Davey Alba Profile picture
@technology reporter / Google, Big Tech, misinfo / https://t.co/Ddpt1oFZBl / ask for my Signal / @daveyalba@mastodon.social
Potato Of Reason Profile picture 1 subscribed
Oct 10, 2023 8 tweets 4 min read
NEW: Spent the day immersed in viral falsehoods about the Israel-Hamas conflict that spread over the weekend and into Monday. Here's what we're bringing back from the misinformation trenches. (gift link)

w/ @dzuidijk

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Image Our reporting found that posts abt the attack in Israel have led to confusion, misinformation and conflict on Musk's X (yes, this website), exposing how his policy changes have transformed the platform into an unreliable resource during a time of crisis. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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Jul 27, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
!! Researchers disagree with Meta's framing of the papers published in Nature and Science today via @JeffHorwitz https://t.co/MxHncUES8cwsj.com/articles/does-…
Image This is why we decided to frame our story around the one paper that was most revealing... Image
Apr 19, 2023 7 tweets 4 min read
NEW: For weeks, @byJuliaLove and I talked to current and ex-Googlers to understand the trade-offs between speed of deploying generative AI products—which Google has been doing under code red—and carefully considering the ethical consequences of such tech.

bloomberg.com/news/features/… Google asked ~80k employees to "dogfood" and test generative AI tools like Bard. Some employees concluded: Bard was "a pathological liar," "cringe-worthy" and gave dangerous advice, according to internal messages we reviewed.

Google launched Bard anyway.

bloomberg.com/news/features/… Image
Jan 27, 2023 10 tweets 6 min read
NEW: Ella Irwin, Twitter’s current head of trust and safety, has become the chief executor of Musk’s whims—even when it goes against established protocols for social media content work that Twitter and its peers have refined for the past decade.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/… We spoke to more than a dozen current & former employees for this story. They told us that since Musk took the helm of Twitter, Irwin has helped him break conventions in how Twitter manages user account policy. Other experts agree, like @LauraEdelson2.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Dec 22, 2022 8 tweets 5 min read
NEW: We documented an experiment run by @accountabletech that shows, tangibly, that Elon Musk's popular Twitter polls can be gamed by bot-for-hire manipulation services originating in Russia, India and Turkey bloomberg.com/news/articles/… With less than $100, one can buy tens of thousands of votes for Twitter polls—and two Twitter ex-employees in Trust & Safety tell me the company has lacked proper safeguards to identify and eradicate inauthentic behavior and manipulation of Twitter polls. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Image