
Social media platforms 'vectors of hate' for extremists
Australia's Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism Jillian Segal handed down her report to provide a pathway to stamping out discrimination against Jewish people.
It recommended intervention to "confront the spread of anti-Semitism by ensuring regulatory settings for the online world keep up with those in the real world".
"Online platforms are major vectors of hate ... however, addressing anti-Semitism online is a complex and multifaceted challenge, given the global nature of much of the content," the report reads.
It calls for algorithms to be made transparent in a bid to prevent the "amplification of online hate".
Asked if rising racial vilification and intolerance could be attributed to polarising views, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese pointed to social media use.
"There is an impact of social media, where algorithms work to reinforce people's views," he told reporters.
Mr Albanese said people's views were being reinforced online and pushed to extremes.
"Australians want a country that is in the centre, you know, that has different views that we debate respectfully and have dialogue respectfully," he said.
The report found efforts should be made to reduce the influence of bots, particularly those overseas peddling discord behind the veil of anonymity.
Law enforcement agencies should be supported to prioritise the identification and prosecution of those who commit offences online with co-operation from the host platforms, it says.
Ms Segal said societies needed to understand how to deal with the social media platforms and convey to them their responsibilities to prevent AI from spreading anti-Semitism.
"It's an ongoing piece of work, but it is work that has to be done by each country, but also countries coming together," she said.
Elon Musk's chatbot, Grok, recently began praising Adolf Hitler on social media platform X, and started replying to posts with anti-Semitic comments.
Grok's hateful tirade appeared following an update at the weekend, and uses data from X.

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Sydney Morning Herald
3 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
The clean energy era is arriving. Is your power company ready?
As long as the lights stay on and power bills aren't too high, most of us aren't overly fussed about who supplies our electricity. That may be about to change, executives in the industry believe, as Australians' booming uptake of solar panels and batteries radically reshapes the market, sending customers searching for the most effective plans to help run their homes on cheap or free energy and profit from selling surplus solar to the grid. Origin Energy was first among the nation's big power companies to start preparing for a future that looks something like this. Five years ago, it purchased a minority stake in UK-based power retailing disruptor Octopus Energy and, with it, the perpetual licence to use its market-leading customer software platform, known as Kraken, in Australia. 'Just like in fintech, there is a digital revolution in energy,' Octopus co-founder Greg Jackson explains. The heart of Kraken is its advanced data and machine learning capability, which collapses multiple legacy customer-service functions, like billing, sales and meter enquiries, into just the one, avoiding the need to bounce callers between departments, and cutting down the company's 'cost to serve'. But perhaps its most important feature in the accelerating shift to green energy is its ability to give customers access to real-time variable power pricing (think Uber as opposed to taxis), and products that automate when to run households' solar panels or hot-water units, charge electric cars and discharge batteries based on when they will get the best price. Octopus, it turned out, was onto something. In less than 10 years, it has gone from a tech start-up selling energy to zero customers to 7.5 million accounts – more than a quarter of all homes in Britain – and is considered one of the world's most valuable unicorns. Its Kraken platform, meanwhile, has proven so successful that it is licensed to utilities in 18 countries. Now, Kraken is poised to be spun out into a standalone entity with a possible valuation of up to £10 billion ($20 billion), according to British media reports earlier this week. Australian investment analysts at UBS and Macquarie value Kraken considerably less than that – UBS's Tom Allen assumes a valuation of £3.4 billion ($7 billion) to £5.8 billion, depending on its growth in sales. Either way, he says, Origin had made a 'fantastic' investment and may be headed for a considerable payday. But Kraken is paying off for Origin in more ways than that, says Jon Briskin, the company's executive general manager of retail. Since Origin migrated its 4.7 million Australian customers onto Kraken in 2023, customer loyalty scores have lifted, customer churn has been falling and complaints to the ombudsman have been fewer. Loading In a fast-changing world where more customers have solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, the tech has also enabled Origin to become more nimble in developing and rolling out futuristic retail products, such as the EV Power Up. With more than 2 million EVs projected to be on the road by 2030, the product means customers can use their app to nominate when they want their EV charged by, and the software automatically chooses the best times of day to charge at an ultra-low capped rate of 8¢ a kilowatt-hour (that could charge up a Tesla Model Y for $5). With home battery uptake on the brink of surging since the Albanese government this month introduced rebates wiping 30 per cent off the cost, Kraken has also given Origin an edge in building out its 'virtual power plant' (VPP) network, whereby Origin pays customers a fee to let it aggregate the energy stored across thousands of their homes. Origin's VPP called Loop – a far-flung network of interconnected household devices including solar panels, batteries, electric cars and appliances that can be ramped up or down to inject bursts of energy into the grid or help address imbalances – is the biggest in the nation, with more than 400,000 devices under orchestration. Briskin says the Loop virtual power plant today sits at 1.5 gigawatts – bigger than a typical coal-fired power station. 'This orchestration is real, it's here, it's building fast,' Briskin says. 'I certainly feel like we are at a competitive advantage to have that technology that can move at greater speed.' While the value of Kraken to Origin's operations today overwhelmingly stems from the lower cost to serve customers, its ability to expand VPPs and co-ordinate household electricity usage and output would become increasingly critical in the fight for customers in the future, UBS's Tom Allen says. 'Energy retailing in the next five to 10 years will be won by who has the best technology to orchestrate behind-the-meter loads and be able to offer incentives to customers and dynamic pricing signals,' he says. 'That's what the future model will look like – it makes sense to be investing in that extra capability now.' While not everyone will be hyper-engaged and may not want to think about optimal times to run appliances, more than 80 per cent of Origin customers are already 'digital-only', Briskin says, with many simply using their app to track their energy usage, and receive alerts if it is trending too high. Origin is not alone in recognising the need to more efficiently manage customers and their energy usage in the shift to cleaner, more dispersed sources of power. We are going from a traditional commodity billing relationship to a much more complex and integrated service provision. Jo Egan, AGL's chief customer officer Last year, AGL snapped up a 20 per cent stake in the scalable and flexible Kaluza technology platform for $150 million, and has begun the process of migrating its 4 million power and gas customers in the coming years. Key drivers behind its adoption of the platform were the need to bring new and innovative energy retail products to the market more quickly in response to customers' fast-changing needs, says Jo Egan, AGL's chief customer officer. 'We are going from a traditional commodity billing relationship to a much more complex and integrated service provision … it's a completely different model,' says Egan. 'When you are working in a world like we are now, where the energy market is changing so frequently, the best situation is that you can deploy and innovate products quite rapidly and at low cost.'

The Age
3 hours ago
- The Age
The clean energy era is arriving. Is your power company ready?
As long as the lights stay on and power bills aren't too high, most of us aren't overly fussed about who supplies our electricity. That may be about to change, executives in the industry believe, as Australians' booming uptake of solar panels and batteries radically reshapes the market, sending customers searching for the most effective plans to help run their homes on cheap or free energy and profit from selling surplus solar to the grid. Origin Energy was first among the nation's big power companies to start preparing for a future that looks something like this. Five years ago, it purchased a minority stake in UK-based power retailing disruptor Octopus Energy and, with it, the perpetual licence to use its market-leading customer software platform, known as Kraken, in Australia. 'Just like in fintech, there is a digital revolution in energy,' Octopus co-founder Greg Jackson explains. The heart of Kraken is its advanced data and machine learning capability, which collapses multiple legacy customer-service functions, like billing, sales and meter enquiries, into just the one, avoiding the need to bounce callers between departments, and cutting down the company's 'cost to serve'. But perhaps its most important feature in the accelerating shift to green energy is its ability to give customers access to real-time variable power pricing (think Uber as opposed to taxis), and products that automate when to run households' solar panels or hot-water units, charge electric cars and discharge batteries based on when they will get the best price. Octopus, it turned out, was onto something. In less than 10 years, it has gone from a tech start-up selling energy to zero customers to 7.5 million accounts – more than a quarter of all homes in Britain – and is considered one of the world's most valuable unicorns. Its Kraken platform, meanwhile, has proven so successful that it is licensed to utilities in 18 countries. Now, Kraken is poised to be spun out into a standalone entity with a possible valuation of up to £10 billion ($20 billion), according to British media reports earlier this week. Australian investment analysts at UBS and Macquarie value Kraken considerably less than that – UBS's Tom Allen assumes a valuation of £3.4 billion ($7 billion) to £5.8 billion, depending on its growth in sales. Either way, he says, Origin had made a 'fantastic' investment and may be headed for a considerable payday. But Kraken is paying off for Origin in more ways than that, says Jon Briskin, the company's executive general manager of retail. Since Origin migrated its 4.7 million Australian customers onto Kraken in 2023, customer loyalty scores have lifted, customer churn has been falling and complaints to the ombudsman have been fewer. Loading In a fast-changing world where more customers have solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, the tech has also enabled Origin to become more nimble in developing and rolling out futuristic retail products, such as the EV Power Up. With more than 2 million EVs projected to be on the road by 2030, the product means customers can use their app to nominate when they want their EV charged by, and the software automatically chooses the best times of day to charge at an ultra-low capped rate of 8¢ a kilowatt-hour (that could charge up a Tesla Model Y for $5). With home battery uptake on the brink of surging since the Albanese government this month introduced rebates wiping 30 per cent off the cost, Kraken has also given Origin an edge in building out its 'virtual power plant' (VPP) network, whereby Origin pays customers a fee to let it aggregate the energy stored across thousands of their homes. Origin's VPP called Loop – a far-flung network of interconnected household devices including solar panels, batteries, electric cars and appliances that can be ramped up or down to inject bursts of energy into the grid or help address imbalances – is the biggest in the nation, with more than 400,000 devices under orchestration. Briskin says the Loop virtual power plant today sits at 1.5 gigawatts – bigger than a typical coal-fired power station. 'This orchestration is real, it's here, it's building fast,' Briskin says. 'I certainly feel like we are at a competitive advantage to have that technology that can move at greater speed.' While the value of Kraken to Origin's operations today overwhelmingly stems from the lower cost to serve customers, its ability to expand VPPs and co-ordinate household electricity usage and output would become increasingly critical in the fight for customers in the future, UBS's Tom Allen says. 'Energy retailing in the next five to 10 years will be won by who has the best technology to orchestrate behind-the-meter loads and be able to offer incentives to customers and dynamic pricing signals,' he says. 'That's what the future model will look like – it makes sense to be investing in that extra capability now.' While not everyone will be hyper-engaged and may not want to think about optimal times to run appliances, more than 80 per cent of Origin customers are already 'digital-only', Briskin says, with many simply using their app to track their energy usage, and receive alerts if it is trending too high. Origin is not alone in recognising the need to more efficiently manage customers and their energy usage in the shift to cleaner, more dispersed sources of power. We are going from a traditional commodity billing relationship to a much more complex and integrated service provision. Jo Egan, AGL's chief customer officer Last year, AGL snapped up a 20 per cent stake in the scalable and flexible Kaluza technology platform for $150 million, and has begun the process of migrating its 4 million power and gas customers in the coming years. Key drivers behind its adoption of the platform were the need to bring new and innovative energy retail products to the market more quickly in response to customers' fast-changing needs, says Jo Egan, AGL's chief customer officer. 'We are going from a traditional commodity billing relationship to a much more complex and integrated service provision … it's a completely different model,' says Egan. 'When you are working in a world like we are now, where the energy market is changing so frequently, the best situation is that you can deploy and innovate products quite rapidly and at low cost.'

News.com.au
3 hours ago
- News.com.au
xAI apologizes for Grok's offensive posts
Elon Musk's startup xAI apologized Saturday for offensive posts published by its artificial intelligence assistant Grok this week, blaming them on a software update meant to make it function more like a human. After the Tuesday upgrade, Grok praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in the posts on social media platform X, and suggested that people with Jewish surnames were more likely to spread online hate. X deleted some of those posts several hours later, amid growing outrage. "We deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced," the company posted on X Saturday, adding that it had modified the system "to prevent further abuse." The company said the change occurred after the chatbot was prompted to "reply to the post just like a human" as well as "tell like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct." As a result, Grok became susceptible to users' "extremist views," which made it produce "responses containing unethical or controversial opinions to engage the user." Grok, which Musk promised would be an "edgy" truthteller following its launch in 2023, has been mired in controversy. In March, xAI acquired X in a $33 billion deal that allowed the company to integrate the platform's data resources with the chatbot's development. In May, Grok ignited controversy by generating posts with unbacked right-wing propaganda about purported oppression of white South Africans that it termed "white genocide."