Apple Magazine - USA - Issue 409 (2019-08-30)

(Antfer) #1

Protests from tech employees, many of them
highly paid engineers, have sometimes boiled
over into dramatic actions like the global
walkout and street demonstrations by Google
employees last November. In that case, the
company responded by changing the way it
investigates misconduct claims and simplifying
the complaint process.


Then there are also the scandals surrounding
lax data privacy and rampant foreign influence,
which have consumed much of Washington’s
attention since the 2016 election.


A massive Russian influence campaign used
phony Facebook and other social media
postings, seeking to sow discord among the
millions of Americans who viewed them. Under
pressure from lawmakers, tech companies are
now working to devise protections against
“deepfake” bogus but realistic-seeming videos
and other online manipulations that could be
used to influence the 2020 election.


Called before Congress, executives from
Facebook, Twitter and Google have detailed
their policies: livestreaming banned for those
who have violated rules, accounts suspended
for breaches related to promoting terrorism,
deceptive conduct prohibited in search, news
and video.


“Our efforts include deploying multiple teams
that identify and take action against malicious
actors,” Derek Slater, Google’s director of
information policy, told lawmakers at a House
hearing. “At the same time, we have to be
mindful that our platforms reflect a broad
array of sources and information, and there
are important free-speech considerations.

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