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Meta AI logo is seen in this illustration taken September 28, 2023
AI labels are coming to Instagram and Facebook. Will they work?
Sir Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, announced Tuesday their platforms would begin labeling AI-generated images.
Meta is working with AI image generators like Midjourney and Shutterstock to add metadata to images that have been created by artificial intelligence, which will then automatically trigger a label when posted. Clegg framed it as a crucial safety measure and said the company would build the technology over the next year.
There are some drawbacks. First, the technology won’t work on video or audio yet, but Clegg says Meta will take down any unlabelled AI-generated clip that “creates a particularly high risk of materially deceiving the public on a matter of importance.”
Second, even still images may be able to get around Meta’s detector by doing something as simple as processing it through photo editing software to generate new metadata, according to experts.
And as far as AI-generated text, Clegg says it would be pointless to try to identify and label it all. “That ship has sailed,” he told Reuters.
Elon Musk claims he's lifting weights to prepare to fight Mark Zuckerberg.
What We’re Ignoring: Revenge of the nerds
There’s growing evidence that the much-ballyhooed mixed martial arts battle between X-Man Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg may actually take place.
Musk first posted that he would be up for a cage match against Zuckerberg in June. Since then, the two moguls have traded multiple barbs on the topic. Now Zuckerberg, who trains in jiu jitsu, has shared a screenshot of a conversation with his wife Priscilla Chan in which he crows about installing a training cage in their backyard. (Her response: “I have been working on that grass for two years.”)
Not to be outdone, Musk posted to X that he is preparing for the fight by “lifting weights throughout the day,” and that the "Zuck v Musk fight will be live-streamed on X. All proceeds will go to charity for veterans.”
Zuckerberg says he is "not holding his breath" because he offered a date of Aug. 26 but didn't hear back. No word yet on whether Threads will attempt a rival broadcast. Stay tuned. Or don’t.
NATO membership for Ukraine?
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
Sweden will join NATO. Is Ukraine next?
Well, sure, but next doesn't mean tomorrow. Next means like at some indeterminate point, which makes President Zelensky pretty unhappy and he's made that clear, but he has massive amounts of support from NATO right now, and he needs that support to continue. So, it's not like he has a lot of leverage on joining NATO. As long as the Americans are saying it's not going to happen, that means it's not going to happen. No, the real issue is how much and how concrete the multilateral security guarantees that can be provided by NATO to Ukraine actually turn out to be. We will be watching that space.
Is Taiwan readying itself for an invasion by conducting its biggest evacuation drills in years?
I wouldn't say readying for an invasion. I would say, you know, sort of preparing for every contingency, and that means taking care of your people. I mean, the Americans weren't readying themselves for nuclear Armageddon by doing drills in classrooms and by, you know, having bomb shelters, but they had them because we were in a world where nuclear war was thinkable. Well, we're in a world where Chinese, mainland Chinese invasion of Taiwan is very unlikely, but thinkable. And of course, the Taiwanese have to think about it a lot more than you and I do.
Elon vs. Zuck. Thoughts?
Well, my thoughts are mostly about the battle of the social media platforms and the fact that of course you now have the big gorilla in the room with a Twitter competitor. And I've seen it pretty functional for the first several days. Obviously, massive numbers of people are on it, mostly because it's really easy to sign up. They're all coming over from Instagram and it's owned by the same person, by the same shareholders. Unclear to me who's going to win. If I had to bet, I would say that within 6 or 12 months, we're going to have a fragmented social media landscape politically, the way we do blogosphere or cable news, which is, I guess, good for consumer choice, but it's bad for civil society. What else is new?
Threads, Twitter, & the 2024 US election
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics.
Hi, I'm Jon Lieber, and this is US Politics in (a little over) 60 Seconds.
Meta last week announced the launch of Threads, a direct competitor to Twitter that reportedly already has reached a hundred million signups, a huge number in just a week. This long-awaited move by. One of the kings of social media could dramatically alter the media environment heading into the 2024 election.
Twitter is enormously popular and important in the political and media world in the US, but has increasingly become a source of consternation and stress for highly engaged political users, particularly those on the left, after the takeover of the platform by Elon Musk, who has pursued what has looked at times like a bizarre and at least partially ideological strategy to upend Twitter's content moderation rules, and in his personal feed, highlighted tweets that troll liberals and promote conspiracy theories. Other competitors to Twitter, like Mastodon or Bluesky, have not achieved mass reach necessary to pose a serious threat to Twitter's dominance of the online media ecosystem, while others like Truth Social remain niche corners of the Internet.
Other outlets like Telegram have grown in importance, but do not provide the open platform of the more dominant social media apps. All of these trends point to the increased atomization of the media landscape globally. In the last 50 years, the US has moved from three dominant national broadcast news networks to a patchwork of increasingly fragmented social media sites with very little gatekeeping and strong, and in some cases partisan, ideological communities.
The launch of a viable competitor to Twitter will accelerate this trend. Meta's content moderation will build off what is learned from managing Instagram and Facebook. This could make it more than just a convening site for people interested in talking about sports and politics, and instead give it a unique appeal for political liberals in the US who don't like where Twitter is going.
That's not to say that conservatives won't be found there too. Even in the height of their concerns about Twitter censoring conservative speech, major conservative figures and writers did quite well on the platform, expanding their reach even as they said they were being stifled. A more fractured online information environment will be even more difficult to moderate than a unified one and provides more avenues for echo chambers and allow politicians to more aggressively micro-target their messages and could render it much more difficult to restrict the spread of disinformation in the 2024 election, especially if Twitter and Threads become the domains of the political right and left, respectively, and if their corporate owners pursue different content moderation policies.
We'd also expect campaigns to start taking advantage of this fractured media landscape, as they have already, targeting different messages to the different audiences on their different channels, making it much more difficult to see what's actually happening on these campaigns as their messages go to increasingly smaller corners of the Internet.
Thanks for watching. This has been US Politics in (a little over) 60 Seconds.