Dangers of Face App

Viral photo app FaceApp has taken the world by storm. Launched in 2017, the app has recently enjoyed mass popularity due largely to Hollywood celebrities posting their humorous edited pictures online.

FaceApp uses “neural network” artificial intelligence technology to alter people’s faces with various filters. Users simply take or upload a photo from their phone and the app’s algorithms do the rest. You can make yourself look younger or older, swap your gender, or transform your expression.

The ageing filter is easily the most popular, with Drake, Hilary Duff, Gordon Ramsay, and LeBron James among the celebrities who showcased their future faces on social media.

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Read more: Your headphones aren't spying on you, but your apps are. Here is why

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Last week, the app was in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, with keen-eyed observers pointing out that the app’s terms of use give its Russian parent company, Wireless Lab, a very broad, global and lifelong licence to use the images.

In short, once you sign up and use the app, the company can do pretty much whatever it likes with your photos. It could plaster a wrinkled version of your face across a billboard, website or the side of a skyscraper, and you would have no legal recourse.

Of course, as experts have correctly pointed out, this is extremely unlikely to happen. Russia’s only interest in your photo data would be for facial recognition software development. Wireless Lab has also publicly stated that most photos are deleted within 48 hours of upload and no information is sent to Russia, but rather is stored temporarily on the company’s American servers.

Other hidden dangers in the fine print

More concerning, however, is the range of other disturbing conditions users unwittingly sign up to with FaceApp. The terms of use comprise a legally binding contract, yet research tells us that virtually no one ever reads the fine print.

This is worrying, given that section 15 of FaceApp’s terms all but bans you from taking legal action against the company. You are only permitted to lodge small claims (up to certain limits) or seek specific court orders. You are otherwise required to resolve all legal disputes through confidential arbitration held in California.

Thankfully, you can opt out of this provision – but you only have 30 days from registration to do so, meaning most of the app’s 100 million existing users are already too late.

For those who have recently bought into the hype, the clock is ticking. You can opt out by sending written notification to:

Wireless Lab OOO

16 Avtovskaya 401

Saint-Petersburg, 198096, Russia

You must include your full name and indicate your clear intent to opt out of binding arbitration. If you do this, standard Californian law applies and you retain your legal right to sue if you want.

If you downloaded FaceApp within the past week and you’re based in Australia, you’ll want to act quickly, given that letters take up to 14 business days to reach Russia via international post.

Section 17 of the terms is also concerning. This clause gives Wireless Lab the right to change the terms at any time, and that the company “may” attempt to notify users but will otherwise simply post the updated terms online.

In theory, there would be nothing to stop the company suddenly imposing a usage charge, and the only way to find out would be to continuously check the terms of use for updates, or your App Store-linked bank account for withdrawals.

You might be giving away more than your face. Shutterstock.com

Section 10 also deserves a mention. It states that you will “indemnify, defend, and hold harmless” FaceApp and its “officers, directors, agents, partners and employees” from “any loss, liability, claim, demand, damages, expenses or costs” relating to your use of the app.

Basically, you cannot sue them for any loss or injury you suffer through the app (such as damaged reputation or embarrassment caused by Wireless Lab using your photos). It also means you agree to cover all legal fees for third-party claims against FaceApp arising from your use of the app, yet you surrender all control over the legal action.

In stark terms, this means you effectively can’t sue FaceApp, and if anyone else tries, you’re picking up the bill.

Is it worth it?

FaceApp is undeniably fun, and is currently the most popular free app in Australia, ahead of Instagram and YouTube. Downloads of the app to US iPhones have increased by 561% in the past month.

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Read more: You may be sick of worrying about online privacy, but 'surveillance apathy' is also a problem

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Any playful app that spreads joy can be a good thing. It is crucial, however, that users know what they are signing up for, otherwise many of their legal rights will vanish and their legal exposure will be extraordinary.

As if wrinkled skin and grey hair weren’t bad enough.

Ref: https://theconversation.com/faceapps-fine-print-means-you-effectively-cant-sue-them-unless-you-send-a-letter-to-their-russian-office-within-30-days-120658

https://www.sciencealert.com/scared-of-faceapp-stealing-your-data-it-s-not-the-creepiest-part-of-their-fine-print

Record haul of Elephant Ivory and Pangolin Scales

Record haul of elephant ivory seized in Singapore, with pangolin scales, worth over $66m in total

JUL 23, 2019, 10:52 AM SGT

UPDATED

JUL 23, 2019, 6:43 PM

Vanessa Liu

SINGAPORE - A record 8.8 tonnes of elephant ivory was seized from three containers on Sunday night (July 21) in what is believed to be one of  the largest seizures that the world has seen in recent years.

The ivory is estimated to have come from nearly 300 African elephants. Just three months earlier in April, Singapore seized 177kg of cut-up and carved elephant ivory.

Alongside the record ivory haul, 11.9 tonnes of pangolin scales were also confiscated in the operation. It was the third shipment to be intercepted this year, said the National Parks Board (NParks), Singapore Customs and the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) in a joint statement.

The containers, which were en route from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Vietnam, were declared as containing "timber" but were found to contain pangolin scales estimated to be worth about $48.6 million, alongside $17.6 million worth of elephant ivory, when they were inspected by the authorities.

In April, two large shipments of pangolin scales - both bound for Vietnam from Nigeria - were intercepted by the local authorities within a week of each other. They were found to contain 12.9 tonnes and 12.7 tonnes of scales respectively.

With this seizure, Singapore has seized a total of 37.5 tonnes of pangolin scales since April.

The shipments were believed to be two of the largest single hauls the world has seen in recent years. The last one on record was in China, where 11.9 tonnes of scales were seized in 2017.

Pangolin scales and elephant ivory seized by Singapore authorities, pictured on July 23, 2019. ST PHOTO: JASON QUAH

An estimated 2,000 giant pangolins (Smutsia gigantea) are believed to have been killed for the scales confiscated in the latest shipment.

The agencies said  China's General Administration of Customs had shared information that enabled the successful seizure at Singapore's Pasir Panjang Export Inspection Station.

"The Singapore Government adopts a zero-tolerance stance on the use of Singapore as a conduit to smuggle endangered species and their parts and derivatives. Our agencies will continue to collaborate and maintain vigilance to tackle the illegal wildlife trade," they added.

Native to Asia and Africa, the ant-eating pangolin is the only mammal covered in scales and curls into a ball to defend itself from predators.

Pangolin scales, which are made of keratin, are in demand in Asia for use in traditional Chinese medicine despite there being no proven medicinal benefit from their use. Pangolin meat is also considered a delicacy in some cultures.

Singapore has seized a total of 37.5 tonnes of pangolin scales since April. ST PHOTO: JASON QUAH

Experts who spoke to The Straits Times about the earlier seizures had said the large quantities of pangolins involved in the shipments pointed strongly to the involvement of criminal networks.

Ms Bridget Connelly, an analyst conducting research on wildlife trafficking with C4ADS - a non-profit based in the United States - told The Straits Times that only a trafficker with a significant source of funds can bear the financial risk of consolidating the animal parts from poachers and middlemen, and exporting them.

She added: "Wildlife trafficking is most efficient and cost-effective when it is done at scale. The poacher isn't going to have the means to ship the product to Asia, nor is the middleman, who may collect from several poachers."

The pangolin is believed to be the world's most trafficked mammal. There are eight species of pangolin, all of which are considered threatened with extinction on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.

According to experts, over a million pangolins were taken from the wild between 2000 and 2013. Current populations of pangolins in Asia are thought to be low enough that traffickers have turned to African regions to feed the demand.

The Singapore authorities also intercepted the shipping of pangolin scales in Singapore in 2015 and 2016.

Ms Connelly pointed out that a key problem in stopping illegal wildlife trade was the lack of detection or, when detection occurred, the lack of sufficient penalties to deter traffickers.

"Often, even if wildlife traders are arrested, they will have minimal sentences or relatively small fines. Because of the high reward and low risk, the wildlife trade has continued to flourish," she said.

Singapore is a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites).

Under local laws - the Endangered Species (Import & Export) Act - the penalty for the illegal import, export and re-export of wildlife is a fine of up to $500,000 and may include two years' imprisonment.

Earlier this month, an international operation involving the police in 109 countries saw thousands of wild animals seized in a crackdown on illegal wildlife trade. Operation Thunderball, based in Singapore, was the third such Interpol mission in recent years aimed at transnational crime networks.

Ms Connelly said Singapore plays a significant role in international maritime trade routes and is heavily exposed to networks using its port to traffic wildlife products.

She said: "Because wildlife traffickers operate across jurisdictions, collaboration among international, regional and local actors at every stage in the supply chain is crucial to understanding and effectively disrupting the networks.

"When a seizure is made, it is important that consignee and consignor information is shared with the authorities in both the origin and destination jurisdictions as to more effectively prevent such shipments from being successful in the future."

The agencies said that the animal parts will be destroyed to prevent them from re-entering the market.

Ref: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/record-haul-of-elephant-ivory-seized-in-singapore-together-with-pangolin-scales-worth-over

Related Story:
https://www.straitstimes.com/askst/illegal-trade-in-wildlife-south-east-asias-tragedy

Other Stories:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ivory-elephant-tusks-pangolin-scales-animal-singapore/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49079720

WHY DOES BOILING WATER TURN TO SNOW WHEN IT'S COLD?

The polar vortex means it’s so cold that water will disappear into the air if you throw it – here’s why.

The arrival of a polar vortex in the US means people are once again stepping outside into sub-zero temperatures to throw boiling water into the air.

Since the advent of social media it has become a winter ritual, with videos of the spectacular effect currently blossoming across the internet.

If done correctly, the boiling water blooms into a white cloud as soon as it hits the freezing air, making it appear like it has turned instantly to snow.

But the science behind the phenomenon shows this isn't exactly what is happening. Instead, the hot water is actually evaporating into steam, before condensing into tiny droplets of water that then freeze into a solid state.

Essentially, the very high temperature of the water combined with the very low temperature of the air causes the water to pass through its three states almost instantaneously – from liquid to gas, then to liquid, then to solid. 

It might sound more dramatic that the water is hot – but that makes it more likely to happen. Since the water is warmer it evaporates more quickly, allowing it to turn to steam as soon as it is thrown.

The cold air can't hold that vapour, so almost as soon as that process happens it changes once again into droplets of liquid – which are so small that the air around them causes them to freeze instantly – and turns into a solid.

Because the effect works with boiling water, it is dangerous for anyone who tries it. One person in Madison, Wisconsin was treated for burns after throwing scalding water into the air, local media reported.

Hundreds of videos of the billows have been shared on Twitter and Facebook, though not all attempts have been successful.

The experiment has even been attempted by people with high-powered water pistols.

Temperatures need to be around -30 degrees celsius and below before the trick actually works, so it is unlikely people in the UK will be able to do it despite the current cold snap.Anyone attempting it before the mercury has reached that low risks covering themselves in boiling water.

In freezing temperatures boiling water turns instantly to vapour when it is thrown in the air (YouTube/ Screenshot)

One person in Madison, Wisconsin was treated for burns after throwing scalding water into the air, local media reported.

A spate of accidents also occurred in 2014, following a similar drop in temperatures across the US.

Asia Cold Snap

Asia cold snap: Scores dead as freezing 'polar vortex' sweeps across eastern Asia

By Adam Withnall, 25 January 2016 12:25

Asia's 'polar vortex' has seen some regions hit by their coldest weather for more than half a century

More than 60 people have died as a band of extreme cold weather spread across eastern Asia, stranding tens of thousands of tourists and bringing some regions their lowest temperatures for half a century.

While much international attention has been focussed on the heavy snowfalls in the eastern US, another cold snap has descended over Korea, China, Hong Kong and Japan.

Temperatures dropped across Asia on Sunday due to a deep depression pulling cold weather down from the north. Major Chinese cities like Shanghai and Beijing hit -4/-5, while -18 was recorded in Seoul, South Korea.

Taiwan saw some of the worst impacts, however, because its subtropical geography means most homes are without central heating.

City officials in Taipei said on Monday that temperatures had hit a 16-year low of 4C,well below the average of around 16C. The cold had caused heart trouble, shortness of breath, strokes and hypothermia and accounted for the deaths of at least 57 people in the wider city area.

Up to 3.5 inches of snow blanketed the island’s tallest peak, Jade Mountain. Authorities warned people to keep warm out of the cold after a 56-year-old man was found dead on the street.

In Hong Kong, a low of 3C was recorded – the lowest temperature there in almost 60 years. News headlines about Asia’s “polar vortex” saw hundreds visit mountains around the city expecting snow.

According to the South China Morning Post, the mountains ended up covered not with snow but with underprepared hikers. Police reportedly had to block off roads up to the hills because so many people refused to heed warnings, and some had to be rescued by fire crews.

“We came here to watch snow,” a young man said on NOW TV news. “We are a bit disappointed and freezing.”

A sixth person was reported to have died on Monday after heavy snows left five people dead over the weekend in western and central Japan, including a woman who fell from a roof while removing snow.

Kyodo News service and other local media reported an 88-year-old woman in western Japan's Tottori prefecture died after a landslide hit her house before dawn.

The bullet train service was delayed, while there were flight cancellations across the country.

In South Korea, more than 500 flights were cancelled to the internationally-renowned holiday island of Jeju, known for its year-round balmy weather and beaches.

The mercury there hit -6C on Sunday, while heavy snow closed the airport entirely. An estimated 60,000 tourists were stranded there in total, the BBC reported, though officials said they hoped the runway would be cleared for use by Monday night.

Most parts of mainland China experienced their coldest weather in decades over the weekend. The southern city of Guangzhou, which has a humid subtropical climate, saw snow for the first time since 1967 on Sunday, the city's meteorological service said.

The cold led to at least four deaths — strawberry farmers who died of carbon monoxide poisoning when they turned up heating in a plastic greenhouse, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

The National Meteorological Bureau forecast that temperatures in southern China would drop another 3-8 degrees Celsius on Monday.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/asia-weather-cold-snap-china-south-korea-hong-kong-taiwan-japan-scores-dead-polar-vortex-a6832416.html

Related: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/us-polar-vortex-frozen-hair-taylor-scallon-twitter-viral-videos-a8757711.html

Polar Vortex in US

More than 20 dead in US polar vortex, frostbite amputations feared

NEW YORK: Tens of millions of Americans on Thursday (Jan 31) braved Arctic-like temperatures as low as -49 degrees Celsius that paralysed the US Midwest and were blamed for at least 21 deaths.

Warmer-than-normal weather was on the way, but that offered little comfort to vulnerable populations such as the homeless and elderly enduring cold that caused frostbite in minutes and made being outside potentially deadly.

Officials across multiple states linked numerous deaths to the frigid air. The death toll rose from a previous 12 after at least nine more people in Chicago were reported to have died from cold-related injuries, according to Stathis Poulakidas, a doctor at the city's John H Stroger Jr Hospital.

Poulakidas, a trauma specialist, said the hospital had seen about 25 frostbite victims this week. He said the most severe cases risked having fingers and toes amputated.

Among those believed to have died from the cold was University of Iowa student Gerard Belz. The 18-year-old was found unresponsive on campus early Wednesday morning just a short walk from his dorm, according to university officials. Police told a local television station they believed the cold played a factor in his death. The wind chill at the time officers found Belz was -46 degrees Celsius, according to the National Weather Service.

Homeless and displaced people were particularly at risk, with Chicago and other cities setting up warming shelters. But many toughed it out in camps or vacant buildings. A 60-year-old woman found dead in an abandoned house in Lorain, Ohio, was believed to have died of hypothermia, Lorain County Coroner Stephen Evans said.

"There’s just no way if you’re not near a heat source that you can survive for very long out in weather like this," Evans told the Chronicle-Telegram newspaper.

15 DEGREES CELSIUS BY SATURDAY

It has been more than 20 years since a similar blast of frigid air covered a swath of the US Midwest and Northeast, according to the National Weather Service.

The bitter cold was caused by the mass of air known as the polar vortex drifting south from its usual position over the North Pole.

Homes and businesses used record amounts of natural gas to fight the cold, according to financial data provider Refinitiv. Utilities appealed to consumers to conserve energy to avoid power outages.

In Detroit, General Motors suspended operations at 11 Michigan plants to cut natural gas consumption. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV canceled a shift on Thursday at two of its plants.

Snow and ice created treacherous travel conditions, with 26 road collisions reported within two hours on Thursday in eastern Iowa's Johnson County, emergency communications center chief Tom Jones told the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

For the second day in a row, the intense cold and windy conditions forced US airlines to cancel more than 2,000 flights. Chicago was hardest hit, with O’Hare International Airport experiencing over 700 cancellations, according to the FlightAware tracking site.

Heavy snow hitting Chicago off the Great Lakes was set to begin winding down on Thursday night, the weather service said.

More than 30 record lows were shattered across the Midwest. Cotton, Minnesota, had the lowest national temperature recorded early on Thursday at minus -48 degrees Celsius, before the weather warmed up, the weather service reported.

Read more at https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/more-than-20-dead-in-us-polar-vortex-frostbite-amputations-11194248

The Polar Vortex

Source: National Geographic

BY SARAH GIBBENS 30 JANUARY 2019

HOW THE POLAR VORTEX CREATED RECORD SUBZERO TEMPERATURES IN THE MIDWEST

Some states are seeing temperatures colder than the Arctic.

WHILE AUSTRALIANS BRACE THE HEATwaves of this year’s summer, there is no doubt that reading the winter forecasts in the United States sends a chill down our spine

In some regions of the United States, temperatures are dropping below freezing, and some portions of the Midwest are experiencing temperatures below 40 degrees Celcius and a mind-blowing wind chill of 59 degrees below zero thanks to the polar vortex. Accuweather predicts the Midwestern states will experience the extreme temperatures until later this week and cautions against stepping outside with any exposed skin. In these record-shattering temperatures, frostbite can occur after only a few minutes.

A BLAST OF ARCTIC AIR

What is the polar vortex, the doomsday-sounding weather pattern blamed for these frigid conditions?

The term refers to a swirling mass of Arctic air that hovers around the north pole all year. Its swirling eddies spin counterclockwise, and during winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, these eddies grow longer and dip farther south.

When the vortex grows, these cold swirls of air are transported south by the polar jet stream (also called the polar front). Moving from west to east, the polar jet stream hovers farther north in the summer and farther south in the winter, altered by changing seasonal sunlight. Along with its subtropical jet stream counterpart in the south, these two fronts play a determining role in seasonal weather changes.

Intermittent blasts of cold polar vortex air happen when the vortex becomes less stable, circulating in waves rather than a tight circle. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, denser cold air in the north and warm air currents moving south can all cause the vortex to become unstable. The more unstable the vortex becomes, the more likely it is that parts of North America, Europe, and Asia feel stray blasts of Arctic weather.

WILL CLIMATE CHANGE MAKE THE VORTEX MORE UNSTABLE?

Scientists are only recently beginning to understand how a climate changed by warming temperatures may lead to colder winters.

One study published last March in the journal Nature Communications found a link between warmer Arctic air and colder US winters, particularly in the northeastern part of the country.

WHAT IS THE POLAR VORTEX?

In a press release about the research, study author Jennifer Francis said, “Warm temperatures in the Arctic cause the jet stream to take these wild swings, and when it swings farther south, that causes cold air to reach farther south. These swings tend to hang around for a while, so the weather we have in the eastern United States, whether it’s cold or warm, tends to stay with us longer.”

One theory for why this might occur focuses on the stability of jet streams. These westerly winds are propelled by the difference between cold air in the north and warm air in the tropics. Without this strong difference, jet streams could become weaker, concluded a paper published last October.

Though global temperatures are rising, climate change could lead to more erratic, extreme weather conditions. In parts of the Midwest and Northeast experiencing these temperature drops, the risk of hypothermia makes an unstable vortex potentially deadly.

Is Peppa Pig evil?

Credit: The Guardian UK

How Peppa Pig became a video nightmare for children

James Bridle’s essay on disturbing YouTube content aimed at children went viral last year. Has the problem gone away – or is it getting worse?

In November of last year, I read an article in the New York Times about disturbing videos targeted at children that were being distributed via YouTube. Parents reported that their children were encountering knock-off editions of their favourite cartoon characters in situations of violence and death: Peppa Pig drinking bleach, or Mickey Mouse being run over by a car. A brief Google of some of the terms mentioned in the article brought up not only many more accounts of inappropriate content, in Facebook posts, newsgroup threads, and other newspapers, but also disturbing accounts of their effects. Previously happy and well-adjusted children became frightened of the dark, prone to fits of crying, or displayed violent behaviour and talked about self-harm – all classic symptoms of abuse. But despite these reports, YouTube and its parent company, Google, had done little to address them. Moreover, there seemed to be little understanding of where these videos were coming from, how they were produced – or even why they existed in the first place.

For adults, it’s the sheer weirdness of many of the videos that seems almost more disturbing than their violence. This is the part that’s harder to explain – and harder for people to understand – if you don’t immerse yourself in the videos, which I’d hardly recommend. Beyond the simple knock-offs and the provocations exists an entire class of nonsensical, algorithm-generated content; millions and millions of videos that serve merely to attract views and produce income, cobbled together from nursery rhymes, toy reviews, and cultural misunderstandings. Some seem to be the product of random title generators, others – so many others – involve real humans, including young children, distributed across the globe, acting out endlessly the insane demands of YouTube’s recommendation algorithms, even if it makes no sense, even if you have to debase yourself utterly to do it.I’m a writer and artist, with a focus on the broad cultural and societal effects of new technologies, and this is how most of my obsessions start: getting increasingly curious about something and digging deeper, with an eye for concealed infrastructures and hidden processes. It’s an approach that has previously led me to investigate Britain’s system of deportation flights or its sophisticated road surveillance network, and this time it took me into the weird, surreal, and often disturbing hinterland of YouTube’s children’s videos. And these videos are worrying on several levels. As I spent more and more time with them, I became perturbed not just by their content, but by the way the system itself seemed to reproduce and exacerbate their most unsavoury excesses, preying on children’s worst fears and bundling them up into nightmare playlists, while blindly rewarding their creators for increasing their view counts even as the videos themselves descended into meaningless parodies and nonsensical stories.

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 A scene from Minnie Mouse Choked Pizza for Eating Too Much. Photograph: YouTube

When I wrote an essay about the videos online, the public reaction largely mirrored my own. On the one hand, people were horrified to find out that these videos existed, and on the other, completely weirded out by the sheer scale and strangeness of what they found. The combination sent the article viral: it was shared and read online millions of times, picked up by websites and newspapers around the world, and even resulted in questions being asked in the European parliament. Finally, YouTube started to respond, although its efforts, and the results, have been mixed.

As a result, while many videos have since been removed from the website, uncountable numbers still remain. In March, Wiredcatalogued a slew of violent accounts and demonstrated that it was possible to go from a popular children’s alphabet video to a Minnie Mouse snuff film in 14 steps, just by following YouTube’s own recommendations. As of last week, Googling the title of one of the now-removed videos mentioned in the New York Times article (“PAW Patrol Babies Pretend to Die Suicide by Annabelle Hypnotized”) results in a link to a near-identical video still hosted on the site (“PAW PATROL Babies Pretend To Die MONSTER HANDS From MIRROR! Paw Patrol Animation Pups Save For Kids”), in which the adorable pups don a freakish clip-art monster mask to terrify one another before being lured off a rooftop by a haunted doll. Is “Save For Kids” supposed to read “Safe For Kids”? Either way, it is not, and it’s obvious that just playing whack-a-mole with search terms and banned accounts is never going to solve entangled problems of copyright infringement, algorithmic recommendation, and ad-driven monetary incentives on a billion-view platform with no meaningful human oversight.YouTube’s initial proposal was to restrict advertising on disturbing content aimed at children – but its proposals failed to engage honestly with its own platform. It’s estimated that 400 hours of content are uploaded to the site every minute. Policing it by hand is impossible; instead, YouTube relies on flagging by viewers to drive official review – which is hardly suitable when the first people to view this stuff are small children, and the damage is already done. YouTube has also touted the technological cure-all of machine learning as its preferred solution – but in April, it finally agreed that the dedicated YouTube Kids app would switch to entirely human moderation, effectively admitting that the approach didn’t work.

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 YouTuber Elle Mills, who has posted footage of herself mid-anxiety attack Photograph: YouTube Elle Mills

Take YouTube’s recommendation system for starters, which doesn’t differentiate between Disney movies and a grainy animation cooked up by a bot farm in China. Essentially what the seemingly benign “if you like that, you’ll like this” mechanism is doing is training young children – practically from birth – to click on the first thing that comes along, regardless of the source. This is the same mechanism that sees Facebook slide fake political ads and conspiracy theories into the feeds of millions of disaffected voters, and the outcome – ever more extreme content and divided viewpoints – is much the same. Add the sheer impossibility of working out where these videos come from (most are anonymous accounts with thousands of barely differentiated uploads) and the viewer is adrift in a sea of existential uncertainty, which starts to feel worryingly familiar in a world where opaque and unaccountable systems increasingly control critical aspects of our everyday lives.Whether these videos are deliberately malicious, “merely” trolling, or the emergent effect of complex systems, isn’t the point. What’s new is that the system in which such violence proliferates is right in front of us, and visibly complicit, if we choose to see it for what it is. I titled that original essay “Something is wrong on the internet” because it seemed and still seems to me that the issues made glaringly obvious by the scandal are not limited to children’s content, nor to YouTube. First among these is how systems of algorithmic governance, rather than leading us towards the sunny uplands of equality and empowerment, continually re-enact and reinforce our existing prejudices, while oppressing those with the least understanding of, and thus power over, the systems they’re enmeshed in.

We’ve seen how computer programs designed to provide balanced sentencing recommendations in US courts were more prone to mistakenly label black defendants as likely to reoffend – wrongly flagging them at almost twice the rate as that for white people (45% to 24%). We’ve seen how algorithmic systems target men over women for prestigious employment positions: in one study, Google’s ad system showed the highest-paying jobs 1,852 times to men — but just 318 times to a female group with the same preferences. And we’ve also seen how hard it is to appeal against these systems. When the Australian government instituted “robo-debt”, an automated debt-recovery programme, it wrongly and illegally penalised the most vulnerable in society, who had no recourse to support or advice to challenge the system.

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 ‘The sheer weirdness of many of the YouTube videos seems almost more disturbing than their violence.’

In the months since first writing about YouTube’s weird video problem, I’ve met a few people from the company, as well as from other platforms that have been caught up in similar vortices. While most are well-meaning, few seem to have much of a grasp of the wider structural issues in society which their systems both profit from and exacerbate. Like most people who work at big tech companies, they think that these problems can be solved by the application of more technology: by better algorithms, more moderation, heavier engineering. Many outside the tech bubble – particularly in the west and in higher income brackets – are simply appalled that anyone would let their kids use YouTube in the first place. But we won’t fix these issues by blaming the companies, or urging them do better, just as we won’t solve the obesity crisis by demonising fast food but by lifting people out of poverty. If YouTube is bridging a gap in childcare, the answer is more funding for childcare and education in general, not fixing YouTube.            

What’s happening to kids on YouTube, to defendants in algorithmically enhanced court trials, and to poor debtors in Australia, is coming for all of us. All of our jobs, life support systems, and social contracts are vulnerable to automation – which doesn’t have to mean actually being replaced by robots, but merely being at their mercy. YouTube provides another salutary lesson here: only last week it was reported that YouTube’s most successful young stars – the “YouTubers” followed and admired by millions of their peers – are burning out and breaking down en masse. Polygon magazine cited, among many others, the examples of Rubén “El Rubius” Gundersen, the third most popular YouTuber in the world with just under 30 million subscribers, who recently went live to talk to his viewers about fears of an impending breakdown and his decision to take a break from YouTube, and Elle Mills, a popular YouTuber with 1.2 million followers, who posted footage of herself mid-anxiety attack in a video entitled Burn Out at 19.

It would be easy to scoff at these young celebrities, were it not for the fact that their experience is merely the most charismatic example of the kind of algorithmic employment under which many others already labour. The characteristics, after all, are the same: long hours without holidays, benefits, or institutional support, and the pressure to work at the pace of the machine in a system whose goals and mechanisms are unclear and ever-changing, and to which its subjects have no appeal. (In a depressing twist, many of these same YouTubers have been hit by declines in revenue caused directly by YouTube’s attempts to demonetise “inappropriate” content for children – solving one problem in the system only exacerbates others.)

The weirdness of YouTube videos, the extremism of Facebook and Twitter mobs, the latent biases of algorithmic systems: all of these have one thing in common with the internet itself, which is that – with a few dirty exceptions – nobody intentionally designed them this way. This is perhaps the strangest and most salutary lesson we can learn from these examples, if we choose to learn at all. The weirdness and violence they produce seems to be in direct correlation to how little we understand their workings – and how much is hidden from us, deliberately or otherwise, by the demands of efficiency and ease of use, corporate and national secrecy, and sheer, planet-spanning scale. We live in an age characterised by the violence and breakdown of such systems, from global capitalism to the balance of the climate. If there is any hope for those exposed to its excesses from the cradle, it might be that they will be the first generation capable of thinking about global complexity in ways that increase, rather than reduce, the agency of all of us.

James Bridle is the author of New Dark Age, (Verso, £16.99).