crazy. Voigt, meanwhile, is a leading politician for the officially “democratic” Christian Democratic Union (you know they are democratic because the word is in their name), and he’s actually dreaming of requiring Germans to obtain state-issued licenses for permission to post their thoughts to the internet.
I added the emphasis to show that the bit about diversity of opinion wasn’t just me or Eugyppius being sarcastic. Mario Voigt really did advocate for revocable social media licences to get those people he deems dangerous off the internet and in the next breath say that he wants the people still allowed to be on the internet to have a greater diversity of opinions.
Matt Taibbi: “America enters the samizdat era”
It is a sobering description of how the world went from this:
Ten years ago PBS did a feature that quoted a Russian radio personality calling Samizdat the “precursor to the Internet.” Sadly this is no longer accurate. Even a decade ago Internet platforms were mechanical wonders brimming with anarchic energy whose ability to transport ideas to millions virally and across borders made episodes like the Arab Spring possible. Governments rightly trembled before the destabilizing potential of tools like Twitter, whose founders as recently as 2012 defiantly insisted they would remain “neutral” on content control, seeing themselves as the “free speech wing of the free speech party.”
to this:
The Internet, in other words, was being transformed from a system for exchanging forbidden or dissenting ideas, like Samizdat, to a system for imposing top-down control over information and narrative, a GozIzdat. Worse, while the Soviets had to rely on primitive surveillance technologies, like the mandatory registration of typewriters, the Internet offered breathtaking new surveillance capability, allowing authorities to detect thoughtcrime by algorithm and instantaneously disenfranchise those on the wrong side of the information paradigm, stripping them of the ability to raise money or conduct business or communicate at all.
(Hat tip: Instapundit. Like us at Samizdata, Glenn Reynolds has watched this change happen over the time he has been blogging.)
Dear Mr MacFarlane,
In general, I am a fan of “The Orville” the soft science fiction series of which you are the creator and star. The other day I watched Episode 5 of Season 2, “All the World is Birthday Cake”. During the course of my viewing I said some things about your work as the writer of that episode that I now regret.
I said that the crew of the Orville had no cause to sneer at the inhabitants of Regor 2 for their unscientific beliefs, given that their own protocol for First Contact with an alien species seemed to be to sashay in to the welcome banquet and start quaffing, without having done the five minutes of research necessary to find out the basic organising principle of the aliens’ society. As this reviewer said, despite possessing advanced computers and translators and all that, the crew “blindly go in, interfere in their culture and cause animosity between the Orville and a first contact species”. Not just animosity towards the Orville, either, the Regorian species is now hostile to the entire Union.
I also said that there was no way that two supposedly elite officers of the Planetary Union like Bortus and Kelly Grayson could be so stupendously foolish as to try to escape from that prison camp where they were being held. What on Earth or off it were they trying to achieve? Where did they think they would go? Both of them were visibly aliens, the only two aliens on the planet! How did they think being outside the camp would improve their situation? Surely they would have known that by far their best chance of freedom was to sit tight and wait for Captain Mercer to get them freed by diplomatic means or by the use of the Orville’s superior technology. And after all that gushing about what a joy it was to welcome a new species to galactic society, Grayson and Bortus straight-up murdering a bunch of prison guards came as a bit of a surprise. Yes, they had been unjustly imprisoned and treated badly, but (I asked sarcastically) would Mr MacFarlane recommend that Americans unjustly imprisoned in foreign jails today should grab a gun off a guard and start shooting to kill? Bang goes the last chance of ever persuading the Regorians to reconsider their rejection of contact. The Regorians were perfectly justified in sentencing Bortus and Grayson to death. In fact they should have gone ahead and executed them both even after the “new star” appeared, to save the Union the trouble.
Mr MacFarlane, I admit with shame that I insulted your skills as a scriptwriter. I made remarks to the effect that it was completely implausible that people who were depicted as having gone through a rigorous selection process to get the positions they occupied could be so lacking in forethought, so stupendously arrogant, so utterly stupid.
I humbly apologise and withdraw that untrue statement. In that respect your script was entirely plausible. Elite people at the top of their profession really can be that stupid.
Take those highly educated, highly paid software engineers working for Google, for instance. The “most powerful company in the world” created and launched an AI called “Gemini” that would produce images of people in response to text requests. Imagine the ingenuity that goes into creating such a marvel. But because they are woke, Google told Gemini to make sure that the people it portrayed were anything other than white males. All that concentrated intelligence, and they still didn’t see what would inevitably happen next… → Continue reading: Seth MacFarlane: An Apology
This post is reposted from a source I do not trust (Double Down News) by a person I do not trust (Dr Susan Michie, adviser to the SAGE committee and literal communist) on a topic (the Israel-Hamas war) where AI-generated fakery is rampant. Remember the six-fingered Palestinian child?
Closer examination give yet more causes for doubt – the bizarrely elongated finger on the left hand of the soldier second from the left, the way that, perhaps in compensation, the right hand of the rightmost man seems to have no fingers at all. There is something wrong about the bipod of his rifle, too. The angle of the windows on the left of the picture looks off. The flame coming out of the window is too neatly defined.
But what interests me is that I thought “AI-generated” before I looked closely enough to see any of that. Possibly the thing that tipped me off, if I am right at all, was that all the elements of the alleged photograph looked exposed to the same degree, when one would think that the glow of the flames would dominate. Even that form of words, which I got from my husband, is more explanatory than whatever it was that screamed “fake” to me.
That said, this image is a great deal more realistic than those of only a few months ago. My spidey-sense for fake pictures will not last much longer.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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