Carbon Chemist

Tag: social

  • The Viral ‘Goodbye Meta AI’ Copypasta Will Not Protect You

    The Viral ‘Goodbye Meta AI’ Copypasta Will Not Protect You

    [ad_1]

    “Goodbye Meta AI” is the most recent Facebook copypasta to go viral online. A chunky wall of text pasted against a hazy orange-yellow gradient background, it’s complete with all the trend’s hallmarks: vague references to the legal system and unilateral declarations of personal protection. It almost feels nostalgic, a blast from the compulsory chain-email past. But, unfortunately, posting an image on Facebook, Instagram, or any social media platform is not how you actually opt out of having your posts be fed to AI models.

    This definitely isn’t the first time a meaningless copypasta has spread on the social media site. More than a decade ago, WIRED covered a popular “copyright hoax” with “pseudo-legalese” blanketing Facebook. It didn’t work then, and it doesn’t work now.

    “Goodbye Meta AI,” which has been shared thousands of times—including, reportedly, in the Instagram Stories of Tom Brady and James McAvoy—has been circulating since early September. Its claim that it can protect your data is blatantly dubious to savvy internet users, but the underlying desire to claw back one’s personal information from tech companies is a sympathetic one. The companies know so many granular details about users’ lives and desires that it can be unsettling. And, in the ongoing wave of generative AI, everything posted online seems vulnerable to being scraped to train the next biggest, baddest AI model.

    Two major red flags that can help you immediately spot a copypasta like this are urgent calls to action and unclear references to legal situations. In this case, the image says “all members must post” to keep their data safe, and it claims to be part of an unnamed attorney’s advice. The 2012 version said, “Anyone reading this can copy this text and paste it on their Facebook Wall.” The decade-old copypasta also included a misspelled reference to a European legal contract.

    “While we don’t currently have an opt-out feature, we’ve built in-platform tools that allow people to delete their personal information from chats with Meta AI across our apps,” says Emil Vazquez, a spokesperson for the company, when reached via email. You can find the steps for that here. He also points out European users can object to personal info being used for AI models—although, as WIRED reported last year, the form to object isn’t going to do much, if anything, for you.

    So, if an errant copypasta doesn’t work, what can you do to avoid having your public words and images be used for Meta’s AI model or that of another AI company? Stop posting online—that’s about it. Apart from walking away and never posting again, there’s not a realistic way for you to avoid the nimble scraper bots as an individual user right now.

    With that in mind, you can take steps to reduce the amount of information publicly available on your social media profiles, for a bit more privacy. Also, downloading old posts for your own records then deleting large swathes of them from the internet isn’t a bad idea. Want to go further? Take a look at this list of websites and apps which allow you to opt out of least an aspect of their AI training practices.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Why Threads is suddenly popular in Taiwan

    Why Threads is suddenly popular in Taiwan

    [ad_1]

    Still, Threads’ popularity plummeted after its launch in July 2023. In Taiwan—like the rest of the world—many users left the platform after satisfying their initial curiosity. 

    But the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election gave it another chance. Wang, who studies social media in Taiwan, traced the platform’s second rise to November of last year, starting with the supporters of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), often associated with the color green. “Many (worried) pan-green supporters noticed that their complaints on politics were promoted to more readers on Threads than any other social media platforms (especially Facebook and Instagram), so more and more pan-green supporters gathered to Threads and used it as a mobilization tool,” he says.

    The election concluded in mid-January, with DPP candidate Lai Ching-te elected as Taiwan’s president. Many supporters of his party stayed on the platform. And as it became influential, other political figures also reactivated their Threads accounts and started posting regularly, trying to join the conversation. Everyday users who are less interested in politics came along too.

    On almost every day of the past three months, Threads has been the most downloaded social network app in both Apple’s and Android’s app stores in Taiwan, according to Sensor Tower, an app store intelligence firm. It surpassed both Western social platforms and those popular in China. 

    What does Taiwan Threads look like?

    Wang, who has been actively posting on Threads and accumulated over 3,000 followers, observes that there are two major demographics among Taiwan’s Threads users today: the pro-green voters, and younger students who are still in middle school and high school. “In recent weeks, there is a considerable amount of discussion on how to choose colleges, majors, and even high schools,” he says.

    Since Threads doesn’t have an official name in Chinese, Taiwanese users have tried to translate it in creative ways. Some stay close to the meaning and call it 串 or chuan, which means a string of beads or other objects (it could also mean a kebab skewer). Others call it 脆 or cui, which means crispy or fragile. It’s a transliteration attempt that many feel is too far-fetched, but since there’s no sound like “th” in Mandarin, it’s the best alternative, and it has already caught on among the users and surpassed other names. 

    What defines the content on Threads is a mix of political and lifestyle posts. On the one hand, some of the most influential accounts are Taiwanese politicians at all levels, including the presidential candidates. On the other, Threads users have embraced a type of content called 廢文—a cross between trash talk and light-stakes monologue. 

    As a result, to gain a following on Threads, the best practice is to mix up the serious and the unserious. One local representative candidate became unexpectedly famous when people discovered that his son was physically attractive. Joking about how this son’s virality has eclipsed his own, the politician now calls himself “The father of the son of Phoenix Cheng” on Threads, where he has over 268,000 followers.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Reddit IPO Filings Reveal the Company’s Hopes—and Fears

    Reddit IPO Filings Reveal the Company’s Hopes—and Fears

    [ad_1]

    The amount of time Reddit reports that users spend with its service hasn’t significantly budged either. In September 2021, the company said that US users on average engaged for 28 minutes a day. It ticked up to 30 minutes that December. In December of 2023, the company specified a figure only for “logged-in” US users, though it clocked in at a similar 25 minutes to 30 minutes per day.

    Other data suggests that the stock of content on Reddit for users to peruse has been roughly constant recently, despite users’ continued activity. Reddit gained 1 billion posts and comments per quarter in 2022, closing the year with 17 billion pieces of content on the platform in total. But that figure fell to 16 billion last September, potentially reflecting improved measurement or the removal of problematic content, before ending up back at 17 billion last December.

    Overseas Struggles

    When US internet companies go public they often claim that luring users from overseas will provide powerful growth. Google and Meta now serve billions of people around the world.

    Reddit’s overseas prospects look less rosy. Even as it pushes into new countries, such as France and Germany, the dominance of English-language content on the platform appears to be growing. Reddit reported that over two-thirds of all posts in late 2021 through 2022 were in English. By the second half of 2023, that grew to over 90 percent of all posts.

    That happened despite Reddit investing in contractors and translators to encourage more content in French, German, and additional languages other than English. One translation project led some Reddit users to think their communities were being run over by spambot rings. Current and former employees say it’s possible that Reddit’s ability to measure non-English content evolved, and that English content hasn’t become more dominant.

    Dependence on Google

    Like for many online businesses, Reddit’s traffic relies in part on referrals from search engines—primarily the dominant player, Google. In early draft filings, Reddit shared figures showing its reliance on search engine traffic falling through 2022, dropping to a low of about one in five users coming via search results.

    That was generally seen as a good sign because it suggested Reddit had a loyal user base and was becoming less dependent on Google. Responding to its search algorithm updates that slashed traffic to Reddit had previously triggered moments of “all hands on deck” crisis at the platform, a former employee says.

    Reddit stopped disclosing figures on search traffic in more recent updates, but there are signs it’s becoming more dependent on Google again. The platform’s IPO filing from last month says that in the second half of 2023, about 75 percent of new users added were not logged in, who “typically come to Reddit via search engines.” Reddit says logged-out users spend less time on the service and are less lucrative. Former employees say that’s because logged-out users tend to visit individual posts and then leave, which usually have fewer ads than news feeds that logged-in users curate and scroll.

    Bringing More Brands Onto Reddit

    After teasing it in an IPO filing last month, the company this month launched Reddit Pro, a free service that provides a dashboard to help businesses understand what’s trending, the audience their posts are reaching, and, of course, pay to boost the reach of their posts.

    Brands such as Taco Bell and the National Football League have been testing Reddit Pro. It’s possible the new service could be a precursor to allowing businesses and organizations to open up communities in their name using the convention b/ or o/ to stand out, some former employees say, as alternatives to Reddit’s longstanding use of r/ to denote different communities.

    [ad_2]

    Source link