AI serves up assault rifles and hearing aids

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There was a time not so long ago when an algorithm decided I had an interest in hearing aids. For no apparent reason, ads for all sorts of hearing enhancements appeared in my social media feeds. Odd because despite my advancing years my hearing remains acute.

Before the hearing aids, a rash of ads for incontinence pads and pants. And then an avalanche of great deals on CPAP machines to battle sleep apnea. Happily, I don't suffer incontinence and snore infrequently.

Nor do I have an unhealthy interest in assault rifles. Yet, for some reason there came a spate of posts featuring Americans getting their jollies firing them. This was after spending a week in the US. Only after telling Facebook I didn't want to see posts like that did they stop.

All this merchandise and unsavoury videos had been thrown in front of me because dodgy AI had made stupid assumptions about who I am and what I'm interested in.

To be fair, the algorithms get it right a lot of the time. I'm interested in travel, and happily browse the photo posts that turn up. Likewise, the constant stream of videos of border collies doing clever things. And also the occasional link to a news story I might have missed.

But as a source of reliable information or even vaguely interesting advertising, social media is like a letterbox jammed with junk mail, with the occasional equivalent of a postcard from a travelling friend or news of the death of an old acquaintance.

Those advancing years which prompted the premature incontinence product ads come with one distinct advantage: discernment. I know trash when I see it.

The concern is that younger social media users are not only less selective but are being steered by algorithms towards noxious content. In the midst of our national domestic violence crisis, calls are growing louder for social media to be reined in so young, impressionable users are not poisoned by misogyny.

Yet in the same week came reports that in a move to cut costs Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, was planning to cut staff on its Oversight Board, which makes the final calls on content moderation.

Also in the same week revelations that Meta's new AI function was dispensing fake news based on wildly inaccurate summaries of genuine news articles from trusted mastheads. No wonder Former ACCC boss Allan Fels has joined the chorus calling for the social media giant to be held to account.

Back in 2021, when Facebook was being pressured by the Morrison government to pay for Australian news content, links to new stories were blocked for a few days. As an editor of a small regional masthead back then, the decision at first seemed disastrous. But after a few days of being unshackled from the onerous task of moderating comments on those links, it was liberating.

We turned to old fashioned emails to get the news out to our subscribers. And we sharpened our headlines so readers wanting to know why traffic was held up on the highway found the story high in the search results.

Meta resorted to the same tactics in Canada, where the Trudeau government has insisted the company pay for news content. Memes have replaced reliable information and Canadians are having to find other ways of accessing news and reasoned analysis.

There might be a positive in all this, a breaking of the codependency between traditional and social media. Before the arrival of the internet, we accessed news through print, radio and TV. I still do, but website subscriptions have replaced paper ones - although I still love to read a newspaper over coffee when time permits.

Absorbing information without the endless, focus-sapping junk served up by social media is a far better way to get the news.

HAVE YOUR SAY: How do you access news? Do algorithms put ridiculous ads on the social media feed? Should social media corporations like Meta be held accountable for spreading misinformation and malevolent content? Email us: echidna@theechidna.com.au

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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:

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- Lower pay for women is more the result of men earning more within the same profession rather than women choosing lower paid occupations than their male counterparts, a new study shows. Profession choice explains around 20 per cent of the gender pay gap, says think tank e61, and the rest comes down to employers paying men more than women within the same field.

- Budget airline Bonza continued to sell tickets for almost two weeks despite receiving default notices it would be forced to ground its planes. Thousands of passengers were left stranded around Australia when Bonza flights were cancelled on Tuesday morning with little notice.

THEY SAID IT: "Social media is a very, very powerful tool. It also gives power to tools." - Chris Young

YOU SAID IT: Vandalising statues of Captain James Cook achieves little, other than revealing a warped interpretation of history.

Gwen writes: "It is so wrong to put James Cook in the same boat (pun intended) as others who have had statues dedicated to them. Bristol's Edward Colston, for example, had so much money to flash around in his home city because he was a slave-trader who caused so much suffering - he deserved to be toppled. Stalin's statue was toppled in his native Georgia, and many other Stalin statues suffered the same fate, because Stalin was a murderer of millions. In contrast, James Cook was a professional, an explorer, a brilliant cartographer and, like all of us, a flawed human."

Jenna G points to myths surrounding Cook, "the main one being he discovered Australia and the second, that he was the person behind or responsible for the occupation of Australia by the English Crown. So should we have statues of Cook? Sure. Should we be sensitive to the needs of both cultures? Absolutely. What about Queen Victoria? Well, I imagine it will be difficult to remove her omnipotent presence from the centres of various main cities in Australia."

Pam writes: "I get the Aboriginal angst, but Cook is the wrong target. He is convenient, plenty of statues. But why, for instance, aren't statues of Queen Victoria vandalised? Most of the mistreatment of Aboriginal people occurred on her watch, under her colonial secretaries. She was concerned about the abuses in India, but not the jail called NSW. And no one seems to attack the pastoralists who massacred Aboriginal people, as outlined by David Marr."

"The issue is not the existence of Captain Cook statues, but the placement of them and the plaques on them," writes Jennifer. "He was not the founder of Australia. He needs to be represented in all his complexity on the plaques, with statues placed in museums where the maps and explorer records are kept. This maintains the history while not inflaming tensions or inflating his character beyond its complex reality. Why do we blame the explorer rather than those who sent him and funded his voyages? We need to get real about the history, rather than scapegoating those doing the bidding of others."

Erik writes: "Thanks, Garry. I read Cook's diaries some years ago and found a man decent and considerate for his times. There is a lot that we need to acknowledge in the attempted genocide that was carried out from 1788 onwards. Denigrating Cook should not be part of that."

Darren from Tennant Creek sees it differently: "If only non Aboriginal Australia would confront the injustices of colonisation and realise the devastating impact it has on Aboriginal people and their communities and the trauma associated with it. Until then I and many others can only see Cook as an invader, and bringer of hurt, destruction and death, regardless of how much running water Jacinta Price stated, has made Aboriginal lives so much better since colonisation."