TikTok Meets EU Commissioner About Tackling Fake News

  • TikTok’s new chief executive Kevin Mayer spoke to one of the European Union’s top officials on Tuesday about tackling disinformation on the social media platform.
  • Thierry Breton, the Commissioner who is responsible for the EU’s internal market and shaping digital policy, tweeted that he had a “good conversation” with Mayer. 
  • The COmmissioner has urged major platforms to sign up to the EU’s Code of Practice to “address the spread of fake news & improve transparency”. It is not yet clear if TikTok has signed up.
  • The US Government has expressed concern regarding TikTok’s links to China and censorship on the platform and has launched a national security review into the company’s acquisition of social media music app Musical.ly.

Facebook Moderators Incorrectly Label Content 300,000 Times a Day

  • A report by NYU Stern has detailed how Facebook content moderators review posts, pictures, and videos that have been flagged by AI or reported by users about 3 million times a day. 
  • CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a white paper that moderators “make the wrong call in more than one out of every 10 cases.” This equates to 300,000 mistakes each day. 
  • Facebook employs about 15,000 content moderators directly or indirectly, who have roughly 150 seconds to decide if a post meets or violates community standards.
  • According to the report, a major problem is that “major social media companies have marginalized the people who do this work, outsourcing the vast majority of it to third-party vendors.”

Man Arrested Following Rape of Child in Manchester

  • A 24-year-old man has been arrested after a child was raped in a field in Greater Manchester.
  • Police were called at around 7.45pm on Monday to the scene, which is near a primary school.
  • A cordon and a police tent remained at the scene on Tuesday morning.
  • The man is in custody for questioning.
  • Specialist officers alongside family are supporting the girl – whose age has not been released.

MP’s Demand Boris Johnson Create National Recovery Plan for England’s Schools

  • Unions and cross-party MPs have called for an immediate plan to get all pupils back to school in England from September. They say this   may require support staff, the requisitioning of public buildings and extra help for disadvantaged students. 
  • This call comes amid the government admitting that most primary pupils in England would not get back to the classroom before summer, as planned. 
  • Dr Mary Bousted, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU) said “the consequences of Covid-19 are going to be felt in our education system for months to come”.

Extremists Exploiting Gap in UK Law

  • Extremists are exploiting gaps in existing UK law to push their agenda, a former counter-terror chief has warned as a major review of current legislation is launched.
  • Sir Mark Rowley, former assistant commissioner for specialist operations at the Metropolitan police, has been asked to lead a review to examine whether existing legislation adequately deals with “hateful extremism”.
  • Rowley said: “Extremism, hate crime and terrorism have all been increasing challenges for our communities and society as a whole”.
  • The Commission for Countering Extremism (CCE) first major report found far-right activists were exploiting community tensions by going to towns and cities and distorting the truth in an effort to turn residents against minorities, particularly Muslims.

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