US immigration enforcement used an AI-powered tool to scan social media posts "derogatory" to the US
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The system, called Giant Oak Search Technology (GOST), ranks a person's social media scores from one to 100 based on what it thinks is relevant to the...

US immigration enforcement used an AI-powered tool to scan social media posts “derogatory” to the US | “The government should not be using algorithms to scrutinize our social media posts”::undefined

  • ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.worldEnglish
    606·
    1 year ago

    At the same time, whenever there is a mass shooting where the killer posted their intent online, people always say “why weren’t the authorities paying attention”.

    • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      201·
      1 year ago

      The problem is false positive and negative rates.

      We’re on track for some 600-700 mass shooters this year.

      The US has 300 million social media users.

      So in a given year, 0.00023% of social media users will turn out to be mass shooters.

      So even if we had an algorithm that was 99.99% accurate at identifying a potential mass shooter from social media, we’d still have a less than 1% chance of correctly identifying a mass shooter from social media posts.

      So what’s the cost of false positives? Do people flagged by such a system get harassed by law enforcement? If they are sovereign citizen type gun nuts or paranoid schizophrenics, does the additional law enforcement attention potentially instigate shootings or standoffs that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred at a higher rate than the successful prevention of mass shootings?

      And what’s the false negative rate? Because if only a small number of mass shooters are correctly identified by such an algorithm at a high rate of false positives but a majority of shooters actually slip through the cracks as false negatives, there too is the potential for overreliance on an algorithm to harm progress towards alternative solutions (such as advancing legislation banning firearm possession for people with mental health issues).

      AI analysis of social media combined with other data sources becomes a more appropriate tool in a situation like “we have three suspects based on multiple other factors for who is an active shooter - did any of the three have a recent stressor in their life such as a job loss?” In that case an 80% correct model could be quite helpful.

    • Dave.@aussie.zoneEnglish
      191·
      1 year ago

      I kind of feel that trawling social media looking for the words of potential mass shooters isn’t going to be the thing that solves - or even slows down - the mass shooting problem that the USA has.

      • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        61·
        1 year ago

        I think there is a huge difference between just scanning publicly available text posted to social media in general rather than immigration focus. A lot of these shooters post very public manifestoesque type comments, friends and families have even called the police in some cases and they take no action. It feels like the police actively ignore this stuff just to be able to shrug and protect 2a.

        A number of these could have easily been stopped.

        • Dave.@aussie.zoneEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          friends and families have even called the police in some cases and they take no action. It feels like the police actively ignore this stuff

          I’m going to be a little glib here : Just fix this part and you won’t need to scan social media posts.

          Also, once this is in place you’ll find that the majority of perpetrators - the ones who plan things out - won’t post super incriminating things beforehand and their generally-disturbed posts will be lost in the sea of general discontent flagged by an algorithm trying to sift the wheat from the chaff.

  • sunbytes@lemmy.worldEnglish
    321·
    1 year ago

    I for one welcome… blah blah

    Yeah this is scary and honestly why I’m super careful what I put online. Well, mostly.

    There are professional social media checkers who will find your hidden/locked social media (and Reddit etc).

    They get hired by recruitment agencies or companies who are hiring.

    And on the surface it could be to check no one is a secret nazi/chauvanist etc

    But I bet there’s secondary data about political leanings or how “appropriate” your friends are.

    Or if you’re willing to be a part of the old boy’s club (coke and strippers is fine for execs, but you can’t have a nephew who is in a labor union etc).

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      1 year ago

      Yep. The CCP’s social credit system was always going to be the end game of surveillance capitalism. It will be spearheaded by conservatives because they’re the most religious, authoritarian, and have an innate desire to restrict social progress and enforce their views on everyone else.

      The best part is they’ll claim it’s completely different and represents Freedom™️ because it’ll be established by capitalism… Even though it’s functionally identical, the CCP are more capitalist than communist, and western conservatives jizz their pants at the level of power and control the CCP have over the Chinese people.

      • pdxfed@lemmy.worldEnglish
        61·
        1 year ago

        Your HR are morons.

        The general thought or claim for companies that do or permit this is that they’re performing some sort of due diligence or that it increases their knowledge of the candidate. The problem is that even if they tried to be objective it’s easy for a candidate to claim discrimination, even if it’s not discriminatory on it’s face. Why?

        When you get asked questions in a job interview or on a screening form, it’s very easy to control that these questions and the implied related decisions are related to the job, work and just that. The screening questions for protected classes you see (are you a vet, disabled, what is your sex, ethnic background, etc.) are almost exclusively stored for reporting purposes and not even accessible during the hiring process, which is a good thing for reducing bias. Outside of a candidate volunteering “I’m Hindu” in an interview, the hiring team and/or HR for the most part would have no way to be exposed to lots of personal information about the candidate.

        Enter social media. If you work for a company and click on an applicant’s social media profile and see them sacrificing a goat with a group of people and are scared or disturbed and change course in the hiring process, guess what, you just likely discriminated on the basis of religion. Picture of them partying and drinking with friends, don’t look responsible. Guess what they were at a club specific to their sexual orientation or identity and you just screwed your company. The key point in these examples is that even if you didn’t consider a post or image in your decision, it’s difficult to prove, and social media is an entire library of potential biased or protected classes.

        Every piece of data available has shown that humans are unable to control biases in the interview process. Allowing or endorsing social media screening for companies is not only a terrible liability, but it’s not going to be effective as your humans are going to fall victim to the same biases they normally do and make the same mediocre decisions they currently do.

        If you’re interested in this topic or Human Resources related subjects, take a look at [email protected] (https://lemmy.world/c/ask_hr )

  • markr@lemmy.worldEnglish
    277·
    1 year ago

    The government should not be scrutinizing anyone’s social media outside of a criminal investigation with a warrant.

      • redwall_hp@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        There’s a world of difference between witnessing something in public and following someone around, making note of everything they say and do “in public.” We call the latter “stalking” when an individual does it.

        • Zak@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          If I click your username, I see everthing this account has posted to Lemmy. There’s no real-world equivalent to that.

          Nearly everyone using Lemmy knows that’s how the software works and should keep that in mind when posting.

        • jimbolauski@lemmy.worldEnglish
          33·
          1 year ago

          Looking at someone’s post history != following a person around.

          Further following someone around is not stalking there has to be an action that would make someone fear being harmed.

    • Darkenfolk@dormi.zoneEnglish
      93·
      1 year ago

      On the other hand, if you don’t want to be scrutinized by everyone don’t put your whole life online for everyone to see and judge.

      Nobody is going to respect your privacy if you do not respect your own privacy.

    • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      72·
      1 year ago

      Hahahaha.

      ‘Warrant’ for public data.

      “A regular 4th amendment violation right here! Everyone look - the government is looking at my Instagram without a warrant!”

      Please. At this point the NSA has probably already developed their own internal LLM based on illegally collected communications intercepts combined with many other data sources and is using that to aid in parallel construction efforts.

      But no, let’s worry about whether what you post on Instagram should need a warrant, because somehow you have an expectation of privacy for the things you publicly post on the Internet…

      Lemmy is hilarious sometimes.

      Fun fact: The US government is allowed to read any emails in cloud storage older than 6 months old without a warrant.

      • Adalast@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        1 year ago

        The issue I see is less a 4th amendment than a 1st. Any “derogatory” language has long since been upheld as protected, so any action they took based on the information would 100% be illegal. Yes, the CIA/NSA has actually stated that they love social media because we are all just surveilling ourselves for them. That is them, not ICE. ICE has no business tracking people’s social media.

        • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Technically until they have successfully immigrated there’s limited first amendment rights.

          As the supreme court has found over and over, given there is no inherent legal right to enter the country, there is no infringement of rights to discriminate who can and can’t enter based on political speech. For prior cases if you are interested, see:

          • Exclusion of a British anarchist was at issue in Turner v. Williams (1904).
          • Harisiades v. Shaughnessy (1952) concerned deportation of communists.
          • Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972) examined denial of a travel visa to a Marxist.

          So while ethically you may feel it’s an infringement of the principles of the first amendment, it is not currently seen that way legally and hasn’t for a long while.

  • qooqie@lemmy.worldEnglish
    111·
    1 year ago

    Oh so only the exact thing we’ve criticized China for? Are we going to start taking people’s passports as they’re exiting the country to detain them for months for slander now?

  • Substance_P@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    When I travel I generally delete all my social media apps off my phone and leave my laptop at home, this seems drastic and I actually think it’s more trouble than it’s worth to be honest. I have no past history of crimes, my politics are left leaning but I’m naturally curious about all branches of political leanings, religions and philosophies among other things. Oddly I have recently gotten off telegram and my instances of being questioned by the CBP (for no reason at all) have virtually stopped.

    • kungen@feddit.nuEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      I have recently gotten off telegram and my instances of being questioned by the CBP (for no reason at all) have virtually stopped.

      What kind of questions did you usually get? And did you have “who can find me by my number” set to “everybody”? Because the CBP gets your telephone number in different ways (most likely ESTA if you’re using that), and then they can easily see your Telegram account.

      I have Telegram and travel often, and I have never gotten any weird questioning from CBP other than the normal “what are you doing here and when are you heading back”. Then again, no one can find my account via telephone number…

      • Substance_P@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Even though I am pretty privacy conscious the community that I live in has decided to get off WhatsApp, I did have my number associated with my account for the reasons of local communication. So yeah you are right that this was my fault to an extent.

        Questions have mostly been similar to what you mentioned, although often said in ways to try to evoke answers that could prove their unfounded suspicions of some sort, but it was the temporary retention of my passport and been taken to a separate room that got tedious, especially when I was trying to make a connecting flight.

  • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    I, for one, will continue to call Seppos Seppos as I won’t be dealing with ICE anyway as who would want to visit, or move to, a country that habitually fascist. There, was that derogatory enough.

  • pete_the_cat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    And I just saw an article yesterday stating that the government is creating a whole department to manage the impact of AI and how it is used.