Tag: transparency

ChatGPT broke the EU plan to regulate AI

[ad_1]
Press play to listen to this article
Voiced by artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence’s newest sensation — the gabby chatbot-on-steroids ChatGPT — is sending European rulemakers back to the drawing board on how to regulate AI.
The chatbot dazzled the internet in past months with its rapid-fire production of human-like prose. It declared its love for a New York Times journalist. It wrote a haiku about monkeys breaking free from a laboratory. It even got to the floor of the European Parliament, where two German members gave speeches drafted by ChatGPT to highlight the need to rein in AI technology.
But after months of internet lolz — and doomsaying from critics — the technology is now confronting European Union regulators with a puzzling question: How do we bring this thing under control?

The technology has already upended work done by the European Commission, European Parliament and EU Council on the bloc’s draft artificial intelligence rulebook, the Artificial Intelligence Act. The regulation, proposed by the Commission in 2021, was designed to ban some AI applications like social scoring, manipulation and some instances of facial recognition. It would also designate some specific uses of AI as “high-risk,” binding developers to stricter requirements of transparency, safety and human oversight.
The catch? ChatGPT can serve both the benign and the malignant.
This type of AI, called a large language model, has no single intended use: People can prompt it to write songs, novels and poems, but also computer code, policy briefs, fake news reports or, as a Colombian judge has admitted, court rulings. Other models trained on images rather than text can generate everything from cartoons to false pictures of politicians, sparking disinformation fears.
In one case, the new Bing search engine powered by ChatGPT’s technology threatened a researcher with “hack[ing]” and “ruin.” In another, an AI-powered app to transform pictures into cartoons called Lensa hypersexualized photos of Asian women.
“These systems have no ethical understanding of the world, have no sense of truth, and they’re not reliable,” said Gary Marcus, an AI expert and vocal critic.
These AIs “are like engines. They are very powerful engines and algorithms that can do quite a number of things and which themselves are not yet allocated to a purpose,” said Dragoș Tudorache, a Liberal Romanian lawmaker who, together with S&D Italian lawmaker Brando Benifei, is tasked with shepherding the AI Act through the European Parliament.
Already, the tech has prompted EU institutions to rewrite their draft plans. The EU Council, which represents national capitals, approved its version of the draft AI Act in December, which would entrust the Commission with establishing cybersecurity, transparency and risk-management requirements for general-purpose AIs.
The rise of ChatGPT is now forcing the European Parliament to follow suit. In February the lead lawmakers on the AI Act, Benifei and Tudorache, proposed that AI systems generating complex texts without human oversight should be part of the “high-risk” list — an effort to stop ChatGPT from churning out disinformation at scale.
The idea was met with skepticism by right-leaning political groups in the European Parliament, and even parts of Tudorache’s own Liberal group. Axel Voss, a prominent center-right lawmaker who has a formal say over Parliament’s position, said that the amendment “would make numerous activities high-risk, that are not risky at all.”
The two lead Parliament lawmakers are working to impose stricter requirements on both developers and users of ChatGPT and similar AI models | Pool photo by Kenzo Tribouillard/EPA-EFE
In contrast, activists and observers feel that the proposal was just scratching the surface of the general-purpose AI conundrum. “It’s not great to just put text-making systems on the high-risk list: you have other general-purpose AI systems that present risks and also ought to be regulated,” said Mark Brakel, a director of policy at the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit focused on AI policy.
The two lead Parliament lawmakers are also working to impose stricter requirements on both developers and users of ChatGPT and similar AI models, including managing the risk of the technology and being transparent about its workings. They are also trying to slap tougher restrictions on large service providers while keeping a lighter-tough regime for everyday users playing around with the technology.
Professionals in sectors like education, employment, banking and law enforcement have to be aware “of what it entails to use this kind of system for purposes that have a significant risk for the fundamental rights of individuals,” Benifei said.
If Parliament has trouble wrapping its head around ChatGPT regulation, Brussels is bracing itself for the negotiations that will come after.
The European Commission, EU Council and Parliament will hash out the details of a final AI Act in three-way negotiations, expected to start in April at the earliest. There, ChatGPT could well cause negotiators to hit a deadlock, as the three parties work out a common solution to the shiny new technology.
On the sidelines, Big Tech firms — especially those with skin in the game, like Microsoft and Google — are closely watching.
The EU’s AI Act should “maintain its focus on high-risk use cases,” said Microsoft’s Chief Responsible AI Officer Natasha Crampton, suggesting that general-purpose AI systems such as ChatGPT are hardly being used for risky activities, and instead are used mostly for drafting documents and helping with writing code.
“We want to make sure that high-value, low-risk use cases continue to be available for Europeans,” Crampton said. (ChatGPT, created by U.S. research group OpenAI, has Microsoft as an investor and is now seen as a core element in its strategy to revive its search engine Bing. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.)
A recent investigation by transparency activist group Corporate Europe Observatory also said industry actors, including Microsoft and Google, had doggedly lobbied EU policymakers to exclude general-purpose AI like ChatGPT from the obligations imposed on high-risk AI systems.
Could the bot itself come to EU rulemakers’ rescue, perhaps?
ChatGPT told POLITICO it thinks it might need regulating: “The EU should consider designating generative AI and large language models as ‘high risk’ technologies, given their potential to create harmful and misleading content,” the chatbot responded when questioned on whether it should fall under the AI Act’s scope.
“The EU should consider implementing a framework for responsible development, deployment, and use of these technologies, which includes appropriate safeguards, monitoring, and oversight mechanisms,” it said.
The EU, however, has follow-up questions.

[ad_2]
#ChatGPT #broke #plan #regulate
( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

March 2, 2023
Shock, anger, betrayal: Inside the Qatargate-hit Socialist group

[ad_1]
Press play to listen to this article
Voiced by artificial intelligence.
BRUSSELS — The European Parliament’s Socialists are warily eyeing their colleagues and assistants, wondering which putative ally might turn out to be a liar as new details emerge in a growing cash-for-favors scandal.
Long-simmering geographic divisions within the group, Parliament’s second largest, are fueling mistrust and discord. Members are at odds over how forcefully to defend their implicated colleagues. Others are nursing grievances over how the group’s leadership handled months of concerns about their lawmaker, Eva Kaili, who’s now detained pending trial.
Publicly, the group has shown remarkable solidarity during the so-called Qatargate scandal, which involves allegations that foreign countries bribed EU lawmakers. Socialists and Democrats (S&D) chief Iratxe García has mustered a unified response, producing an ambitious ethics reform proposal and launching an internal investigation without drawing an open challenge to her leadership. Yet as the Parliament’s center left ponders how to win back the public’s trust ahead of next year’s EU election, the trust among the members themselves is fraying.

“I feel betrayed by these people that are colleagues of our political group,” said Mohammed Chahim, a Dutch S&D MEP. “As far as I am concerned, we are all political victims, and I hope we can get the truth out in the open.”
S&D MEPs are grappling not only with a sense of personal betrayal but also a fear that the links to corruption could squash otherwise promising electoral prospects.
Social democrats were looking forward to running in 2024 on the bread-and-butter issues at the top of minds around the bloc amid persistent inflation, buoyed by Olaf Scholz’s rise in Germany and the Continent-wide popularity of Finland’s Sanna Marin. Now, the group’s appeal to voters’ pocketbooks could be overshadowed by suitcases filled with cash.
“We were completely unaware of what was going on,” said García, vowing that the group’s internal inquiry will figure out what went wrong. “We have to let the people responsible [for the investigation] work.”
The ‘darkest plenary’
Shock, anger and betrayal reverberated through the 145-strong caucus in early December last year when Belgian police began arresting senior S&D figures, chief among them a former Italian MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri and Eva Kaili, a rising star from Greece who had barely completed a year as one of Parliament’s 14 vice presidents.
“The Qatargate revelations came as a terrible shock to S&D staff and MEPs,” an S&D spokesperson said. “Many felt betrayed, their trust abused and broken. Anyone who has ever become a victim of criminals will understand it takes time to heal from such an experience.”
When the S&D gathered for a Parliament session in Strasbourg days after the first arrests, few members took it harder than the group’s president, García, who at one point broke down in tears, according to three people present.
“We are all not just political machines, but also human beings,” said German MEP Gabriele Bischoff, an S&D vice chair in her first term. “To adapt to such a crisis, and to deal with it, it’s not easy.”
“I mean, also, you trusted some of these people,” she said.
An Italian court ruled that the daughter of former MEP Pier Antonio Panzeri can be extradited to Belgium | European Union
In Strasbourg the group showed zero appetite to watch the judicial process play out, backing a move to remove Kaili from her vice presidency role. (She has, through a lawyer, consistently maintained her innocence.)
The group’s leadership also pressured MEPs who in any way were connected to the issues or people in the scandal to step back from legislative work, even if they faced no charges.
“It was of course the darkest plenary we’ve had,” said Andreas Schieder, an Austrian S&D MEP who holds a top role on the committee charged with battling foreign interference post Qatargate. “But we took the right decisions quickly.”
The S&D hierarchy swiftly suspended Kaili from the group in December and meted out the same treatment to two other MEPs who would later be drawn into the probe.
But now many S&D MEPs are asking themselves how it was possible that a cluster of people exerted such influence across the Socialist group, how Kaili rose so quickly to the vice presidency and how so much allegedly corrupt behavior went apparently unnoticed for years.
Like family
The deep interpersonal connections between those accused and the rest of the group were part of what made it all so searing for the S&D tribe.
Belgian authorities’ initial sweep nabbed not only Panzeri and Kaili but also Kaili’s partner, a longtime parliamentary assistant named Francesco Giorgi, who had spent years working for Panzeri. Suddenly every former Panzeri assistant still in Parliament was under suspicion. Panzeri later struck a plea deal, offering to dish on whom he claims to have bribed in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Maria Arena, who succeeded Panzeri as head of the Parliament’s human rights panel in 2019, also found herself under heavy scrutiny: Her friendship with her predecessor was so close that she’d been spotted as his plus-one at his assistant’s wedding. Alessandra Moretti, another S&D MEP, has also been linked to the probe, according to legal documents seen by POLITICO.
The appearance of Laura Ballarin, García’s Cabinet chief, raising a glass with Giorgi and vacationing on a Mediterranean sailboat with Kaili, offered a tabloid-friendly illustration of just how enmeshed the accused were with the group’s top brass.
“I was the first one to feel shocked, hurt and deeply betrayed when the news came out,” Ballarin told POLITICO. “Yet, evidently, my personal relations did never interfere with my professional role.”
Making matters worse, some three months later, the scandal has largely remained limited to the S&D. Two more of its members have been swallowed up since the initial round of arrests: Italy’s Andrea Cozzolino and Belgium’s Marc Tarabella — a well-liked figure known for handing out Christmas gifts to Parliament staff as part of a St. Nicholas act. Both were excluded, like Kaili, from the S&D group. They maintain their innocence.
Whiter than white
That’s putting pressure on García, who is seen in Brussels as an extension of the power of her close ally, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is one of S&D chief Iratxe García most important allies | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
However, she has not always been able to leverage that alliance in Brussels. A prime example is the backroom deal the political groups made to appoint the Parliament’s new secretary-general, Alessandro Chiocchetti, who hails from the center-right European People’s Party. García emerged mostly empty-handed from the negotiations, with the EPP maneuvering around her and The Left group securing an entirely new directorate general.
Kaili, from a tiny two-person Greek Socialist delegation, would also have never gotten the nod to become vice president in 2022 without García and the Spanish Socialists’ backing.
Yet when it comes to trying to clean house and reclaim the moral high ground, the Socialist chief has brought people together. “She deserves to be trusted to do this correctly,” said René Repasi, a German S&D lawmaker.
In the new year, the S&D successfully pushed through the affable, progressive Luxembourgish Marc Angel to replace Kaili, fending off efforts by other left-leaning and far-right groups to take one of the S&D’s seats in the Parliament’s rule-making bureau. In another move designed to steady the ship, the Socialists in February drafted Udo Bullmann, an experienced German MEP who previously led the S&D group, as a safe pair of hands to replace Arena on the human rights subcommittee.
And in a bid to go on the offensive, the Socialists published a 15-point ethics plan (one-upping the center-right Parliament president’s secret 14-point plan). It requires all S&D MEPs — and their assistants — to disclose their meetings online and pushes for whistleblower protections in the Parliament. Where legally possible, the group pledges to hold its own members to these standards — for example by banning MEPs from paid-for foreign trips — even if the rest of the body doesn’t go as far.
Those results were hard won, group officials recounted. With members from 26 EU countries, the group had to navigate cultural and geographic divisions on how to handle corruption, exposing north-south fault lines.
“To do an internal inquiry was not supported in the beginning by all, but we debated it,” said Bischoff, describing daily meetings that stretched all the way to Christmas Eve.
The idea of recruiting outside players to conduct an internal investigation was also controversial, she added. Yet in the end, the group announced in mid-January that former MEP Richard Corbett and Silvina Bacigalupo, a law professor and board member of Transparency International Spain, would lead a group-backed inquiry, which has now begun.
The moves appear to have staved off a challenge to García’s leadership, and so far, attacks from the Socialists’ main rival, the EPP, have been limited. But S&D MEPs say there’s still an air of unease, with some concerned the cleanup hasn’t gone deep enough — while others itch to defend the accused.
Some party activists quietly question if the response was too fast and furious.
Arena’s political future is in doubt, for example, even though she’s faced no criminal charges. Following mounting pressure about her ties to Panzeri, culminating with a POLITICO report on her undeclared travel to Qatar, Arena formally resigned from the human rights subcommittee. The group is not defending her, even as some activists mourn the downfall of someone they see as a sincere champion for human rights causes.
Vocal advocacy for Kaili has also fueled controversy: Italian S&D MEPs drew groans from colleagues when they hawked around a letter about the treatment of Kaili and her daughter, which only garnered 10 signatures.
“I do not believe it was necessary,” García said of the letter. “[If] I worry about the situation in jails, it has to be for everyone, not for a specific MEP.”
The letter also did nothing to warm relations between the S&D’s Spanish and Italian delegations, which have been frosty since before the scandal. The S&D spokesperson in a statement rejected the notion that there are tensions along geographical lines: “There’s no divide between North and South, nor East and West, and there’s no tension between the Italian and Spanish delegations.”
In another camp are MEPs who are looking somewhat suspiciously at their colleagues.
Repasi, the German S&D member, said he is weary of “colleagues that are seemingly lying into your face” — a specific reference to Tarabella, who vocally denied wrongdoing for weeks, only to have allegations surface that he took around €140,000 in bribes from Panzeri, the detained ex-lawmaker.
Repasi added: “It makes you more and more wonder if there is anyone else betting on the fact that he or she might not be caught.”
Jakob Hanke Vela, Karl Mathiesen and Aitor Hernández-Morales contributed reporting.

[ad_2]
#Shock #anger #betrayal #Qatargatehit #Socialist #group
( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

March 2, 2023
The strengths and weaknesses of Volodymyr Zelenskyy

[ad_1]
Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
In the weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion, senior Ukraine opposition politicians and former ministers were brimming with frustration. They’d been imploring President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to meet with them — something he’d not done since his landslide election nearly two years before.
They’d also been urging him to boost funding for the country’s armed forces for months, clamoring for Ukraine’s reservists to be called up as America’s warnings of an invasion intensified — an invasion Zelenskyy still thought unlikely. They wanted intensive war-planning, including the drafting and publication of civil defense orders, so people would know what to do when the guns roared.
“Ukraine is trapped with a national leader who does not think strategically,” Lesia Vasylenko, a lawmaker and member of the liberal and pro-European political Holos party, had told me five days before the invasion.
“I think that’s the thing he will be blamed for later. It’s not about knowing everything. It’s about refusing to have in your entourage experts who know what questions to ask, and having advisers who can contradict and challenge you, and we may pay a price for that,” she’d fumed.
Of course, Zelenskyy’s missteps — as Vasylenko and many other opposition lawmakers see them — have since been forgiven, but they have not been forgotten. And these missteps form the basis of their worries for post-war Ukraine. They see a pattern that will become even more troubling when the guns fall silent, arguing that the president’s strengths as a lionhearted wartime leader are ill-suited for peacetime.
War hasn’t done anything to temper Zelenskyy’s impatience with governing complexities or with institutions that don’t move as fast as he would like or fall in line fast enough. He prefers the big picture, ignores details and likes to rely on an inner circle of trusted friends.
But while the comedian-turned-president is being lauded now — even hero-worshipped — by a starstruck West for his inspirational wartime rhetoric, spellbinding oratory and skill at capturing the hearts of audiences from Washington to London and Brussels to Warsaw, Zelenskyy floundered as president before Russia invaded. Few gave him much chance of being reelected in 2024, as his poll numbers were plummeting — his favorability rating was at 31 percent by the end of 2021.

He had promised a lot — probably too much — but achieved little.
“Ukraine has two main problems: the war in the Donbas and the fear of people investing in the country,” Zelenskyy had said shortly after his election win. But his anti-corruption efforts stalled and were unhurried, while his promise to solve the problem of the Donbas went nowhere. And in his early eagerness to clinch a peace deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who declined a sit-down, some criticized Zelenskyy for thinking too much of his powers of persuasion and charisma.
“He thought peace would be easy to establish because all you needed to do was to ‘look into Putin’s eyes’ and talk to him sincerely,” said lawmaker Mykola Kniazhytskyi.
“He became president without any political experience, or any experience in managing state structures. He thought running a state is actually quite simple. You make decisions and they have to be implemented,” Kniazhytskyi told me. And when things went wrong, his reaction was always, it’s “the fault of predecessors, who need to be imprisoned,” Kniazhytskyi said.
But while the comedian-turned-president is being lauded now, he floundered as president before Russia invaded | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Yet, Zelenskyy’s transformation from disappointing peacetime leader to, in the hyperbolic words of French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, “a new, young and magnificent founding father” of the free world, has been startling.
Even his domestic critics doff their caps to him for his strengths as a superb communicator: His daily addresses to Ukrainians have steadied them, given direction and boosted morale, even when spirits understandably flag. And they acknowledge he likely saved the country by declining U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s offer for “a ride” out of Kyiv.
“He has become a compelling leader,” said Adrian Karatnycky, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of the upcoming “Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the Russian War.” According to Karatnycky, Zelenskyy’s strengths as a communicator match the times. “He’s good at channeling public opinion, but he’s more effective now because the country is much more united and surer about its identity, interests and objectives. He’s still the same guy he was — an actor and performer — but that makes him an ideal war leader because he’s able to embody the public impulse,” he added.
But when normal politics are in play and the public isn’t united, Zelenskyy’s an inconsistent leader who switches the script and recasts the story to chase the vagaries and whims of public opinion. “When the public purpose is clear, he has great strength, and in wartime, he has behind him the absolute power of the state. But when the carriage turns into a pumpkin again, he’s going to have to cope with a very different world,” Karatnycky concluded.
And that world hasn’t really gone away.
Domestic political criticism is mounting — though little noted by an international media still enraptured by Zelenskyy’s charismatic appeal and enthralled by the simple story of David versus Goliath.
Meanwhile, in the Verkhovna Rada — the country’s parliament — frustration is building, with lawmakers complaining they’re being overlooked by a government that was already impatient of oversight before the war and now shuns it almost entirely. Zelenskyy has only met with top opposition leaders once since Russia invaded — and that was nearly a year ago.
“The routine of ministers being questioned by the Rada has been abandoned,” said opposition lawmaker Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, a member of the European Solidarity party and former deputy prime minister in the previous government of former President Petro Poroshenko.
“Wartime does call for urgent decisions to be taken quickly, and it calls for shortened procedures. And so that’s kind of understandable,” she said. “But we are seeing decisions being increasingly centralized and concentrated in fewer hands, and this is having an impact on the balance of political power, and [it’s] damaging to the system of governance we are trying to develop and the strengthening of our democratic institutions in line with the criteria laid out by the EU for convergence.”
Klympush-Tsintsadze is worried the recent wave of anti-corruption arrests was more an exercise in smoke and mirrors in the run-up to February’s EU-Ukraine summit — and one that might be used as an opportunity to centralize power even further. “If someone thinks that centralization of power is the answer to our challenges, that someone is wrong,” she added. “I think it is important to watch very closely how anti-corruption cases develop, and whether there will be transparent investigations, and whether the rule of law will be closely observed.”
According to Kniazhytskyi, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Zelenskyy is a populist politician and shares the personality-focused flaws of this breed. However, what cheers the opposition lawmaker is how Ukrainian civil society has bloomed during the war, how local self-government has been strengthened because of wartime volunteering and mutual assistance and how some state bodies have performed — notably, the railways and the energy sector.
It is this — along with a strong sense of national belonging forged by the conflict — that will form the foundation of a strong post-war Ukraine, he said.

[ad_2]
#strengths #weaknesses #Volodymyr #Zelenskyy
( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 21, 2023
Elon Musk goes to war with researchers

[ad_1]

Press play to listen to this article
Voiced by artificial intelligence.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he promised an era of openness for the social media platform. Yet that transparency will soon come at a price.
On Thursday, the social-networking giant will shut down free and unfettered access to reams of data on the company’s millions of users. As part of that overhaul, researchers worldwide who track misinformation and hate speech will also have their access shut down — unless they stump up the cash to keep the data tap on.
The move is part of Musk’s efforts to make Twitter profitable amid declining advertising revenue, sluggish user growth and cut-throat competition from the likes of TikTok and Instagram.

But the shift has riled academics, infuriated lawmakers and potentially put Twitter at odds with new content-moderation rules in the European Union that require such data access to independent researchers.
“Shutting down or requiring paid access to the researcher API will be devastating,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, who has spent years relying on Twitter’s API to track potentially harmful material online.
“There are inequities in resources for researchers around the world. Scholars at Ivy League institutions in the United States could probably afford to pay,” she added. “But there are scholars all around the world who simply will not have the resources to pay anything for access to this.”
The change would cut free access to Twitter’s so-called application program interface (API), which allowed outsiders to track what happened on the platform on a large scale. The API essentially gave outsiders direct access to the company’s data streams and was kept open to allow researchers to monitor users, including to spot harmful, fake or misleading content.
A team at New York University, for instance, published a report last month on how far wide-reaching Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election had been by directly tapping into Twitter’s API system. Without that access, the level of Kremlin meddling would have been lost to history, according to Joshua Tucker, co-director at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics.
Twitter did not respond to repeated requests to comment on whether this week’s change would affect academics and other independent researchers. The move still may not happen at all, depending on how Twitter tweaks its policies. The company’s development team said via a post on the social network last week it was committed to allowing others to access the platform via some form of API.
“We’ll be back with more details on what you can expect next week,” they said.
Yet the lack of details about who will be affected — and how much the data access will cost from February 9 — has left academics and other researchers scrambling for any details. Meanwhile, many of Twitter’s employees working on trust and safety issues have either been fired or have left the company since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October.
In Europe’s crosshairs
The timing of the change comes as the European Commission on Thursday will publish its first reports from social media companies, including Twitter, about how they are complying with the EU’s so-called code of practice on disinformation, a voluntary agreement between EU legislators and Big Tech firms in which these companies agree to uphold a set of principles to clamp down on such material. The code of practice includes pledges to “empower researchers” by improving their ability to access companies’ data to track online content.
Thierry Breton, Europe’s internal market commissioner, talked to Musk last week to remind him about his obligations regarding the bloc’s content rules, though neither discussed the upcoming shutdown of free data access to the social network.
“We cannot rely only on the assessment of the platforms themselves. If the access to researchers is getting worse, most likely that would go against the spirit of that commitment,” Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s vice president for values and transparency, told POLITICO.
“It’s worrying to see a reversal of the trend on Twitter,” she added in reference to the likely cutback in outsiders’ access to the company’s data.
While the bloc’s disinformation standards are not mandatory, separate content rules from Brussels, known as the Digital Services Act, also directly require social media companies to provide data access to so-called vetted researchers. By complying with the code of practice on disinformation, tech giants can ease some of their compliance obligations under those separate content-moderation rules and avoid fines of up to 6 percent of their revenues if they fall afoul of the standards.
Yet even Twitter’s inclusion in the voluntary standards on disinformation is on shaky ground.
The company submitted its initial report that will be published Wednesday and Musk said he was committed to complying with the rules. But Camino Rojo — who served as head of public policy for Spain and was the main person at Twitter involved in the daily work on the code since November’s mass layoffs — is no longer working at the tech giant as of last week, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions within Twitter. Rojo did not respond to a request for comment.
American lawmakers are also trying to pass legislation that would improve researcher access to social media companies following a series of scandals. The companies’ role in fostering the January 6 Capitol Hill riots has triggered calls for tougher scrutiny, as did the so-called Facebook Files revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen, which highlighted how difficult it remains for outsiders to understand what is happening on these platforms.
“Twitter should be making it easier to study what’s happening on its platform, not harder,” U.S. Representative Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement in reference to the upcoming change to data access. “This is the latest in a series of bad moves from Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership.”
Rebecca Kern contributed reporting from Washington.
This article has been updated to reflect a change in when the European Commission is expected to publish reports under the code of practice on disinformation.

[ad_2]
#Elon #Musk #war #researchers
( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

February 8, 2023
No Transparency In Ongoing Anti-Encroachment Drive: KCC&I

[ad_1]
SRINAGAR: Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industries (KCC&I) on Thursday said that there is no transparency in the ongoing anti-encroachment drive launched by the government.
Addressing a news conference, Sheikh Ashiq, president of KCC&I, as per the news agency KNO said that there is a need to set accountability in the ongoing anti-encroachment drive and that a formal order should be issued in this regard so that the people are aware about it completely.
“We have talked to the higher ups today after the shops were sealed at Aftab Market yesterday and we have been assured that no such measure involving the livelihood of people will be taken,” he said.
He said that they are not here to shield the land mafia and those who have grabbed the land, but the livelihood should not get affected and thus a formal order in this regard is imperative to end the chaos.
“We have urged the government to come clear in this regard. We have been assured that the chaos will end soon,” he said.

[ad_2]
#Transparency #Ongoing #AntiEncroachment #Drive #KCCI
( With inputs from : kashmirlife.net )

February 2, 2023
Karnataka AAP demands transparency in probe into ‘Santro Ravi’s’ Case

[ad_1]
Bengaluru: The Karnataka unit of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has posed several questions to the ruling BJP government in Karnataka about the investigation in power broker ‘Santro Ravi’s’ case.
K.S. Manjunath, also known as ‘Santro Ravi’, was nabbed by the Gujarat Police earlier this moth. The alleged human trafficker was on the run for the past 11 days. Ravi was in the eye of a political storm over his alleged role in police transfers and links to several politicians. He has at least 21 criminal cases lodged against him related to human trafficking, murder, fraud, and kidnapping.
Speaking to the press at the party office here, AAP’s communication in-charge for Karnataka, Brijesh Kalappa, said, “It has been over two weeks since the arrest of Santro Ravi, but the government has not goven any information about the investigation. Are they trying to shield him or do away with him?”
Kalappa asked several pointed questions to the government, including why Ravi was apprehended in Gujarat and not in Karnataka, what was the reason for his visit to Gujarat, and who were the people with whom Ravi had business dealings.
He also questioned the government’s lack of action against those who may have helped Ravi amass a wealth of Rs 1000 crore, and asked why the ED, CBI, or the Income Tax department are not probing how Ravi acquired so much money.
In response to a question about ADGP Alok Kumar’s comment that the investigation only pertains to the harassment complaint filed by Ravi’s wife, Kalappa said, “Why is the ADGP not investigating the links of this white-collar criminal with the politicians? Alok Kumar should not give in to political pressure. If he is working on the behest of politicians, he is incompetent to hold to his post.”
Kalappa also asked who helped Ravi stay in the Kumara Kurpa government guest house and questioned the reported overdose of drugs found in Ravi’s system. He compared the lack of information about Ravi’s case to that of Ajmal Kasab, pointing out that the public had more information about Kasab’s whereabouts and daily activities.
“Of the three political parties, both Congress and JD(S) have fallen silent on the issue of Santro Ravi, after Ravi himself said that he has provided his services to all the three political parties. They are hand-in-glove in both Santro Ravi and Shirki’s case and are happy with the government’s inaction against these criminals,” the AAP leader said.

[ad_2]
#Karnataka #AAP #demands #transparency #probe #Santro #Ravis #Case
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

January 28, 2023
Russian diamonds lose their sparkle in Europe

[ad_1]
Press play to listen to this article
Voiced by artificial intelligence.
In the European bubble in Brussels, diamonds aren’t anyone’s best friend anymore.
The Belgian government’s reluctance to ban imports of Russian diamonds, which would hurt the city of Antwerp, a global hub for the precious stones, has outraged Ukraine and its supporters within the EU.
Ukraine has been pushing to stop the import of Russian rough diamonds because the trade enriches Alrosa, a partially state-owned Russian enterprise.

While such a crackdown wouldn’t inflict the same damage on Vladimir Putin’s economy as a prohibition on all fossil fuels, for example, the continuing flow of Russian diamonds has become a symbol of Western countries putting their national interests above those of Ukraine.
New plans for a fresh round of sanctions against Putin have now reignited the debate over the morality of Europe’s trade in diamonds from Russia.
Belgium is fed up with being scapegoated. According to Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, Putin’s ability to sell diamonds to all western markets now needs to be shut off.
“Russian diamonds are blood diamonds,” De Croo said in a statement to POLITICO. “The revenue for Russia from diamonds can only stop if the access of Russian diamonds to Western markets is no longer possible. On forging that solid front, Belgium is working with its partners.”
The West’s economic war against Russia has already had an impact. Partly because of U.S. sanctions, the Russian diamond trade in Antwerp has already been severely hit. But those rough Russian diamonds are diverted to other diamond markets, and often find their way back to the West, cut and polished.
That’s why Belgium is working with partners to introduce a “watertight” traceability system for diamonds, a Belgian official said. If it works, this could hurt Moscow more than if Washington or Brussels are flying solo.
“Europe and North America together represent 70 percent of the world market for natural diamonds,” the official said. “Based on this market power, we can ensure the necessary transparency in the global diamond sector and structurally ban blood diamonds from the global market. The war in Ukraine provides for a strong momentum.”
Sanctions at last?
Belgium’s offensive comes just when its position on sanctioning Russian diamonds is under renewed attack — not just from other EU countries and Belgian opposition parties, but also within De Croo’s own government.
According to Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, Putin’s ability to sell diamonds to all western markets now needs to be shut off | Laurie Dieffembacq/Belga Mag/AFP via Getty Images
The EU is preparing a new round of sanctions against Russia ahead of the first anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Countries such as Poland and Lithuania are again urging the EU to include diamonds. However, one EU diplomat said the discussion is now more an “intra-Belgian fight than a European one.”
De Croo leads a coalition of seven ideologically diverse parties. The greens and socialists within his government are pushing him to actively lobby for hitting diamonds in the next EU sanctions round.
In particular, Vooruit, the Dutch-speaking socialist party, is making a renewed push. Belgian MP Vicky Reynaert will be introducing a new resolution in the Belgian Parliament proposing an import ban.
“It’s becoming impossible to explain that Belgium is not open to blocking Russian diamonds,” Reynaert said. “We want Belgium to actively engage with the European Commission to take action.” Belgian socialist MEP Kathleen Van Brempt is pushing the same idea at the European level.
But the initiative from the socialists isn’t likely to deliver an import ban, or even import quotas, four officials from other Belgian political parties said. De Croo is now set on an international solution instead. No one expects the socialists to destabilize De Croo’s fragile Belgian coalition government over the issue of diamonds.
Even if all seven parties in the Belgian government did agree to hit Russian diamonds, there would be another key obstacle.
In the complicated Belgian political system, the regional governments would have a say as well. The government of the northern region of Flanders is against an import ban. That government is led by the Flemish nationalists, whose party president, Bart De Wever, is also the mayor of Antwerp. “Nothing will change their minds on this,” one of the Belgian officials said of the nationalists’ position.
Blood diamonds
Belgium hopes that by building an international coalition to trace Russia’s “blood diamonds” it will finally stop being seen as a roadblock to action.
The industry agrees. “Sanctions are not the solution,” said Tom Neys of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre. “An international framework of complete transparency, with the same standards of compliance as Antwerp, can be that solution,” he said.
Such a transatlantic plan would have a huge impact, according to Hans Merket, a researcher with the International Peace Information Service, a human rights nonprofit organization. “That would have much more effect than the current U.S. sanctions, which are being circumvented,” said Merket.
But the devil will be in the details. Will Belgium succeed in building a transatlantic coalition? Are consumers willing to pay more for their diamonds, or does it still risk diverting the goods to other markets where traders are less diligent?
One of the Belgian officials was doubtful of Belgium’s chances of success. If the international alliance falters, Belgium and the EU should consider moving ahead on their own to convince the rest of the world to act. “But let’s give De Croo a shot at this,” the official said.

[ad_2]
#Russian #diamonds #lose #sparkle #Europe
( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

January 24, 2023