Misinformation has bedeviled social media companies for years, and the problem is especially consequential during elections. Are the companies up to the job as the 2022 midterm elections approach?
Mobile apps are sometimes ‘regionalized’ to better serve the needs of users, functioning differently in, for example, China than in Canada. But some of those differences pose security and privacy risks.
The Chinese-owned app TikTok continues its growth as one of the most popular social media networks. After pandemic health measures were lifted, other social media networks saw a decline in use.
There’s no evidence that news outlets are worse off because of Google, Facebook and other aggregators. If anything, evidence shows that, overall, news outlets would be in worse shape without them.
A recent extortion scam involved threatening to leave unfavourable reviews to restaurants unless they paid up shows the dangers of relying on the wisdom of crowds.
Searching symptoms online has become so common there is a name for the condition of health anxiety induced by self-diagnosis on the internet: Cyberchondria.
A Google engineer’s claims that a chatbot can feel things has prompted people to consider what consciousness means. It also begs the questions of the rights of sentient software and machines.
Kyle Mahowald, The University of Texas at Austin and Anna A. Ivanova, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Fluent expression is not always evidence of a mind at work, but the human brain is primed to believe so. A pair of cognitive linguistics experts explain why language is not a good test of sentience.
A Google engineer claims one of the company’s chatbots has become sentient. Experts disagree, but the debate raises old questions about the nature of consciousness.