Tech ethics (Spam Mail #35)

💩 Cool shit

Responsible tech playbook - This week’s articles cover some of the bigger issues in tech today. This playbook is a fantastic guide covering for how to mitigate risk and harms when designing digital products.

YeMessage - Talk to Kanye. In AI chatbot form.

LingYourLanguage - Hear an audio clip and guess the language being spoken.

Spine PS4 Emulator - Exactly what it says.

DeepFaceLive - Real-time face swapping for video calls. This could make Zoom meetings very interesting.

Are You You? - If the last link freaks you out, this one may only make you feel worse. Try and beat facial recognition technology by making funny faces.

The Forest Link - And lastly, use this site to go on a random exploration of the web.

💎 Word gems

The Facebook Files (WSJ / Jeff Horwitz, Georgia Wells, Deepa Seetharaman, Keach Hagey, Justin Scheck, Newley Purnell, Sam Schechner, and Emily Glazer)

Last week, The Wall Street Journal published a stunning 5-part series, exposing how, “Facebook Inc. knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands.”

The investigation includes Facebook exempted VIP members from its moderation rules, knew how toxic Instagram is for teen girls, allowed drug cartels and human trafficking to flourish on their platforms, and more.

Facebook in 2018 didn’t have a protocol for dealing with recruiting posts for domestic servitude. In March 2018, employees found Instagram profiles dedicated to trafficking domestic servants in Saudi Arabia. An internal memo says they were allowed to remain on the site because the company’s policies “did not acknowledge the violation.”

Freedom on the Net 2021: The Global Drive to Control Big Tech (Freedom House)

A new report on how government interventions are eroding our freedoms online. While the Facebook report above shows the importance of tech regulation, this piece reveals the complicated risks that come with it. The future of the web is going to be a tension between a nationalistic splintering internet, and decentralized technologies.

Free expression is under unprecedented strain around the world. In 56 countries, a record 80 percent of those covered by Freedom on the Net, people were arrested or convicted for their online speech. Several governments this year also imposed especially egregious sentences. In December 2020, Iranian authorities executed Ruhollah Zam, who administered the popular Amad News channel on Telegram, after he was accused of inciting protests and being affiliated with foreign intelligence services. In January 2021, a court in Thailand sentenced a former civil servant to 43 years in prison after she was found guilty of violating the country’s draconian lèse-majesté law through her social media posts criticizing the monarchy. And in June 2021, an Egyptian court sentenced online influencers Haneen Hossam and Mawada al-Adham to 6 and 10 years in prison, respectively, for supposedly violating a human trafficking law by sharing TikTok videos that encouraged women to pursue careers on social media platforms.

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