Month: October 2021

A tech body backed by the Australian units of Facebook, Google and Twitter said on Monday it has set up an industry panel to adjudicate complaints over misinformation, a day after the government threatened tougher laws over false and defamatory online posts.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week labeled social media “a coward’s palace,” while the government said on Sunday it was looking at measures to make social media companies more responsible, including forcing legal liability onto the platforms for the content published on them.

The issue of damaging online posts has emerged as a second battlefront between Big Tech and Australia, which last year passed a law to make platforms pay license fees for content, sparking a temporary Facebook blackout in February.

The Digital Industry Group Inc. (DIGI), which represents the Australian units of Facebook Inc., Alphabet’s Google and Twitter Inc., said its new misinformation oversight subcommittee showed the industry was willing to self-regulate against damaging posts.

The tech giants had already agreed a code of conduct against misinformation, “and we wanted to further strengthen it with independent oversight from experts, and public accountability,” DIGI Managing Director Sunita Bose said in a statement.

A three-person “independent complaints sub-committee” would seek to resolve complaints about possible breaches of the code conduct via a public website, DIGI said, but would not take complaints about individual posts.

The industry’s code of conduct includes items such as taking action against misinformation affecting public health, which would include the novel coronavirus.

DIGI, which also represents Apple Inc. and TikTok, said it could issue a public statement if a company was found to have violated the code of conduct or revoke its signatory status with the group.

Reset Australia, an advocate group focused on the influence of technology on democracy, said the oversight panel was “laughable” as it involved no penalties and the code of conduct was optional.

“DIGI’s code is not much more than a PR stunt given the negative PR surrounding Facebook in recent weeks,” said Reset Australia Director of tech policy Dhakshayini Sooriyakumaran in a statement, urging regulation for the industry.

Source: Voice of America

A key U.N. summit tasked with protecting biodiversity officially opens in China and online Monday, as countries meet to tackle pollution and prevent mass extinction weeks before the COP26 climate conference.

Beijing, the world’s biggest polluter, has sought to position itself in recent years as a world leader on climate issues after Washington’s withdrawal from international commitments under the Trump administration.

The online session that begins Monday afternoon — setting the stage for a face-to-face meeting in April — will see parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) working out the details of a new document that will set targets for protecting ecosystems by 2030.

Up for debate are the “30 by 30” plan to give 30% of lands and oceans protected status — a measure supported by a broad coalition of nations, as well as a goal to stop creating plastic waste.

China has not yet committed to the “30 by 30” plan.

This year’s COP15 gathering, hosted in the southwest city of Kunming, was originally set for 2020 and postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Around one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction amid human encroachment on habitats, over-exploitation, pollution, the spread of invasive species, and climate change.

The CBD has been ratified by 195 countries and the European Union — although not the United States, the world’s biggest historical polluter — with parties meeting every two years.

Division over targets

China said on Friday it has “given high priority to the protection of biodiversity by establishing a network of protected areas and national parks.”

And this week Beijing is expected to unveil a statement known as the Kunming Declaration, which would set the tone for its environmental leadership.

But sharp divisions remain over the targets for urgent action over the next decade.

France and Costa Rica are among a coalition of support for the initiative to declare 30% of oceans and lands protected areas before 2030.

But when scientists called for more ambitious protection of half of Earth’s biodiversity, Brazil and South Africa strongly opposed.

Other sources of tension surround financing, with developing nations asking rich countries to foot the bill for their ecological transitions.

These issues will be at the heart of negotiation sessions set to take place in Geneva in January 2022.

The biodiversity discussions at COP15 are separate from weightier COP26 summit set to begin next month in Glasgow, where world leaders are under pressure to act on the climate crisis.

The Glasgow summit faces a packed agenda dominated by efforts to persuade countries such as China and India to commit to binding “nationally determined contributions” towards net zero emissions.

China has pledged to peak carbon emissions in 2030 and reach zero emissions by 2060, but environmentalists have flagged the huge amount of coal-fired power being brought online in recent years by the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases.

Source: Voice of America

After water levels at a California dam fell to historic lows this summer, the main hydropower plant it feeds was shut down. At the Hoover Dam in Nevada — one of the country’s biggest hydropower generators — production is down by 25%. If extreme drought persists, federal officials say a dam in Arizona could stop producing electricity in coming years.

Severe drought across the West drained reservoirs this year, slashing hydropower production and further stressing the region’s power grids. And as extreme weather becomes more common with climate change, grid operators are adapting to swings in hydropower generation.

“The challenge is finding the right resource, or mix of resources, that can provide the same energy and power outputs as hydro,” said Lindsay Buckley, a spokesperson for the California Energy Commission.

U.S. hydropower generation is expected to decline 14% this year compared with 2020, according to a recent federal forecast. The projected drops are concentrated in western states that rely more heavily on hydropower, with California’s production expected to fall by nearly half.

The reductions complicate grid operations since hydropower is a relatively flexible renewable energy source that can be easily turned up or down, experts say, such as in the evenings when the sun goes down and solar energy generation drops.

“Hydro is a big part of the plan for making the whole system work together,” said Severin Borenstein, a renewable energy expert at the University of California, Berkeley and board member of the California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s electric grid.

Borenstein noted that hydropower is important as the state works to build out its electricity storage options, including by installing batteries that can dispatch energy when it is needed.

Ben Kujala of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, which handles power planning for the Columbia River Basin, also noted that grid operators have adapted how they deploy hydropower in recent years to ensure that it complements solar and wind energy.

Power grids linking western regions also offer some relief. While California can face multi-year stretches of dry weather, the Pacific Northwest usually gets enough precipitation in the winter to recover and produce hydropower to export.

But this year, the Northwest was also hit by extreme heat and less precipitation, according to Crystal Raymond, a climate change researcher at the University of Washington. While energy planners account for drought years, Raymond said climate change over the long term may further reduce the amounts of melting snow in mountains that fill reservoirs in the spring.

In August, California officials shut down the Edward Hyatt hydropower plant for the first time in its 60-year history after water levels at Lake Oroville sank to historic lows. The plant can produce enough power for up to 750,000 homes, but typically operates at lower levels.

At Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border, federal officials recently said there is a 34% chance that the Glen Canyon Dam won’t be able to produce power at some point in 2023, up from a 3% chance for next year, if extreme drought persists.

Declines in hydropower production in California this summer coincided with heat waves, forcing the state to buy extra power. To prevent outages in late September, state officials said they were deploying temporary emergency generators.

“The drought did compound the difficulty of meeting demand,” said Jordan Kern, an energy and water systems expert at North Carolina State University.

In some northwestern states, hydropower production has reverted closer to normal levels after dipping just below their 10-year ranges earlier this year. California’s hydropower levels remained at the bottom of the state’s 10-year range through June. Federal forecasts say much of the West is likely to continue to see drought conditions through the end of the year.

Declines in hydropower production mean production bumps for other energy sources. Natural gas power is expected to rise 7% in California and 6% in the Northwest this year over last, according to federal forecasts. Coal generation is forecast to rise 12% in the Northwest.

The California Air Resources Board says the state has been able to continue reducing the electricity sector’s greenhouse gas emissions despite swings in hydropower generation in recent years.

Source: Voice of America

Facebook, in the aftermath of damning testimony that its platforms harm children, will be introducing several features including prompting teens to take a break using its photo sharing app Instagram, and “nudging” teens if they are repeatedly looking at the same content that’s not conducive to their well-being.

The Menlo Park, California-based Facebook is also planning to introduce new controls on an optional basis so that parents or guardians can supervise what their teens are doing online. These initiatives come after Facebook announced late last month that it was pausing work on its Instagram for Kids project. But critics say the plan lacks details, and they are skeptical that the new features would be effective.

The new controls were outlined on Sunday by Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs, who made the rounds on various Sunday news shows including CNN’s “State of the Union” and ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” where he was grilled about Facebook’s use of algorithms as well as its role in spreading harmful misinformation ahead of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

“We are constantly iterating in order to improve our products,” Clegg told Dana Bash on “State of the Union” Sunday. “We cannot, with a wave of the wand, make everyone’s life perfect. What we can do is improve our products, so that our products are as safe and as enjoyable to use.”

Clegg said that Facebook has invested $13 billion over the past few years in making sure to keep the platform safe and that the company has 40,000 people working on these issues. And while Clegg said that Facebook has done its best to keep harmful content out of its platforms, he says he was open for more regulation and oversight.

“We need greater transparency,” he told CNN’s Bash. He noted that the systems that Facebook has in place should be held to account, if necessary, by regulation so that “people can match what our systems say they’re supposed to do from what actually happens.”

The flurry of interviews came after whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former data scientist with Facebook, went before Congress last week to accuse the social media platform of failing to make changes to Instagram after internal research showed apparent harm to some teens and of being dishonest in its public fight against hate and misinformation. Haugen’s accusations were supported by tens of thousands of pages of internal research documents she secretly copied before leaving her job in the company’s civic integrity unit.

Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a children’s digital advocacy group, said that he doesn’t think introducing controls to help parents supervise teens would be effective since many teens set up secret accounts.

He was also dubious about how effective nudging teens to take a break or move away from harmful content would be. He noted Facebook needs to show exactly how they would implement it and offer research that shows these tools are effective.

“There is tremendous reason to be skeptical,” he said. He added that regulators need to restrict what Facebook does with its algorithms.

He said he also believes that Facebook should cancel its Instagram project for kids.

When Clegg was grilled by both Bash and Stephanopoulos in separate interviews about the use of algorithms in amplifying misinformation ahead of Jan. 6 riots, he responded that if Facebook removed the algorithms people would see more, not less hate speech, and more, not less, misinformation.

Clegg told both hosts that the algorithms serve as “giant spam filters.”

Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who chairs the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, told Bash in a separate interview Sunday that it’s time to update children’s privacy laws and offer more transparency in the use of algorithms.

“I appreciate that he is willing to talk about things, but I believe the time for conversation is done,” said Klobuchar, referring to Clegg’s plan. “The time for action is now.”

Source: Voice of America