Tag Archives: Facebook

Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Facebook’s AI Might Be Able To Find Offensive Memes

Facebook recently released an intriguing research paper called “The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes.”

It’s well worth the read and a closer look at the database developed over the course of the research. The idea is simple: Use machine learning to help identify ‘mean’ and hateful memes.

If such a tool could be developed, it would help not just Facebook. It would help the entire online ecosystem better police the internet, stopping a significant portion of hate speech in its tracks.

Unfortunately, as the research shows, the AI still has a ways to go before it can truly be considered effective.

To conduct the search, the company compiled a data set consisting of a million samples of memes from all across the web. They eliminated any that were in clear violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service, which left them with 162,000 samples.

They re-created those memes by copying the text onto a new image, sourced via a partnership with Getty Images. That done, they had human reviewers judge whether the memes were “hateful”. Once a consensus was reached, they culled the remaining memes down to a final data set of 10,000, using these to attempt to “teach” the AI to identify hateful memes.

The result? The human reviewers had an average accuracy rate of 84.7 percent, versus the AI’s 64.73 percent accuracy rate. It was a good effort by the AI, especially since this was the first attempt. Clearly, much more work needs to be done before the AI routine can be said to be truly effective.

A researcher involved in the project had this to say about the results:

“If we knew what is missing, it would be easy to fix and the gap between AI and humans would be lower. Generally speaking, we need to work on improving multimodal understanding and reasoning.”

One thing you can be sure of is this: The company will keep hammering away at the problem, and the AI’s percentages will increase in time. It’s an interesting, challenging project that could have an enormous impact. Kudos to Facebook for their work to this point.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Facebook Is Fighting Back Against Spam Accounts

Unless you’re plugged into the world of social media, you may not realize it. There’s a war on, and until recently, it was a war that Facebook was losing. The war is being fought with billions of fake accounts being used to fundamentally alter the social media landscape. It is influencing the kinds of content social media users see. The fake accounts perpetuate an endless number of scams on unsuspecting social media users.

Facebook and the other Titans of social media have been fighting back, but it has been an uphill battle. It is far easier to create thousands of fake accounts and blast all types of fake news and propaganda than it is to discover those accounts and do something about them.

In recent weeks, however, Facebook has deployed some powerful new tools in the fight. The company has gained ground on the endless array of scammers and propagandists on their platform. Using these new tools, the company has been able to identify and delete a staggering 6.6 billion fake accounts, and block untold millions of others on a daily basis during the account creation process.

The secret to the company’s success is a new technology called the DEC, which stands for Deep Entity Classification. It’s a tool that leans heavily on machine learning to analyze active accounts on Facebook. It can dig into each individual’s profile, general behavior, and interactions with the community at large. In short, fake accounts don’t interact with the community the same way that actual accounts do. They have a signature which makes them identifiable.

This is almost certain to create a kind of social media arms race. You can bet that the people who rely on fake accounts to push their agenda will fight back, which will prompt Facebook to further improve their tool set. Still, progress is being made and this is a significant step. Kudos to Facebook!

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Messaging Gets Upgrade For Instagram Users

Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire is chasing growth. It’s not hard to understand why. Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform, with more than 2.4 billion users worldwide. The bigger you get, the harder it is to grow. That is exactly why Zuckerberg zeroed in on the three fastest platforms in his empire: Messaging, Stories, and Groups. By chasing the fastest growing elements, he can keep his empire expanding.

Instagram is a part of that empire and recently the company made a change, incorporating Direct Messaging (DMs) into the browser experience.

It’s a relatively small change, but its significance is not lost on Influencers and online marketers who rely heavily on Instagram to stay in touch with business partners around the world. Essentially, the change makes Instagram’s DMs just like any other online chat program, which makes communication easy, convenient and seamless.

Now that Instagram’s DMs are available in the browser, it’s just a matter of time before meta chat services that combine chat feeds from multiple sources incorporate Instagram DMs into the mix. That will enable you to access all your messages from a variety of sources from a single umbrella, which will streamline your communications further.

Messaging has of course been part of the internet experience since the earliest days of the web. Today’s apps are increasingly sophisticated, sleek and streamlined. Based on the growth trajectory Mark Zuckerberg made reference to, the trend toward increasing reliance on messaging across social media platforms only stands to grow further and take on ever more importance.

If your company uses Instagram DMs to keep far-flung employees in touch with each other, or to communicate with business partners, rejoice. The new changes will make your life even easier. Be advised though, that at present, the new functionality is in Beta, and is only available to a tiny fraction of Instagram’s user base. In the months ahead though, and pending successful testing, everyone will have access to it.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

 Will We Control Computers With Our Brains Soon?

Over the years, Facebook has made several high-profile acquisitions, with one of their most recent being the acquisition of Oculus Rift for a staggering two billion dollars.  Now, rumors are swirling that the company is on track to buy another innovative startup, CTRL-Labs. They are the makers of an innovative device worn at the wrist that uses brain waves to allow users to control electronic devices.

Estimates are that the social media giant will pay between $500 million and a cool one billion dollars to acquire the company, which is one of a number of startups creating BMIs, (Brain Machine Interfaces).

What’s interesting about the offering by CTRL-Labs is that their product is worn on the wrist, while most of their competitors rely on devices worn on the head. In a few cases, they require chips to be physically implanted in the brains of those who want to use their tech.

In this regard, what CTRL-Labs is offering borrows from two different technologies that have been featured on TED talks in recent years:  Pranav Mistry’s “Sixth Sense” technology (which translates gestures into commands that a computer can understand) and the Emotive headset, which scans your brain for changes and translates those signals into commands.

Honestly the industry is still too small and the technologies are too unrefined to know for certain whose products will wind up being adopted as the de facto standard.  However, the fact that Facebook is placing a large bet on the industry is a powerful indication that these types of technologies (whatever form they ultimately take) are the future.

It’s a long-term bet, to be sure.  Although there are products you can buy today, they only offer limited functionality and it will be at least five years before we see a killer app for the new tech, but one way or another, the day is coming when we will indeed control computers with our brains.

 

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Facebook Is Making Changes To Privacy Following Huge Fine

We’re talking about the result of a massive five billion dollar fine over violations surrounding the Cambridge Analytica scandal. While the staggering size of the fine made all the headlines, there’s more to the company’s agreement than just several billion dollars.

In addition to the fine itself, the company has also accepted an agreement.

It forces Facebook to implement a new privacy framework, and to be monitored and held accountable for decisions it makes about its users’ privacy and information it collects on them.

The FTC Press release reads, in part, as follows:

“The order requires Facebook to restructure its approach to privacy from the corporate board-level down and establishes strong new mechanisms to ensure that Facebook executives are accountable for the decisions they make about privacy and that those decisions are subject to meaningful oversight (for a period of not less than twenty years).”

Facebook also published a statement about their acceptance of the fine, but it offered little in the way of new information.  Digging a bit deeper, however, some of the details of the changes coming to Facebook include the following:

  • The formation of an independent privacy committee – The committee will be appointed by an independent nominating committee and be comprised of Facebook’s board of directors. The FTC says this will help limit CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s formerly unfettered control over decisions affecting user privacy.
  • The appointment of Compliance Officers – These people will report to the new privacy committee and will be tasked with monitoring the entire company’s privacy program. The Compliance offers are not appointed by Facebook’s CEO or any Facebook employee, and no Facebook employee (including the CEO) can remove those officers.  One of the responsibilities of the new Compliance Team will be to submit reports to the FTC.
  • More and better external oversight of Facebook – The FTC’s ruling strengthens the role of independent third-party assessors who will conduct independent reviews of Facebook’s privacy program at two-year intervals.

Will these steps be enough?  Only time will tell, but it’s certainly a great start.  Kudos to the FTC for holding Facebook accountable and trying to be a force for change.

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