Why tech tycoons are ignoring the clear and present dangers of AI
While videos of last weekend’s confrontation between Hui Muslims and police were wiped from Chinese social media sites, they have been making the rounds on the global internet. Authorities in the southwestern Yunnan province had planned to demolish a dome atop the historic Najiaying Mosque in the rural town of Nagu but were blocked by thousands of local residents who formed a protective circle around the mosque. Hundreds of police officers in riot gear surrounded the demonstrators and the standoff went on throughout the weekend. The mosque’s dome was slated for destruction as part of ongoing central government “Sinicization” efforts that are papering over, and in some cases literally destroying, evidence of the influence of other cultures and religions in China, Islam in particular. Domes on mosques are being targeted because of their obvious connection to Arab culture and replaced by architecture intended to appear more traditionally “Chinese” in character.
An estimated 30 people have since been arrested, and sources speaking about the confrontation with CNN said that the internet had been shut down in select neighborhoods around the town. Editors at China Digital Times collected and reposted videos of the standoff before they were censored on Weibo. The videos offer valuable evidence of the government’s crackdown on certain kinds of religious expression, even as China’s constitution guarantees “freedom of religious belief.”
Vietnam is ratcheting up pressure on TikTok to reduce “toxic” content and respond to its censorship demands, lest the platform be banned altogether. To show they mean business, Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communications began an investigation of the company’s approaches to content moderation, algorithmic amplification and user authentication last week. This is especially shaky territory for TikTok. With nearly 50 million users, Vietnam is one of TikTok’s largest markets. And unlike its competitors Meta and Google, TikTok has actually complied with Vietnam’s cybersecurity law and put its offices and servers inside the country. This means that if the local authorities don’t like what they see on the platform, or if they want the company to hand over certain users’ data, they can simply come knocking.
Pegasus, the world’s best-known surveillance software, was used to spy on at least 13 Armenian public officials, journalists, and civil society workers amid the ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory known as Nagorno-Karabakh. A report on the joint investigation by Access Now, Citizen Lab, Amnesty International, CyberHub-AM and technologist Ruben Muradyan asserts that this is “the first documented evidence of the use of Pegasus spyware in an international war context.” While there’s no smoking gun proving that the software, built by Israel-based NSO Group, was being used to aid one side of the conflict or the other, the location and timing of the deployment certainly suggest as much.