Trade unions and online safety experts have urged MPs to investigate TikTok’s plans to make hundreds of jobs for UK-based content moderators redundant.
The video app company is planning 439 redundancies in its trust and safety team in London, leading to warnings that the jobs losses will have implications for online safety.
"I think this is the worst scam in the world," said Paul Raffile, a sextortion and cybercrime researcher based in Connecticut. "There is no other scam that involves targeting children, coercing them into a sexually compromising situation, exploiting them, blackmailing them. There's no other scams that I think even compare to this."
A new app offering to record your phone calls and pay you for the audio so it can sell the data to AI companies is, unbelievably, the No. 2 app in Apple’s U.S. App Store’s Social Networking section.
The app, Neon Mobile, pitches itself as a moneymaking tool offering “hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year” for access to your audio conversations.
In 2023/24, Department for Education data shows a record 11,614 suspensions were handed to pupils using apps like Instagram, TikTok and Twitter to bully their peers or share inappropriate content.
This marks an increase of over 75% since 2021.
"There's zero evidence of AI consciousness today. But if people just perceive it as conscious, they will believe that perception as reality,"
Related to this is the rise of a new condition called "AI psychosis": a non-clinical term describing incidents where people increasingly rely on AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Grok and then become convinced that something imaginary has become real.
In interviews with 13 content moderators, industry experts and members of anti-extremism organizations, researchers heard that far-right messaging was the most commonly spread, including neo-Nazism, attacks on women, racialized and LGBTQ2S+ communities, and the spread of conspiracy theories like QAnon.
“These gaming-adjacent platforms offer extremists direct access to large, often young and impressionable audiences,” co-author William Allchorn said in a release. “They have become a key tool for extremist recruitment.”
Comments
make a comment