#content-moderation

#content-moderation

Rockstar Games has removed a fan-made mission simulating the assassination of Charlie Kirk from its popular online crime sim Grand Theft Auto Online, with the publisher even banning the conservative activist's name to prevent similar missions from appearing. As reported by IGN, developer Rockstar North introduced a new feature in the A Safehouse in the Hills update on December 10, allowing GTA Online players to create and share unofficial missions within the game.

My journey on TikTok Shop started out with a search for "hip hop jewelry." It's an innocuous search query multiple users have likely typed in, hoping to find something to wear. While browsing the cheap jewelry, I was struck by what TikTok's algorithm repeatedly suggested that I might also be interested in: jewelry with blatant Nazi symbolism. TikTok continues to struggle with moderation as its in-app ecommerce store gains traction with younger users.

Shortly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, in 2022, he claimed that "removing child exploitation is priority #1." It was certainly a noble goal-social-media sites had become havens for distributing abusive materials, including child pornography and revenge porn, and there was perhaps no major platform as openly hospitable to such content as Twitter. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, which restricted nudity and pornographic videos, Twitter allowed users to post violent and "consensually produced adult content" to their feeds without consequence.

Malaysia and Indonesia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Elon Musk's company xAI, as concerns grew among global authorities that it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing scrutiny of generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, along with concerns that existing safeguards are failing to prevent their abuse.

If I sound frustrated, it's because, like, honestly, all this thing has done is made our lives more difficult.

I have quite a lot of pressure to remove the BBC from X, he said. By the way, that is not what I'll be doing because we need to be on these platforms. We need to give quality information on to these social media platforms, bring people in. I actually think that's critical, because otherwise the Chinese, the Iranians they're flooding the zone. They're investing very hard. We are in a position where the majority of 16 to 34s come to BBC every week we're still fighting that battle.

It's a sickening law of the internet that the first thing people will try to do with a new tool is strip women. Grok, X's AI chatbot, has been used repeatedly by users in recent days to undress images of women and minors. The news outlet Reuters identified 102 requests in a 10-minute period last Friday from users to get Grok to edit people into bikinis, the majority of these targeting young women. Grok complied with at least 21 of them.

China has proposed strict new rules for artificial intelligence (AI) to provide safeguards for children and prevent chatbots from offering advice that could lead to self-harm or violence. Under the planned regulations, developers will also need to ensure their AI models do not generate content that promotes gambling. The announcement comes after a surge in the number of chatbots being launched in China and around the world. Once finalised, the rules will apply to AI products and services in China, marking a major move to regulate the fast-growing technology, which has come under intense scrutiny over safety concerns this year.

Half of the new TikTok U.S. joint venture will be owned by a consortium of investors among them Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX will each hold a 15% share. Another 30.1% will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors and 19.9% will be retained by the China-based ByteDance, according to the memo. The U.S. venture will have a new, seven-member majority-American board of directors, the memo said.

The most significant change in this revision, I believe, is how Google has explicitly elevated the "status" of review responses. In this update, it's made clear that responses will be reviewed by Google and won't be published if they don't comply with their policies. This revision may signal that review responses are no longer just casual interactions - they've become official information that is not only read by humans but also processed and restructured by AI.

AI-powered toys for young children are flooding online marketplaces, promising to provide young minds with a never-ending supply of bedtime stories and companionship around the clock.

So Reddit will be using an age prediction model to determine user ages, in the hopes that this will ensure that underage users can't log into the app, though kids will still be able to view a non-logged-in version of the platform.

A new report compiled by investigators at Lady Freethinker, Scrolling Through Cruelty, reveals thousands of disturbing videos circulating openly on major social media platforms, where animals are tortured and killed, forced into staged rescues, pitted against one another in fights, and even sexually abused - all for views, clicks, and profit. Collectively, these videos racked up an astonishing 1 billion+ views. The most common animal cruelty content documented was monkey torture, animal fighting, and fake rescues, where animals are deliberately put into dangerous situations so perpetrators can film dramatic "rescues."

The European Union has imposed a €120m (£105m) penalty on X, marking the first sanction under the bloc's Digital Services Act for content-moderation breaches. The Commission said that X misled users with its paid "blue tick" verification, blocked researchers from accessing platform data, and failed to set up a proper advertising repository. Despite early speculation that regulators might go after Elon Musk's broader business empire, the fine was calculated without taking into account his estimated USD$467bn (£352.7bn) fortune.

Five years on, the Board has made important strides for Meta's global users, bringing transparency, reasoning and a human rights perspective to decisions that were long made behind closed doors, and with little or no public-facing rationale. The model we have built brings experts from around the globe to independently review sensitive content decisions on Meta platforms with input from the public and civil society.

In a chaotic and distressing year, books provided a respite, a chance to commune with works of coherent voice and vision. Some people find it harder to read during days overflowing with one-minute distractions and incessant notifications, but when I took the time, I was rewarded with a slightly bigger foothold in a world of decency, humanity, patience, and compassion. Here are 10 good reasons to give that a try.

Horses, a disturbing indie horror game, was set to launch yesterday on several digital storefronts, but in the past week, many of those retailers have refused to list it, including Steam, the Epic Games Store, and most recently, the Humble Store. It's a move that has sparked controversy online, with many decrying it as unjust censorship of the game's adult themes.

While I'm not proud to say it, I do occasionally scroll TikTok to kill a few brain cells and a few minutes in my day. My partner also sends me TikToks which she says is her love language, which I in turn use to justify the habit. But these days I'm seeing a trend, there is a stark increase in comments trying to figure out whether a video is AI.