Poking the bear

Right problem, wrong solution? The WEF put this out, so immediately it’s suspect in the minds of many, but let’s entertain the proposal, nonetheless. Online abuse is a real problem and occurs constantly. Someone has proposed a way to help fight it. Here’s an excerpt from the article entitled: The solution to online abuse? AI plus human intelligence “The ‘Trust & Safety’ intelligent solution to detect online abuse While AI provides speed and scale and human moderators provide precision, their combined efforts are still not enough to proactively detect harm before it reaches platforms. To achieve proactivity, trust and safety teams must understand that abusive content doesn’t start and stop on their platforms. Before reaching mainstream platforms, threat actors congregate in the darkest corners of the web to define new keywords, share URLs to resources and discuss new dissemination tactics at length. These secret places where terrorists, hate groups, child predators and disinformation agents freely communicate can provide a trove of information for teams seeking to keep their users safe. The problem is that accessing this information is in no way scalable. Classic intelligence collection requires deep research, expertise, access and a fair amount of assimilation skills – human capacities that cannot be mimicked by a machine.” – Inbal Goldberger via WEForum.org So, what’s the problem with that? The problem is that who gets to decide what is “harmful”? Who would be the subject matter experts mentioned in this scheme? The same people who decide what is racist, homophobic, or Islamophobic? The same people who censored any information that questioned any the CDC’s or WHO’s recommendation on fighting COVID? Will adding AI add impartiality into the system, or simply amplify the agendas of those who control it? Last week, President's Trump's home, Mar a Lago was searched by the FBI looking for classified documents. Why did the FBI execute a search warrant instead of just subpoenaing the documents in question? Did the Biden Administration have a secondary motive, like provoking the Republican base? We who support Trump and/or the conservative cause must be careful not to be goaded into an emotional response. There is a time and place for those angered by the raid on Trump's home, that time is November, and the place is the ballot box. The Democrats will do anything to marginalize and demonize Trump and his supporters. We must not be baited into acting as they would, as demonstrated during the summer of 2020.