Last week, our colleague Michael Shellenberger testified before the Senate about Artificial Intelligence. The threat of AI isn’t the technology itself, Michael argued. It’s the people who control the technology.
Case in point: tech platforms’ use of AI in the mass censorship of social media posts. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have routinely used AI to identify so-called mis- and disinformation and then labeled, shadowbanned or shut down accounts of people with the wrong opinions.
Much of the Covid-related censorship we witnessed over the past three years was conducted through AI flagging. The US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, through its partnership with the Stanford Internet Observatory’s “Virality Project,” used AI to find vaccine-skeptical posts on Facebook and Twitter. This project led to the removal of “often-true” content about Covid vaccines on social media.
