This Week In Cyberspace

Lavender. Sounds pretty vanilla right? But it’s actually the name of the Artificial Intelligence machine allegedly targeting Israel’s bombs at Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives in Gaza. The system has generated  “mass target creation and lethality”, especially in the first six weeks of the conflict. But with a 10% error rating,  the fallout for Gazan civilians has been horrific.

On the back of a report by +972 Magazine, we probe into the interplay between technology and conflict.

This Week In Cyberspace we take a look at hate speech online in the context of conflict. With the UN calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and the horrific human toll of Palestinian civilian lives still rising, certain words are coming under intense scrutiny.

META is reviewing the use of the word 'Zionist' on its platforms, while the Arabic term 'Saheed' - the word for martyr - is responsible for the most content takedowns across all of its platforms.

But what are the implications for free speech and rational debate online?

It's the biggest year of voting in global history. Seventy countries will decide their governance including citizens of no less than twenty-one African nations. But with many of those already on the Election Watchlist for internet interference, how many will claim to be bastions of democracy?

With a humanitarian crisis of apocalyptic proportions underway in the African heartland of Sudan, what role do tech-cos have in navigating a way through this?

Putin is locked in for a 5th term, largely through the control of information on the internet, while Elon Musk’s quest for world domination also continues apace with the release of the raw computer code behind his new xAI Chatbot.

On top of all that, the Chinese owned company behind TikTok is being forced to sell up in the US, and over in the EU, the AI Act has come into law essentially enabling developers to go for broke. 

It's been a busy week in cyberspace!

Did Kate Middleton actually doctor her own family photograph? Or has she actually been abducted by aliens? How fake images can ignite a bonfire of wild conspiracy theories.

And turncoat Donald Trump once wanted TikTok banished from the USA. Now that he's banned from Facebook for telling lies and inciting his followers to storm the Capitol, he wants the legislation he introduced to be reversed. But with Biden poised to sign off on it, is it all too late for him and TikTok's 150 million American users?

5 days ago, a strict new anti-LGBTQ+ bill called the Human Sexual rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill was introduced, which threatens to incite a witch hunt against lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex people fighting for their rights to express themselves and have privacy in Ghana, both online and off. It's part of a disturbing worldwide trend to vilify and control 'the other', and while it might appease the largely conservative Christian majority, it also threatens $5.8 million in foreign investments in the country. Right now, it's all in the hands of President Nana Akufo-Addo.

How can we tell if fake news is real when, despite the facts, some people swear by it? And how do we judge the veracity of a artificially generated videos when we see them on Facebook?

Two First Amendment cases started in the US Supreme Court yesterday concerning social media laws in Texas and Florida. The State's claim the platforms are exercising “freewheeling censorship”, while they say they just want to stop conservatives posting lies like they did about the last US Federal election being stolen.

Meanwhile the new text to video AI model SORA is causing waves with its ability to create visuals that can replicate one minute of fiction that looks uncannily like the real thing.

Both of these developments have the potential to transform the internet in ways we can't even imagine. But will it be good for humanity?

The ex KGB lieutenant colonel has a Presidential election in just under a month, and aside from silencing dissenters, he’s making sure that any information Russian citizens might find on the internet is singing his praises. With the seriously suspicious death of opposition leader Alexi Navalny four days ago and the arrest of around 400 people who came out to mourn him, Putin is going for gold as a digital dictator.

2023 has been BIG! We’ve covered the Open AI soap opera, the Internet Governance Forum, the Digital Occupation of Gaza and so much more. So where does all this leave us sensitive receptors as we head into the New Year? We wrap the year in wrapping paper and wish it well as we venture forth into unchartered territory.

Two landmark pieces of international text were agreed upon this week -  the final text of COP28’s first global stocktake calling on countries to transition away from fossil fuels, and the European Union’s provisional Act to put a few guardrails around the development of Artificial Intelligence.

With lots of get-out clauses for polluters to lean on, and loopholes for Big Tech to jump through, it's a game of horse-trading behind smoke and mirrors. But in the end, it's all we've got.

What kind of a future can the United Nations offer us? As COP28 wraps up, we struggle to find any positives. There's the Loss and Damage Fund but no phase out of fossil fuel extraction on the horizon. In the midst of all the the horse-trading, the Australian Government signs on to the pledge to triple renewables while the opposition backs the nuclear option. Meanwhile, Pacific Island Nations threaten to boycott the entire process as their homes are claimed by rising sea levels. All in a day's work on the good ship COP.

In this episode of TWICS we continue our examination of the UN's climate summit in Dubai. With 2,500 registered delegates connected to the coal, oil and gas industry and the President of COP28 showing a distinct disregard for climate science, the international conference is proceeding on shaky ground. Could it be that snake oil is the biggest commodity being pedalled in the host country this year?

2023 is set to be the hottest year on record. So how will climate justice be achieved at COP28 when climate activists are relegated to a space far away from the conference and actively surveilled by an authoritarian petro-state? The only way to decouple the world economy from fossil fuels is through an active climate movement. So will free speech, independent media and the right to protest be respected at COP28?

Not since 1985 when the Apple board got rid of Steve Jobs has there been such an upheaval in the tech sector as there was last Friday when Sam Altman, the 38 year old CEO of Open AI (the not-for-profit that runs CHATGPT), was fired . It was a board coup that also saw the company’s president and three senior researchers resign. Investors were ropeable, especially the CEO of Microsoft who tried to mediate his return to the company. When that failed, Microsoft made Altman an offer he couldn’t refuse. Is this best tech soap opera to date?

This Week In Cyberspace we catch up with Brett Solomon in an airport in Ottawa. He’s on his way to Washington DC to find out how human rights online are being factored into Digitalisation Policies by a new breed of Digital Ambassadors. And how do these international policies align with internet freedom?

The Asia Pacific Internet Governance Forum is on in Brisbane with hundreds of delegates from the region gathering to discuss how to govern the unwieldy beast that is the world wide web of things. With many large states wanting to govern the online space on their own right, how can users get a seat at the table and prevent the internet becoming the splinternet? And how can we bring a human rights agenda to internet governance going forward? Brett Solomon is on the ground to report back.

This year, the climate summit COP28 will be held in one of the richest oil producing Petrostates. But is the United Arab Emirates the best place to be hosting a conference about reducing carbon emissions? As one of the world's biggest emitters per capita, the UAE also has some pretty strict laws against protesting. We look at this and the use of spyware against activists in the first of our COP editions of This Week In Cyberspace.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has accused the 'No' campaign in the referendum on a Voice to Parliament for First Nations Australians of using AI to spread misinformation and disinformation on digital platforms. We look at the forces behind this push and the responsibility of tech giants, governments and individuals to police it.

The blue bird of happiness has been X-communicated. From 7 characters to just one, Twitter has become X - the personal plaything of the richest man in the world. The new brand aligns with Elon Musk's other ventures - Space X, X AI, even his son’s name X Æ A-12 (which his mother Grimes explained "represented the unknown variable, and her elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence"). Musk has plans  to transform X into something akin to China’s WeChat. But is that what democracies need?

This week we turn our attention to Saudi Arabia where a futuristic megacity called Neom is being built.  Tech giants Google and Microsoft have just signed massive deals to set up data storage facilities there but what are the implications of doing business with a repressive regime?

 While actors are concerned that their image will be used forever in perpetuity by AI, tech workers in Kenya are worried about the mental health impacts of filtering out abusive content so that we can safely use systems like ChatGPT.

Content moderators in Kenya are currently suing META for a range of things including lack of mental health support, because they have to review violent and sometimes even illegal content so that we don’t have to.

Welcome to series 2 of This Week In Cyberspace where we look at human rights in the digital age through the lens of Artificial Intelligence.

For as long as the Internet has been operative, alternative gender expression online has been a thing. But with the use of AI by corporations and governments to collect personal data, and often weaponise it against citizens, this space is no longer as safe as it once was.

Uganda has just enacted the world’s harshest anti-LGBTQ+ laws using discriminatory data sets to identify gender, emotion, and now sexual orientation. These binary codes are discriminatory in nature. So how can they be tackled?

In the final episode of Season 1 we take a closer look at Artificial Intelligence, specifically Generative Large Language Multi-Modal Models (or GLLMMMs). These Golem Class AIs have the experts spooked and yet the five giant tech companies are already rolling them out to the public with no safeguards for society. And as we know, an unregulated tech space adversely creates a toxic online environment. So how to we avert even more severe unintended consequences than doom scrolling, fake news and the breakdown of democracy?

Digital rights are being eroded in Australia with an Act of Parliament that enables surveillance, modification of data, interception of communications and even account takeovers. Earlier this year, the Attorney-General publicly released the Privacy Act Review of the Identify and Disrupt Bill, otherwise known as the hacking bill. But will this result in changes that are, in the words of Electronic Frontiers Australia; "balanced against the ever growing interests and insatiable data appetites of business and its further subordination to what is administratively convenient and expeditious for the government". Stay tuned.

It all began as a centre for tech utopia but it’s turned into something quite uncontrollable. Silicon Valley - home of the digitally free and technologically brave - is its own unleashed beast. But with no ethics surrounding the development of this seemingly limitless computer industry, has it now got us all by the short and curlies?

How the hell can we protect ourselves from the rise and rise of Artificial Intelligence? As human brains compete with digital minds, The Future for Life Institute is proposing watermarking systems to trace AI provenance, and liability for harm caused by runaway products. But with Microsoft’s decision to ditch its entire AI ethics team this week, and the European Union scheduled to vote on the EU AI Act at the end of this month, what sort of disruptions to democracy are forecast? More importantly, how can they be averted?

With 187 Internet shutdowns in 35 countries in 2022, the relationship between democracy and technology is top of mind for many humanitarians. A prime forum to thrash out some of the nuances of this partnership will be the second U.S. Summit for Democracy, which takes place in Washington from March 29-30. Access Now is co-leading the Technology for Democracy Cohort in partnership with the U.K. and Estonian governments. It’s  an impressive coalition of over 150 civil society, government, and private sector organisations across 40 countries. And Brett Solomon will be there.

The United Nations is currently holding its 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women and the main theme for this 12-day think fest is: “Innovation and technology for gender equality”. It’s the first time that digital gender inequalities have been highlighted by the Commission and high time too because there are 238 million more men on line than women. At the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, Hilary Clinton famously said "Human rights are women's rights, once and for all". Now women's rights are also digital rights. We unpack some of the key issues that disproportionately affect women and girls and non-binary people online.

Rainbow flags are flapping from police stations, shop fronts and Surf Rescue buggies thanks to Sydney WorldPride. Inclusivity and diversity is the mantra of the Rainbow Tribe, but globally, identity wars ares raging. We discuss how the LGBTIQmmunity is enhanced by digital platforms in some countries, and targeted by them in others. 

“The country was a construction site. It has become a cemetery.” wrote one journalist in the wake of the mega earthquake that rocked Turkey on February 6 killing nearly 50,000 people, many of them buried beneath the rubble of poorly built apartment blocks. A further two earthquakes destroyed even more buildings weakened by the previous quake. In the midst of this natural disaster, Twitter and Tik Tok (the main modes of communication) were blocked. Survivors are pointing fingers at the Erdogan government which allowed the dodgy dwellings to go up. In return, the state is detaining people who post about it on their social media accounts. 

There are potentially dangerous experiments taking place in the Artificial Intelligence sphere that could shape the way we all live. The latest one is Tik Tok’s Focused View, an emotional recognition feature that targets ads to the user based on your reactions to various videos. But there are serious questions about whether it actually violates European Union laws. We attempt to get our real live intelligence around the issue.

It’s been 2 years since the military took over rule in Myanmar. Playing from the authoritarian's playbook, the regime is  using CCTV's and International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) registration to control their citizens. It's a digital dictatorship where people think that Facebook IS the Internet, and human rights abuses are hidden behind internet shutdowns. But dictatorships always fall. We explore how this one could.

In  the world’s largest democracy, censorship has been running rampant around a BBC documentary that the Indian Foreign Ministry has called a “propaganda piece” made with a “colonial mind-set.” When students in New Delhi organised screenings of the two-part series, authorities called in the riot police, cut off electricity and detained the organisers. ‘India - the Modi Question’ explores the Prime Minister’s  involvement in an actual riot in which 1,000 mostly Muslims were killed back in 2002. So how successful have authorities been in using their emergency powers to censor clips from the doco on social media platforms?

We reboot in 2023 with Brett Solomon  (CEO of accessnow.org) fresh from the World Economic Forum in Davos where he’s been on a panel with the Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine. He also took selfies with Will I Am who loves CHAT GPT, the Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer owned by Microsoft. Nick Cave calls it ‘a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human’. Is this the end of humanity as we know it? Or are we on the brink of a brave new world?

A defining moment of the past year has been the massive data breach that left millions asking the question, "Who Am I?". This question wont go away in 2023 as we try to define ourselves not only in physical spaces but online ones too. As governments around the world ramp up their use of cyber warfare, internet shutdowns like the 180 plus we saw in 2022, will continue to occur. What the world needs now, apart from love, sweet love, is more governance around data. Will it happen? Stay tuned for TWICS 2023.  

Shutting down the internet is a powerful digital weapon used by autocrats the world over. It’s currently being used by Putin in his war against Ukraine. In the past 10 months, Russia has also managed to block nearly 3,000 news websites and make civilians in occupied parts of the country pay for SIM cards with Rubels. So how can the rest of the world help restore some sense of interconnectedness in a country under such intense “Russification”?

Millions of people are exploring their artificially generated, inner iridescent, cartoon essence. That’s right, with the recent release of  the “magic avatar” by the photo-editing app Lensa, we can all be fantasy stars in our own lunchtime. But concerns are mounting about how it not only collects massive amounts of personal data, often sexualises your image while potentially breaching artistic copyright.

The 17th Internet Governance Forum has just wrapped up in the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, with a call to urgently connect the 2.7 billion who are unconnected by increasing infrastructure investment, fostering digital literacy, harnessing advanced technologies, and building a safe and secure digital space where fundamental human rights are realised. Our regular guest and CEO of the digital rights organisation accessnow.org Brett Solomon was there in the flesh and reports back on the elephant inside the dinosaur.

Brett Solomon joins us from a noisy cafe in Amsterdam for a chat ahead of the 17th Internet Governance Forum in Addis Adaba, Ethiopia. The big irony is that the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray is currently under a two-year internet blackout and this is not on the IGF's agenda yet. Nor is the situation in China nor Russia. There's a battle for control of the internet going on globally and this will be played out in Addis. As will the issue of content governance in conflict zones.

The mass layoffs in the tech sector include human rights experts, specialist rights and ethics teams, and content moderators that speak local languages in places like Asia and Africa. Twitter has shed 90% of employees in India and only has one marketing person left  in Japan, its second largest market. So what do these changing priorities mean and is this a reckoning for the industry?

Things are hotting up as COP27 enters its final days and human rights defenders demand the release of Alaa Abd el-Fattah. The Egyptian-British pro-democracy activist has been on a six month hunger strike and has refused water since the climate conference began ten days ago. British Parliament is up in arms over it. Lady Boycott is concerned about human rights abuses, Lord Purvis of Tweed wants to pause the 4 billion pound trading partnership.  Khalid Abdalla, the Egyptian-British actor who’ll play Dodi al-Fayed in the upcoming season of Netflix's The Crown, is also concerned. So has Alaa cornered Egypt?

Elon Musk wants to “authenticate all real humans", so why is he dressing up in red samurai gear and posing as the ‘Devil’s Champion’? The Tesla founder’s recent halloween outfit, with its inverted cross and goat’s head breastplate, seems to have inflamed conspiracy theorists who think his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter is part of a global battle against evil. It would be funny if it wasn't so serious. 

This week we look  to Finland for tips on how to protect human rights online and be happy. Turns out this involves some schizophrenic thinking and lots of forests. Brett Solomon from accessnow.org has been speaking with top officials in the happiest Scandanavian country, and says that instability and policy confusion means that we may just be at a tipping point where we can have some significant influence.

Facial Recognition is now so embedded in our lives that we forget how this data is being used. The securitisastion and corporatisation of everything has led to a point where our identity could be owned by a private company without our consent. How can mere mortal small fry like us reclaim our basic human rights? Hear how regulatory frameworks to govern surveillance capitalism are progressing in places like San Fransisco and Europe.

This Week In Cyberspace, we investigate spyware. It’s just been found to have been used by the Mexican army to spy on citizens. So what exactly is it, and how can we protect ourselves from it? Tune in for some digital details.

What do you do when your identity is stolen? Laugh. There are bigger problems, like Israel and Palestine.....still. Facebook's Oversight Committee has brought down its first report and it's fascinating!