This week on Lawfareās Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Alina Polyakova and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Lisa Kaplan and Sophie Lawt
Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 5: 5 Minutes

Janaina Medeiros
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@thedigitalhuman
This week on Lawfareās Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Alina Polyakova and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Lisa Kaplan and Sophie Lawt
Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 5: 5 Minutes

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Hint: Donāt look for an account that tweets like a bot.
Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 5: 5 Minutes
What the heck is TheSoul Publishing, and how did it get tens of of millions of followers on YouTube and Facebook? And what is it doing with
"What the heck is TheSoul Publishing? Iām still honestly not sure.
Hereās what I do know: Measured in terms of views and subscribers, it had the third-largest reach of any group of entertainment channels on YouTube in Novemberāoutranked only by Disney and WarnerMedia. It is run by Russian nationals and based in and managed from Cyprus, with U.S. operations housed in a shared work space in New York. It funds itself with ad revenues from YouTube and Google worth tens of millions of dollars. And in 2018, it purchased a small suite of Facebook advertisements targeting U.S. citizens on political issuesāand it made those purchases in rubles.
Asked detailed written questions about the company, a spokesman for TheSoul Publishing responded with a statement and provided background information, which is reflected throughout.Ā The spokesman stated: āSimply because a company has roots, international offices, and/or diverse global employees outside of the U.S., one should not jump to conclusions or automatically make assumptions that there is a hidden agenda. To be clear, TheSoul Publishing creates fun, non-political oriented content that is enjoyed by an incredible amount of fans globally.ā
Indeed, TheSoul Publishing does create nonpolitical (and apparently lucrative) craft videos, reaching worldwide audiences. But it also creates political content, including pro-Russian versions of histories that contain inaccurate information. The social media platforms, which I made aware of TheSoulās activities, have not taken action against the companyāapparently having concluded that its activities do not violate their policies."
Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 5: 5 Minutes
Ā
"As mass protests against police brutality and racial injustice continue across the country, 4chan, a notorious alt-right troll hub online, is trying to meddle in protestersā online operations.
On Sunday night, users of 4chan made several highly trafficked posts with links to dozens of Black Lives Matter channels on Telegram, a privacy-oriented, encrypted messaging app that has been used for organizing protests across the country. Users on 4chan encouraged others to post disinformation in the groups, find āincriminatingā information that they can pass to law enforcement, and trawl the channels for as much personal, identifying, and organizational information as they can about people in the groups."
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Some have already posted the phone numbers of volunteers organizing food and water for protesters, and phone numbers for jail support for arrested protesters. The 4chan posts didnāt include instructions for what to do with the numbers, but based on 4channerās normal behavior, itās possible that the implication is to harass the person on the other end of the line. In some cases, users in the threads are also doxxing what they believe to be āAntifa safehousesā by posting addresses of these homes.
The central focus on the 4chan posts so far, though, hasnāt been to impede the current protests, but rather to compile doxxing information on the activists behind the protests. āBE STEALTHY DONT TROLL, RIGHT NOW THE MOST VALUABLE THING WE CAN GET IS INFO,ā one user posted.
āA lot of these retards have identifying info on their telegram profiles, instagram, personal website, real name, phone number, etc. get that,ā another wrote, urging other 4channers to store what they found on internet archive sites like Archive.is and Pastebin (links on Pastebin arenāt accessible, suggesting that the site may have taken moderation action). Others encouraged people to share their findings with ātrustworthy public sourcesā and āright wing journalists.ā
Itās unclear to what extent 4chan posters have followed through on their plans, and if the threads have led to any offline harassment. Many of the Black Lives Matter channels donāt let anyone without authorization post. And administrators of some of the channels seem to be aware of the people trying to infiltrate. One of the larger protest Telegram channels, The BLM Revolution of 2020 with roughly 8,740 subscribers, posted an open letter to āto the fascist how are watching this channel,ā on Sunday night. āIām going to be honest with you all, the path that you have picked is only going to bring more suffering, and solidify the system that youāve set out to fight against. Your fight is going to end up with more people in your situation. Lost, lonely, and unsure where to go,ā the person behind the Telegram channel wrote, encouraging right-wingers to reach out if they wanted to anonymously talk.
Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 5: 5 Minutes

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
"Liberals think Iām trying to support all these nut cases...They have it all wrong."
"I caught up with Michael Murphy late on Sunday from his home in Jacksonville, Florida, but it wasnāt easy: he hadnāt been able to answer his phone for 24 hours. āI had to turn it off,ā he said. āIām also getting spearphishing emails every 30 seconds.ā
The angry callers had gotten Murphyās nameĀ from one of the dozens of domain registries that he had set up since Friday night. That day, a friend who lived in North Carolina noticed that right-wingersĀ in that state and across the country were setting up rallies attacking business closures put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Murphy, who said heās staunchly opposed to and frustrated by the protests because of the risks they pose in accelerating the spread of the coronavirus, and his friendĀ realized that the organizers, which turned out to include aĀ small group of pro-gunĀ advocates helping coordinate the campaign,Ā were using a simple state-based abbreviation pattern to register websites promoting the protests.
They came up with a plan. Murphy snapped upĀ domains for every still available iteration of reopenAL.com, reopenAK.com, reopenAR.com, and so forth, that hadnāt already been purchased, along with every domain he could for variations like liberateWV.com, liberateWY.com, and liberateWI.com. The idea was to preempt any further such purchases by people genuinely seeking to organize protests.
āI realized all these fringe guys are gonna get a hold of these websites, So I went out and bought āem up that night,ā he told me. The financial burden of thwarting fringe-right groups? āIt cost me about four grand,ā Murphy said. āI donāt have the money quite frankly. I was just trying to do something good. Iām in massive credit debt to do this.ā
Murphy said that he recognized that his plan isnāt foolproof. While similar domains have already been obtained and still remain up for purchase, he thinks keeping fringe-right wingersĀ from the oneās he purchased has made a difference.Ā He said he believes such short concise domain names are important in search rankings. āNames are really powerful. Thatās why people pay millions for certain domains,ā he said.
After buying the URLs, things were initially quiet. But on Saturday night a Reddit post detailing information about the domain registrations went viral. While the message didnāt directly identify Murphy, it gave instructions on how to find his name alongside speculation that he must be running an anti-lockdown astroturf campaignāeven though Murphyās intentions were the exact opposite. On Twitter, people doxxed him, posting his address and home number.
āI bought these names to try to stop the insanity, basically. And it just turned to insanity,ā he said. He felt forced to unplug his phone, and his inbox exploded with messages attacking himāand potentially trying to hack him..."
Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 5: 5 Minutes
Dietrich Stout has a wealth of fascinating insight into early human brain development on The Paleolithic Technology Laboratory studies website. Well worth a deep dive.
The Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 2: Symbiosis
This is a great lunchtime lecture to tune into if you have any interest in how the human brain came to be.
The Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 2: Symbiosis
With the promise of more intelligent technology, are real threats. Can design fiction shape the future of AI to mitigate bias?
Imagine this: Itās morning and you are starting your daily routineāgo to work, bring kids to school, etc. You are quite late. You lift the door handle of the car; able to recognize your fingerprints, the car unlocks. You speak, āTo Helenās school please, then Martinās school, then to work.ā The car doesnāt respond. Itās rush hour and you need to bring the kids to school on time and then rush to work.
Your carās machine-learning algorithm predicts you are likely to get a fine or worse, despite your intentions to drive consciously when kids are on board and stay under the speed limit. Almost like the āpre-crimeā police units of the Tom Cruise sci-fi hit āMinority Report,ā the algorithm uses police report data on parents who speed during rush hour when late for school or work. It neglects your law-abiding attitude. Fortunately, the personal digital assistant in your watch, sensing your car has been disabled, is already contacting the schools and your workplace with your estimated times of arrival and an excuse for your tardiness.
Does this seem like a distant future? Recently, an AI-based system named COMPAS has been used to forecast which criminals are most likely to re-offend. Predictions of re-offending convicts produced risk assessments followed by U.S. judges in courtrooms. However, when the algorithm was wrong it generated higher error rates in minority ethnic groups, e.g. had a higher false-positive rateĀ in Black than in white people. Black people re-offending was more likely a wrong prediction just as for safety-concerned parents in the fictional scenario above.
AlthoughĀ it is not easyĀ (if not impossible)Ā to even loosely predict the future,Ā we know thatĀ in the comingĀ decade high-tech products, such as smart drones or driverless cars (so-called near-future technologies), are going to rely heavily onĀ machineĀ learning. Nevertheless, machine-learning algorithms willĀ almost certainly harborĀ some form of implicit bias, e.g. cognitive, social, racial,Ā etc. For example, Caliskanās et al.ās academic paper, āSemantics Derived Automatically from Language Corpora Contain Human-Like Biases,ā published in the leading academic journalĀ Science, described an autonomous intelligent agent associating words like āparentsā and āweddingā mainly to feminine names while on the contrary career-related words like āprofessional and salaryā when assigned to men. Several studies exploring stereotypes data used to train AI provide evidence that the word-associating agent flawed strategy may be used to train a CV-analyzer service with consequences on gender balance. Interestingly, Caliskan et al.ās experiment replicated the extensive proof of bias found in previous studies involving human participants, perhaps reflecting debatable beliefs in our society.
The question, therefore, is: How can we uncover andĀ mitigate bias in near-future technologies before such technologies becomeĀ integrated intoĀ the fabric of society? Another way to put it is: How can designers and engineers developing these near-future technologies ensure that they are no unwittinglyĀ discriminating against orĀ excluding certain groupsĀ of people.
The Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 2: Symbiosis
Pattie Maes is a professor in MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences and until recently served as academic head. She runs the Media
Check out some of the extraordinary projects coming out of the the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces group. A symbiotic future looks a lot cooler than previously expected.
The Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 2: Symbiosis

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
The Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 2: Symbiosis
The Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 2: Symbiosis
Artist Sougwen Chung on collaborating with technology, creating new systems, and never limiting yourself.
As far as my work goes, a lot of what I do today is inspired by creating new forms of collaboration; thinking about machines or environments as creative catalysts. It stems from an interest in thinking about authorship and technology. Because I started so young with computers, after a while I wondered, where was my creative agency in software? As I became proficient with the tools as an expert, I felt there was something missing.
I found that I missed physical gesture when working with computersāspecifically the gestural instincts Iāve developed through violin and drawing. Sometimes working with software and code can feel like one is relegated to the screen. So that feeling led me to explore working with robots through the medium of performance, to re-engage with physical spaces. Robots are typically regarded as industrial tools, but Iāve always thought of them as a kind of kinetic sculpture. Being able to invent my own human/machine collaboration processes has been really empowering.
The Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 2: Symbiosis
Those who create future technologies should also fear their power.
The MIT Media Lab is one of the most visible parts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ā both as an imposing glass-and-metal edifice in Cambridge and as an endless source of new technologies, from Lego Mindstorms and Guitar Hero, to e-ink, touchscreens, and in-vehicle GPS. Pattie Maes, the founder and director of the labās influential Fluid Interfaces research group, has spent much of her career investigating artificial intelligence, cognitive augmentation, and human-computer interaction, and in recent years, she says, sheās become increasingly conscious of those technologiesā capacity for bleak unintended consequences. So, turning to a pop-culture touchstone that addresses some of those darker repercussions, this year sheās giving all her new grad students an unusual assignment: watch every episode of the dystopian science fiction show Black Mirror.
āI just think that as designers of computer technologies that will get into the hands of 2.5 billion people, that anyone who was involved in designing new services and new interfaces should really think carefully about what impact the technologies they develop will have on society and on peopleās lives,ā she said. āBlack Mirror is of course a very negative version of how things can go wrong, but I think itās useful for all of the students and anyone involved in the development of new digital services and systems to look at that and keep that in mind as something to avoid.ā
The Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 2: Symbiosis
Technology firms should use more design fiction to explore and avoid potential negative consequences, such as AI bias.
Design fiction stories provide a novel way for designers, engineers and futurists (among others) to think about the impact of technology from a human perspective and link this to possible future needs. With a mixture of logic and imagination, design fiction can reveal aspects of how technology may be adopted and used, starting conversations about its future ramifications.
For example, the short story āCrime-sourcingā explores what might happen if AI was to use crowdsourced information and a criminal database to predict who might commit a murder. The researchers found that because the database was full of people in minority ethnic groups who, for social reasons, were statistically more likely to reoffend, the ācrime-sourcingā model was more likely to wrongly suspect minorities than white people.
You donāt have to be a talented writer or make a slick film to produce design fiction. Brainstorming activities involving cards and storyboards have been used to develop design fiction and help develop the storytelling process. Making workshops that used these kinds of tools more common would enable more engineers, entrepreneurs and policymakers to use this method of assessment. And making the resulting work publicly available would help to expose potential biases in technologies before they affect society.
Encouraging designers to create and share more stories in this way would ensure the narrative that underpins new technology wouldnāt just present a positive picture, nor an extremely negative or dystopian one. Instead, people will be able to appreciate both aspects of what is happening around us.
The Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 2: Symbiosis

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
The Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 2: Symbiosis
The Digital Human, Series 20, Episode 2: Symbiosis