China's social credit system is coming to America

State lawmakers are considering regulation barring all California law enforcement officers from running facial recognition programs on body cameras. Other Bay Area cities such as Berkeley and Oakland are considering following San Francisco’s lead in banning all applications for local police. And federal legislators — from both sides of the aisle — are holding hearings on Capitol Hill to examine how federal agencies are using the technology, and whether it deserves more scrutiny and stricter controls.

Taken together, these efforts, pushed by activists and politicians from the tech industry’s home base in the Bay Area, constitute something not often seen in Silicon Valley: an attempt to impose preemptive regulations on a rapidly developing technology.

The chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee announced Monday that the panel will hold a hearing next month on Facebook’s plan to develop a cryptocurrency-based payments platform.

The Financial Services Committee will hold a hearing on Facebook’s Project Libra on July 17, Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) announced Monday afternoon. The Senate Banking Committee will hold its own hearing on the social media giant’s crypto project the previous day.

So far, Facebook has cooperated with French justice on matters related to terrorist attacks and violent acts by transferring the IP addresses and other identification data of suspected individuals to French judges who formally demanded it.

Following a meeting between Nick Clegg, Facebook’s head of global affairs, and O last week, the social media company has extended this cooperation to hate speech.

“Just because it is difficult to regulate the internet doesn’t mean policy makers should jump to the alternative of wishing these companies away,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s head of global affairs, said in a speech on Monday in Berlin. […]

“The internet does need competition and it does need regulation … we want to work with governments and policymakers to design the sort of smart regulation that fosters competition, encourages innovation and protects consumers,” Clegg said.

Model Gigi Hadid believes she should be able to post paparazzi pictures on her Instagram account because her participation in their photos — from posing to choosing her outfit — invalidates a photographer’s ownership claims.

In a copyright infringement lawsuit filed in January this year, an agency, Xclusive-Lee, alleges that Hadid posted one of its images to her Instagram, which it claims violates the company’s copyright. In a motion to dismiss filed earlier this month, as well as a supporting memorandum, Hadid’s legal team asserts that her posting the image constituted fair use because she contributed to the photo in the form of a smile and her outfit.

While Microsoft pitches itself as an inclusive and progressive company — especially during Pride Month, with tweets and donations to LGBTQ+ causes — employees who have donated to the PAC say they have no control over which candidates are being supported, meaning that they have no say when the PAC financially supports candidates whose views the employees don’t want to support. Microsoft employees who spoke to OneZero — on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals — say that the PAC doesn’t ask employees for input or supply avenues to suggest or control which candidates should be supported.

“Candidates that we dislike are those that advance policies contrary to the company’s stated policies of diversity, inclusion, and growth mindset,” one employee, who said they had persuaded about 10 others to stop donating to the PAC, told OneZero.

If people do start stuffing their new digital wallets with Libra, it might not take years for Facebook to turn that activity into revenue. Marcus believes the new wallets could have a more immediate financial impact on a business line Facebook knows well: Targeted advertising. If users have Libra on hand as they scroll through Facebook’s News Feed, when they click on an ad it will be easier to buy something. That would make Facebook ads more appealing to marketers. 

Influencers skirt the rules and restrictions platforms impose on official businesses that want to advertise guns or gun-related services and accessories. This makes gun influencers more directly, tangibly important to the businesses they partner with than perhaps any other type of influencer in the bloated influencer economy. They may, in fact, be the only influencers who have proof of their reason to exist.

There are dozens of women (it is mostly women who are gun influencers) making partial or complete livings off Instagram grids full of guns and perfect smiles. Some of them are hunters, some of them are veterans, some participate in professional shooting sports, some also swing-dance, some play soccer. Some look really good in a pair of camouflage overalls or a red, white, and blue onesie or wearing almost nothing, and all of them have come up with their own rules about how best to monetize these physical realities.

Without any such intervention or effective policies in place, deepfake porn has carved out a comfortable space online — and it’s thriving. In addition to free, easy-to-use deepfake generator apps, there are now photo search engines (which HuffPost won’t name) that allow people to upload pictures of individuals to find porn actresses with similar features for optimal face-swapping results. There are even deepfake porn forums where men make paid requests for professional-looking videos of specific women, and share links to the women’s social media profiles for source imagery. HuffPost has observed requesters seeking porn with female Twitch, YouTube and Instagram influencers, as well as the requesters’ own co-workers, friends and exes.

Linkedin will today announce algorithm changes made over the past 12-18 months to favor conversations in its Feed that cater to niche professional interests, as opposed to elevating viral content, its executives tell Axios.

The big picture: News feeds that were fundamentally built to connect one voice to many are struggling to deliver on value as communication trends move to more personal and ephemeral conversations.

We already require that advertisers get authorized and add disclaimers to these ads in over 50 countries and territories, and now we’re expanding proactive enforcement on these ads to countries where elections or regulations are approaching, starting with Ukraine, Singapore, Canada and Argentina. Beginning today, we will systematically detect and review ads in Ukraine and Canada through a combination of automated and human review. In Singapore and Argentina, we will begin enforcement within the next few months. We also plan to roll out the Ad Library Report in both of those countries after enforcement is in place.

Facebook has been testing these options with moderators at its Phoenix and Essen, Germany, contract moderation sites. Moderators can also view video or images in grayscale, or stop the videos from auto-playing.

In some cases, moderators can make the determination of whether the content satisfies or breaches the Facebook content policies by viewing only the text, while leaving the images blurred out, says Chris Harrison, a psychologist and member of Facebook’s global resiliency team.

“It’s related to the work we’re doing with the well-being team. We’re thinking about how people spend their time in the app and making sure that it’s time well spent” a Facebook spokesperson tells me. Many people can’t feel settled if there are red dots begging to be tapped — a psychological quirk Facebook takes advantage of. The company seems to be realizing that its growth hacking can backfire if its pleas for engagement actually deter us from opening its app in the first place.

This update opens up a new world of location-based group chats for anything from conferences, to festivals, to stadiums, to campuses, to chatting with people hanging out in the same cafe.

Libra is already widely known as a Facebook initiative. Unless the consumer benefits are truly extraordinary, that may be enough to prevent Libra from ever gaining escape velocity. This applies even more to the Calibra wallet: Facebook promises not to mix transaction data with profile data, but that entails, well, trust that Facebook may have already lost.

Still, that doesn’t mean digital currencies will never make it: I do think that Libra gets closer to a workable balance between trust and efficiency than Bitcoin, at least when it comes to being usable for transactions and not simply a store of value; the question is who can actually get such a currency off the ground

“I think the biggest surprise people would have about Brand Twitter is learning that there are real people behind the accounts, reading the terrible shit you send, day in and day out,” Amy Brown says. “I can’t speak for other people working in this field, but when I was at Wendy’s, I regularly had to talk to my therapist about the replies I would read on our social channels. When you already have depression and you read enough times that you deserve to die, you start to really believe it. And the platforms care about abuse directed at a brand’s social-media manager(s) about as much as they care about abuse directed at an individual user. They’ve created an entire industry with no protections for the workers within it.”