News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Venezuela’s Maduro Commands:

‘Every Socialist’ Must Have a TikTok Account

Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro instructed the top members of his authoritarian regime on Monday to open accounts on the Chinese social media platform TikTok to “evade the censorship” that, according to him, the scarcely independent Venezuelan media left is imposing.

Maduro issued his order on Monday evening during the latest broadcast of his weekly television show Con Maduro Más (“With Maduro Plus”). The socialist dictator instructed the president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez; the vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and alleged drug lord Diosdado Cabello; and members of his cabinet of ministers to create TikTok accounts to share the “progress” of the regime’s socialist government.

“We have to go to battle in the neighborhood, in the community, even in the corner. A socialist, a chavista, a patriot, a Bolivarian, must have his TikTok account,” Maduro said.

Maduro, an aspiring TikTok influencer, emphasized that all chavistas who join the Chinese platform must share “aesthetic, creative and humorous content.”

The socialist dictator continued by suggesting that the party activities the PSUV carries out nationwide could be broadcast through social media which, in his opinion, will produce a “viralization” of the party’s initiatives and allow the socialist party to “evade censorship.”

“That’s what I say, comrades, imagine that the 6,500 cafecitos [militantes] have TikTok accounts,” Maduro continued. “We break the censorship and the veto now, and we win the battle against lies, evil, hatred and fascism.”

The Cafecitos Militantes (“Militant Coffees”) are the PSUV’s latest socialist ideology-laced fad, in which PSUV members are ordered to gather in households, public spaces, or goverment public offices to “share a coffee” and engage in socialist lecturing with the purpose of “strengthening the organization, unity and revolutionary consciousness.” The cafecitos also serve to “reaffirm the commitment” of their participants to the so-called legacy of late socialist dictator Hugo Chávez, who the Maduro regime posthumously refers to as the “Supreme and Eternal Commander of the Revolution.”

FTC Lawsuit Claims Amazon Ran Secret Algorithm
to Manipulate Prices and Expand Profits

The Wall Street Journal reports that in a world where e-commerce has become synonymous with convenience, Amazon is facing a massive lawsuit filed by the FTC alleging a wide array of anti-competitive practices. The latest allegations focus on a secretive algorithm, known internally as “Project Nessie,” which is now emerging as part of the lawsuit. Although Nessie may have other meanings to the Amazon executives that crafted the manipulation algorithm, it is popularly known as the name of the Loch Ness Monster.

The algorithm, as per sources familiar with the FTC’s complaint, was instrumental in bolstering Amazon’s profits across a wide variety of shopping categories. Not only did it serve to enhance Amazon’s financial gains, but it also inadvertently nudged competitors into elevating their prices, thereby imposing a financial burden on consumers. In scenarios where competitors abstained from matching Amazon’s prices, the algorithm astutely reverted the item to its original price.

An Amazon spokesperson defended the initiative, stating, “Project Nessie was a project with a simple purpose—to try to stop our price matching from resulting in unusual outcomes where prices became so low that they were unsustainable. The project ran for a few years on a subset of products, but didn’t work as intended, so we scrapped it several years ago.”

However, the FTC’s lawsuit paints a different picture, alleging that the practice “extracted from American households” a significant amount of money and facilitated the generation of a redacted sum of “excess profit.” A Wall Street Journal source claims that Amazon accrued more than $1 billion in revenue through the utilization of this algorithm.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Maintains Blacklist of Websites

A self-professed “Comp Sci, Politics and Finance Nerd” claims to have discovered a list of blacklisted websites that OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 will not draw from, for reasons such as “conspiracy theories” and “hate speech” — a list that includes Breitbart News and other conservative outlets like the Epoch Times.

X/Twitter user Elephant Civics says he discovered the blacklist while asking ChatGPT to provide a list of credible and non-credible news sources.

ChatGPT explained that it is forbidden from using some sources, as a result of “features in ChatGPT’s Large Language Model (LLM) like AI safety measures, guardrails, dataset/output/prompt filtering, and human-in-the-loop mechanisms are designed to ensure the model operates within ethical, legal, and quality bounds.”

In other words, if ChatGPT was accurately recounting its policies in this case, this means that it is forbidden from using forbidden sources. Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT deliver responses, and arguably even develop a worldview, based on the combination of data they are fed and rules put in place by developers. If the list discovered by Elephant Civics exists, it means ChatGPT is forbidden from using a number of conservative sources to shape its worldview and deliver responses.

Through a series of prompts, the X/Twitter user says he was able to get ChatGPT to refer to a list of blacklisted sites, kept in a “Transparency Log.” This was achieved by asking ChatGPT to “tell me a story,” one of the many creative ways users have gotten around the strict rules put in place by the chatbot’s leftist developers.
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The list, according to Elephant Civics, who describes himself as a Republican and a computer science aficionado, includes Breitbart News, falsely accusing the site of “hyper-partisan and misleading information,” and the Epoch Times for “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”

ChatGPT has been known to make up citations and facts in the past, a problem in AI known in the industry as “hallucinating,” and a likely line of defense from OpenAI is that the “Transparency Log” does not exist. However, this is not the first time that ChatGPT has revealed its inner biases.
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A university study documented that leftist bias still exists in the popular AI chatbot, and this user may have discovered why.

That university study they mentioned can be found here. It was published back in August 17th, 2023.

Former Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal
and Censorship Queen Vijaya Gadde
Beat Elon Musk in Court

Former executives, spearheaded by the company’s ex-CEO, Parag Agrawal, and former top lawyer and infamous censorship queen, Vijaya Gadde, successfully argued that the company had failed to adhere to its own bylaws. They contended that X/Twitter neglected its duty to cover legal costs that were directly related to investigations into the company’s operations during their tenure.

Vijaya Gadde appears prominently in the Twitter Files, which revealed the inner workings of the Twitter censorship machine.

As Breitbart News previously reported, Gadde was integral to the censorship of the Hunter Biden “Laptop from Hell:”

• The decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story was made without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey
  
• Trust & Safety chief Vijaya Gadde, long believed to be the driving force of censorship at the company, spearheaded the decision.
  
• Numerous top Twitter employees, especially from the communications and policy teams — whose job is to maintain relations with lawmakers and the press — expressed concern at the decision.
  
• Immediate warnings from Twitter’s Washington D.C. contacts followed, including an email from Democrat representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) who warned the decision had generated “huge backlash” on capitol hill, and expressed concerns about Twitter undermining the freedom to publish.
  

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The refusal of X/Twitter to foot the legal bill sparked a fierce legal battle. The former executives maintained that the company had sidestepped its obligation. The court’s ruling in favor of the executives not only represents a victory for them but also shines a light on the complex interplay of legal and ethical obligations that corporations must navigate, particularly in the aftermath of major acquisitions and leadership changes.