Posts Tagged: Senate

Meta whistleblower tells Senate the company ‘cannot be trusted with our children’

Another Meta whistleblower has testified before Congress regarding safety issues on the company’s platforms. On the same day that Frances Haugen told Congress in 2021 how Meta could fix some of its safety problems, Arturo Béjar, a former director of engineering for Protect and Care at Facebook, sent CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives an email regarding the harms that young people may face while using the company’s products.

Two years later, Béjar was the sole witness in a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing titled “Social Media and the Teen Mental Health Crisis.” In his testimony, Béjar claimed he was subpoenaed earlier this year to testify regarding emails he sent Meta higher-ups. He said he realized that since he sent them, nothing had changed at the company.

“Meta continues to publicly misrepresent the level and frequency of harm that users, especially children, experience on the platform,” Béjar told the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law in prepared remarks. “And they have yet to establish a goal for actually reducing those harms and protecting children. It’s time that the public and parents understand the true level of harm posed by these ‘products’ and it’s time that young users have the tools to report and suppress online abuse.”

Béjar was an engineering director at Meta between 2009 and 2015, during which time he was responsible for protecting Facebook users. He supported a team that worked on “bullying tools for teens, suicide prevention, child safety and other difficult moments that people go through,” according to his LinkedIn profile.

He testified that he initially left Meta feeling “good that we had built numerous systems that made using our products easier and safer.” However, he said that, since they were 14, his daughter and her friends “repeatedly faced unwanted sexual advances, misogyny and harassment” on Instagram. According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on Béjar’s claims, he stated that Meta’s systems typically ignored reports they made or responded to say that the harassment they faced didn’t break the rules.

Those issues prompted him to return to Meta in 2019, where he worked with Instagram’s well-being team. “It was not a good experience. Almost all of the work that I and my colleagues had done during my earlier stint at Facebook through 2015 was gone,” Béjar said in his testimony. “The tools we had built for teenagers to get support when they were getting bullied or harassed were no longer available to them. People at the company had little or no memory of the lessons we had learned earlier.”

Béjar claimed that Instagram and internal research teams gathered data showing that younger teens dealt with “great distress and abuse.” However, “senior management was externally reporting different data that grossly understated the frequency of harm experienced by users,” he told senators.

In a 2021 email to Zuckerberg and other executives laying out some of his concerns, Béjar wrote that his then-16-year-old daughter uploaded a car-related post to Instagram only for a commenter to tell her to “get back to the kitchen.” Béjar said his daughter found this upsetting. “At the same time the comment is far from being policy violating, and our tools of blocking or deleting mean that this person will go to other profiles and continue to spread misogyny,” Béjar wrote. “I don’t think policy/reporting or having more content review are the solutions.”

Béjar said that along with his daughter’s experiences with the app, he cited data from a research team indicating that 13 percent of users aged between 13 and 15 reported that they received unwanted sexual advances on Instagram within the previous seven days. While former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg offered sympathy toward his daughter for her negative experiences and Instagram head Adam Mosseri asked to set up a meeting, according to Béjar, Zuckerberg never responded to the email.

“That was unusual,” Béjar said in his testimony. “It might have happened, but I don’t recall Mark ever not responding to me previously in numerous communications, either by email or by asking for an in-person meeting.”

Béjar told the Associated Press that Meta has to change its approach to moderating its platforms. This, according to Béjar, would require the company to place a greater onus on tackling harassment, unwanted sexual advances and other issues that don’t necessarily break the company’s existing rules.

He noted, for instance, that teens should be able to tell Instagram that they don’t want to receive crude sexual messages, even if those don’t violate the app’s current policies. Béjar claims it would be easy for Meta to implement a feature through which teens could flag sexual advances that were made to them. “I believe that the reason that they’re not doing this is because there’s no transparency about the harms that teenagers are experiencing on Instagram,” he told the BBC.

Béjar laid out several other steps that Meta could take to reduce harm users face on its platform that “do not require significant investments by the platforms in people to review content or in technical infrastructure.” He added that he believes adopting such measures (which primarily focus on improving safety tools and getting more feedback from users who have experienced harm) would not severely impact the revenues of Meta or other companies that adopt them. “These reforms are not designed to punish companies, but to help teenagers,” he told the subcommittee. “And over time, they will create a safer environment.”

“My experience, after sending that email and seeing what happened afterwards, is that they knew, there were things they could do about it, they chose not to do them and we cannot trust them with our children,” Béjar said during the hearing. “It’s time for Congress to act. The evidence, I believe, is overwhelming.”

“Countless people inside and outside of Meta are working on how to help keep young people safe online,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “Working with parents and experts, we have also introduced over 30 tools to support teens and their families in having safe, positive experiences online. All of this work continues.”

Béjar hopes his testimony will help spur Congress to “pass the legislation that they’ve been working on” regarding the online safety of younger users. Two years ago, Haugen disclosed internal Facebook research indicating that Instagram was “harmful for a sizable percentage of teens.” Growing scrutiny led Meta to halt work on a version of Instagram for kids.

Since Haugen’s testimony, Congress has made some efforts to tackle online safety issues for kids, but those have stuttered. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) twice advanced from a Senate committee (in the previous Congress and earlier this year), but it hasn’t reached a floor vote and there’s no companion bill in the House. Among other things, the bill seeks to give kids aged under 16 the ability to switch off “addictive features and algorithm-based recommendations, as well as having more protections for their data. Similar bills have stalled in Congress.

Last month, attorneys general from 41 states and the District of Columbia sued Meta over alleged harms it caused to young users. “Meta designed and deployed harmful and psychologically manipulative product features to induce young users’ compulsive and extended Platform use, while falsely assuring the public that its features were safe and suitable for young users,” according to the lawsuit. Béjar said he consulted with the attorneys general and provided them with documents to help their case.

“I’m very hopeful that your testimony, added to the lawsuit that’s been brought by state attorneys general across the country … added to the interest that I think is evidenced by the turnout of our subcommitee today, will enable us to get the Kids Online Safety Act across the finish line,” subcommittee chair Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) told Béjar. Blumenthal, one of KOSA’s original sponsors, expressed hope that other legislation “that can finally break the straitjacket that Big Tech has imposed on us” will be enacted into law.

Over the last few years and amid the rise of TikTok, Meta has once again been focusing on bringing younger users into its ecosystem, with Zuckerberg stating in 2021 (just a couple of weeks after Haugen’s testimony) that the company would refocus its “teams to make serving young adults their North Star rather than optimizing for the larger number of older people.” Recently, the company lowered the minimum age for using its Meta Quest VR headsets to 10 through the use of parent-controlled accounts.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-whistleblower-tells-senate-the-company-cannot-be-trusted-with-our-children-185616936.html?src=rss

Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics

Senate bill would hold AI companies liable for harmful content

Politicians think they have a way to hold companies accountable for troublesome generative AI: take away their legal protection. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Josh Hawley have introduced a No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act that, as the name suggests, would prevent OpenAI, Google and similar firms from using the Communications Decency Act's Section 230 to waive liability for harmful content and avoid lawsuits. If someone created a deepfake image or sound bite to ruin a reputation, for instance, the tool developer could be held responsible alongside the person who used it.

Hawley characterizes the bill as forcing AI creators to "take responsibility for business decisions" as they're developing products. He also casts the legislation as a "first step" toward creating rules for AI and establishing safety measures. In a hearing this week on AI's effect on human rights, Blumenthal urged Congress to deny AI the broad Section 230 safeguards that have shielded social networks from legal consequences.

In May, Blumenthal and Hawley held a hearing where speakers like OpenAI chief Sam Altman called for the government to act on AI. Industry leaders have already urged a pause on AI experimentation, and more recently compared the threat of unchecked AI to that of nuclear war.

Congress has pushed for Section 230 reforms for years in a bid to rein in tech companies, particularly over concerns that internet giants might knowingly allow hurtful content. A 2021 House bill would have held businesses liable if they knowingly used algorithms that cause emotional or physical harm. These bills have stalled, though, and Section 230 has remained intact. Legislators have had more success in setting age verification requirements that theoretically reduce mental health issues for younger users.

It's not clear this bill stands a greater chance of success. Blumenthal and Hawley are known for introducing online content bills that fail to gain traction, such as the child safety-oriented EARN IT Act and Hawley's anti-addiction SMART Act. On top of persuading fellow senators, they'll need an equivalent House bill that also survives a vote.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/senate-bill-would-hold-ai-companies-liable-for-harmful-content-212340911.html?src=rss
Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics

Bipartisan Senate group reintroduces a revised Kids Online Safety Act

US Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) reintroduced a bill today that would put the onus on social media companies to add online safeguards for children. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) was first introduced last February (sponsored by the same pair) but never made it to the Senate floor after backlash from advocacy groups. The revamped legislation “provides specific tools to stop Big Tech companies from driving toxic content at kids and to hold them accountable for putting profits over safety,” said Blumenthal. It follows a separate bill introduced last month with a similar aim.

Like the original KOSA, the updated bill would require annual independent audits by “experts and academic researchers” to force regulation-averse social media companies to address the online dangers posed to children. However, the updated legislation attempts to address the concerns that led to its previous iteration’s downfall, namely that its overly broad nature could do more harm than good by requiring surveillance and censorship of young users. The EFF described the February 2022 bill as “a heavy-handed plan to force platforms to spy on young people” that “fails to properly distinguish between harmful and non-harmful content, leaving politically motivated state attorneys general with the power to define what harms children. One of the primary fears is that states could use the flimsy definitions to ban content for political gain.”

The rewritten bill adds new protections for services like the National Suicide Hotline, LGBTQ+ youth centers and substance-abuse organizations to avoid being unnecessarily harmed. In addition, it would make social platforms give minors options to safeguard their information, turn off addictive features and opt out of algorithmic recommendations. (Social platforms would have to enable the strongest settings by default.) It would also give parents “new controls to help support their children and identify harmful behaviors” while offering children “a dedicated channel to report harms” on the platform. Additionally, it would specifically ban the promotion of suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation and the use of “unlawful products for minors” like gambling, drugs and alcohol. Finally, it would require social companies to provide “academic and public interest organizations” with data to help them research social media’s effects on the safety and well-being of minors.

The American Psychological Association, Common Sense Media and other advocacy groups support the updated bill. It has 26 cosponsors from both parties, including lawmakers ranging from Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) to Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Blackburn told CNBC today that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is “a hundred percent behind this bill and efforts to protect kids online.”

Despite the Senators’ renewed optimism about passing the bill, some organizations believe it’s still too broad to avoid a negative net impact. “The changes made to the bill do not at all address our concerns,” Evan Greer, director of digital rights advocacy group Fight For the Future, said in an emailed statement to Engadget. “If Senator Blumenthal’s office had been willing to meet with us, we could have explained why. I can see where changes were made that attempt to address the concerns, but they fail to do so. Even with the new changes, this bill will allow extreme right-wing attorneys general to dictate what content platforms can recommend to younger users.”

The ACLU also opposes the resurrected bill. “KOSA’s core approach still threatens the privacy, security and free expression of both minors and adults by deputizing platforms of all stripes to police their users and censor their content under the guise of a ‘duty of care,’” ACLU Senior Policy Counsel Cody Venzke toldCNBC. “To accomplish this, the bill would legitimize platforms’ already pervasive data collection to identify which users are minors when it should be seeking to curb those data abuses. Moreover, parental guidance in minors’ online lives is critical, but KOSA would mandate surveillance tools without regard to minors’ home situations or safety. KOSA would be a step backward in making the internet a safer place for children and minors.”

Blumenthal argues that the bill was “very purposely narrowed” to prevent harm. “I think we’ve met that kind of suggestion very directly and effectively,” he said at a press conference. “Obviously, our door remains open. We’re willing to hear and talk to other kinds of suggestions that are made. And we have talked to many of the groups that had great criticism and a number have actually dropped their opposition, as I think you’ll hear in response to today’s session. So I think our bill is clarified and improved in a way that meets some of the criticism. We’re not going to solve all of the problems of the world with a single bill. But we are making a measurable, very significant start.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/bipartisan-senate-group-reintroduces-a-revised-kids-online-safety-act-212117992.html?src=rss
Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics

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