UK unveils extremism blocking tool

So it looks like one of two things has happened:<p>1) The British government have built AI tech capable of identifying extremist views in any video at the incredibly low price of £600000, doing what no other technology company in the world is capable of.<p>2) A smart consulting company has convinced the British government to waste £600000 on building a model that can flag certain videos from a very specific training set but in real world use is horribly innacurate and completely useless.

What&#x27;s really worrying about this to me, is how deep this goes. Hacker News is a relatiely well informed audience about this topic. We understand:<p>* that the false positive rate is going to result in more legal material being taken down than ISIS propaganda by an order of magnitude even if what they claim is true.<p>* That the success rate on the data set you&#x27;ve been training on is highly likely to completely mis-represent your true success rate.<p>* That the processing power required for this is likely prohibitive. Not capable of being run real-time, and any actual implementation will have much worse results due to performance optimization.<p>That&#x27;s laying aside the deep and obvious problems with the government forcing private companies to censor legal speech with no over-sight or even a human in the loop. Let alone law enforcement in the loop.<p>What this press release is, is a calculated attack on free speech. Deliberately misleading the public about the capabilities of technology to attack the technology companies they claim to want to work with. To apply public pressure to private companies to do police enforcement jobs.<p>The only response to this is to state the obvious: If the government wants something censored they can apply to a court injunction as is due process, and in the mean time, let&#x27;s get rid of this abhorrent stream of Home Secretaries.

&quot;ASI Data Science said the software is capable of detecting 94% of IS&#x27;s online activity, with an accuracy of 99.995%.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not sure what this means. It may be a 0.005% false positive rate. If they&#x27;re scanning, say, Youtube videos, then the resulting false positive number would be huge.

Why does the UK seem to take 1984 as a guide book, rather than a cautionary tale?<p>As much as I applaud efforts to stop extremism, censorship in this form is concerning. Who is the arbiter of what counts as extremism? Obviously any website urging people to join Daesh should be blocked by their standard, but what about websites promoting the PLO, or the PKK? How about websites about the Rohingya? The Burmese government certainly seems to think they are terrorists.

Hands up those who remember the previous incarnation of this, the broadcast ban on Sinn Fein: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Xr8bsOgmGhI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Xr8bsOgmGhI</a> &#x2F; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;1&#x2F;hi&#x2F;4409447.stm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;1&#x2F;hi&#x2F;4409447.stm</a>

Censorship is never something to get excited about. It is a slippery slope towards the event in Spain last year when the government misused censorship allowances to silence political opposition[1].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;no-justification-spanish-internet-censorship-during-catalonian-referendum" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;no-justification-spani...</a>

As always this whole thing is pointless and stupid. As things get blocked, the posters of this material will tweak it until it passes the AI-driven censors.<p>It&#x27;d all be a laughable trainwreck... if it didn&#x27;t set further precedent of censorship and potentially destroy people who fall into false positives.

Will it block comments like &quot;If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.&quot; ?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk&#x2F;politics&#x2F;theresa-may-mein-kampf-adolf-hitler-nazi-vince-cable-liberal-democrat-conservatives-a7825381.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk&#x2F;politics&#x2F;theresa-may-me...</a>

We all ultimately follow the Chinese when it comes to tech. Just after much drama and a couple terror attacks.

What a sad state. It starts with &quot;protecting&quot; people from terrorism, but it will quickly devolve into humanity-stunting censorship. Instead, educate people about terrorism. We cannot defer education in the hopes of protecting people. This never, ever ends the way it is intended.<p>One day I fear I will open my eyes to find parts of the world blurry, because of state-mandated image filtering device, embedded in my eye.

Blocking porn =&gt; blocking &quot;Xtreme&quot; Content =&gt; Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, never at war with Eurasia

And what about academics that study these phenomenon? It will encourage research to go underground.

If it doesn’t spot The Telegraph, I think it needs better training data.

If the government were actually serious about cracking down on extremism, they wouldn&#x27;t block the content, they&#x27;d intercept it and subtly change it to make it ridiculous and humiliating for ISIS. This really wouldn&#x27;t be that hard.<p>Turning the notion of ISIS recruits into a joke (which, sadly, they actually kind of are) would potentially stem their flow. Censorship, however, will be interpreted by potential recruits as &quot;we are afraid of the truth&quot;, will harden their resolve and they&#x27;ll figure out a way to get around it anyway.<p>Amber Rudd and Theresa May are simply trying to create the infrastructure for a police state, though, using ISIS as a pretext. They&#x27;re authoritarians at heart and always will be.

Does anyone believe this will work as well as they imply it will?

as long as they acknowledge a communist can also be extremist.