Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

Monthly Archive September 2022

Stripe shirt eyes covered
Little Caucasians blond boy child 3-4 years old covered his face with his hands alone in the dark and is afraid. The concept of social problems and dysfunctional families, child abuse. Copy space.

Twitter’s Censorship — Child Porn (Shrug… ), MDs’ Doubts: NO!

Twitter censored doctors and researchers who raised doubts about COVID strategies but seemed helpless about child porn

Earlier this week, we looked at The Verge’s groundbreaking coverage of Twitter’s inability to prioritize and address child porn (and non-consensual nudity) at the site. One of the authors, Casey Newton, followed up Wednesday at Platformer,, filling readers in on new facts that he and Zoe Schiffer learned from a former Twitter employee after their story was published. One was that “Twitter’s move would draw Apple’s attention to the significant amount of porn on the service, and potentially place new restrictions on its iOS app or even remove it from the App Store.” That’s no idle threat, Newton reminds us. In 2018, Tumblr was dropped from the Apple app store when “child sexual abuse material (CSAM) was found on the Read More ›

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courtroom attastor talking to magistrate

Can You Trust Wikipedia to Decide Your Courtroom Fate?

Should judges and lawyers rely on Wikipedia to guide court case decisions? Researchers devised a clever test to see if they do

Wired recently ran an article entitled “Wikipedia Articles Sway Some Legal Judgments.” The subtitle declared: “An experiment shows that overworked judges turn to the crowdsourced encyclopedia for guidance when making legal decisions.” Wired’s headline oversold the story but the topic is worth a close look. Researchers at Maynooth University in Ireland, MIT, and New York’s Cornell University conducted a study to test whether Wikipedia articles about Irish court decisions affected judicial rulings in subsequent cases in Ireland. The researchers selected Irish Supreme Court decisions, analyzed them, and posted about 75 articles in Wikipedia describing those decisions. They wanted to see whether Irish courts were then using the Wikipedia articles when writing their own judicial opinions. In English, Irish, Canadian, American, Read More ›

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Police tactical team gathered round a house

Swatting Goes Into Politics — as Congresswoman Greene Discovered

Swatting — calling the police and pretending that a violent incident is taking place at a given address — can kill the victim

This has been a summer to remember for U.S. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia). She was “swatted” twice. The first false report that brought the police to her home was Wednesday, August 23: According to the first Rome PD report, five officers responded to a call on Wednesday during the initial attempted swatting. The caller claimed that a man had been “shot five times in a bathtub” at Greene’s home, and there was a woman and possibly children still in potential danger. On the way to Greene’s house, police realized who the homeowner was, but “due to the nature of the call,” police “formed up” at a nearby intersection and made a “tactical approach.” Rome PD provided Ars with no Read More ›