Livestreaming A Massacre
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2019
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s show, April Glaser and Will Oremus first talk to two researchers who’ve uncovered new information about the way the U.S. government trains its facial recognition software. According to their findings, the government uses photos of immigrants, children, and even deceased prisoners to train their programs.
Then NBC News reporter Ben Collins talks about the role of online extremism in last week’s New Zealand attacks, specifically with regard to Facebook and other platforms that allow live broadcasting. Collins also discusses how the shooter left a manifesto riddled with white supremacist signals from online communities and the difficulty of reporting on these racist communities without broadening their reach.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future. |
| 0:04.6 | I'm Will Oremus. |
| 0:05.8 | And I'm April Glazer. |
| 0:13.9 | Hey, everyone, welcome to If Then. |
| 0:15.8 | We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America. |
| 0:21.8 | We're recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 19th. |
| 0:25.3 | Last week, we talked about how companies are scraping everyone's social media photos to help train their face recognition systems, specifically to make their data banks of faces more diverse. |
| 0:35.7 | We'll start today's show with a quick follow-up on face |
| 0:38.3 | recognition, focusing on a new report from a team of researchers who collaborated to learn where a |
| 0:43.5 | government standards body is getting its training data, thanks in part to some Freedom of |
| 0:47.7 | Information Act requests. They announced to their findings this week in Slate, and the first line of |
| 0:52.7 | their story is, if you thought IBM using |
| 0:54.9 | quietly scraped flicker images to train facial recognition systems was bad, it gets worse. |
| 1:00.1 | Speaking of bad, we'll talk to Ben Collins from NBC News about the role of online extremism |
| 1:05.1 | and of platforms like Facebook that allowed live broadcasting in last week's New Zealand attacks. |
| 1:11.2 | And as always, we'll end with Don't Close My Tabs, some of the best things we saw on the web this week. |
| 1:15.3 | That's all coming up on If Then. |
| 1:18.7 | Welcome back to the show. |
| 1:20.6 | Our first guest this week are Os Kee's and Nikki Stevens. |
| 1:25.0 | Oss Kee's is a PhD student at the University of Washington and an inaugural Microsoft Ada |
| 1:30.3 | Lovelace fellow. |
| 1:31.6 | They're also a lapsed software developer. |
... |
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