Technology

The problem is false positive and negative rates.

We're on track for some 600-700 mass shooters this year.

The US has 300 million social media users.

So in a given year, 0.00023% of social media users will turn out to be mass shooters.

So even if we had an algorithm that was 99.99% accurate at identifying a potential mass shooter from social media, we'd still have a less than 1% chance of correctly identifying a mass shooter from social media posts.

So what's the cost of false positives? Do people flagged by such a system get harassed by law enforcement? If they are sovereign citizen type gun nuts or paranoid schizophrenics, does the additional law enforcement attention potentially instigate shootings or standoffs that wouldn't have otherwise occurred at a higher rate than the successful prevention of mass shootings?

And what's the false negative rate? Because if only a small number of mass shooters are correctly identified by such an algorithm at a high rate of false positives but a majority of shooters actually slip through the cracks as false negatives, there too is the potential for overreliance on an algorithm to harm progress towards alternative solutions (such as advancing legislation banning firearm possession for people with mental health issues).

AI analysis of social media combined with other data sources becomes a more appropriate tool in a situation like "we have three suspects based on multiple other factors for who is an active shooter - did any of the three have a recent stressor in their life such as a job loss?" In that case an 80% correct model could be quite helpful.

I kind of feel that trawling social media looking for the words of potential mass shooters isn't going to be the thing that solves - or even slows down - the mass shooting problem that the USA has.

Yep. The CCP's social credit system was always going to be the end game of surveillance capitalism. It will be spearheaded by conservatives because they're the most religious, authoritarian, and have an innate desire to restrict social progress and enforce their views on everyone else.

The best part is they'll claim it's completely different and represents Freedom™️ because it'll be established by capitalism... Even though it's functionally identical, the CCP are more capitalist than communist, and western conservatives jizz their pants at the level of power and control the CCP have over the Chinese people.

Yeah, my company for sure checks all social media during hiring background checks.

Public posts have no expectation of privacy.

Hahahaha.

'Warrant' for public data.

"A regular 4th amendment violation right here! Everyone look - the government is looking at my Instagram without a warrant!"

Please. At this point the NSA has probably already developed their own internal LLM based on illegally collected communications intercepts combined with many other data sources and is using that to aid in parallel construction efforts.

But no, let's worry about whether what you post on Instagram should need a warrant, because somehow you have an expectation of privacy for the things you publicly post on the Internet...

Lemmy is hilarious sometimes.

Fun fact: The US government is allowed to read any emails in cloud storage older than 6 months old without a warrant.

On the other hand, if you don't want to be scrutinized by everyone don't put your whole life online for everyone to see and judge.

Nobody is going to respect your privacy if you do not respect your own privacy.

Libel. Slander only applies to spoken statements.

I have recently gotten off telegram and my instances of being questioned by the CBP (for no reason at all) have virtually stopped.

What kind of questions did you usually get? And did you have "who can find me by my number" set to "everybody"? Because the CBP gets your telephone number in different ways (most likely ESTA if you're using that), and then they can easily see your Telegram account.

I have Telegram and travel often, and I have never gotten any weird questioning from CBP other than the normal "what are you doing here and when are you heading back". Then again, no one can find my account via telephone number...