Latest news with #Footnotes
The Hindu
4 days ago
- Business
- The Hindu
TikTok launches crowd-sourced context tool; Reddit's AI-driven share price jump; CapitalG and Nvidia in reported talks to fund Vast Data
TikTok launches crowd-sourced context tool TikTok announced the launch of a crowd-sourced tool called Footnotes that is aimed at letting users add context to potentially inaccurate or misleading posts, following a similar model to the Community Notes feature on X (formerly Twitter). TikTok began testing Footnotes in April, and allows vetted users to contribute context that is then rated by others for being helpful. Meta also follows a similar standard, having done away with its fact-checking programme in what was seen as a strategic move to align the company with U.S. President Donald Trump's conservative values. TikTok has around 170 million users in the U.S. and nearly 80,000 users in the country who have maintained an account for at least half a year have qualified as Footnotes contributors. However, the Chinese-owned short video app said that it will continue to maintain existing fact-checking programmes such as labelling content that is hard to verify, and partnering with fact-checking bodies. The existence of a Community Notes model of content moderation alone is not enough to prevent disinformation on sites such as X and Meta, according to professional fact-checkers working across time zones and languages. Reddit's AI-driven share price jump Reddit last week saw its shares rising by 15% after reporting quarterly results that went far beyond Wall Street expectations, bringing more attention to its Generative AI-powered offerings. Reddit is the latest tech company to capitalise on the market's interest in AI products, as it focuses on AI-based advertising tools. Apart from this, Reddit boasts a huge and well-organised trove of knowledge that users have contributed to the platform in the form of subject-based forums, media, questions and answers, interviews, and more. Per data from LSEG, Reddit expects its third-quarter revenue to be between $535 million and $545 million, while analysts have estimated an average of $473 million. Marketers are interested in Reddit, as it offers them the opportunity to make use of various ad campaigns and even insert brand ads right into user conversations. CapitalG and Nvidia in reported talks to fund Vast Data CapitalG, the growth fund under Alphabet, and Nvidia are reportedly carrying out talks in order to invest in AI infrastructure provider Vast Data. The new funding round could value the company at as much as $30 billion, per the sources. The funding round could close in the coming weeks, according to them. Vast Data has its headquarters in New York and develops storage technology that caters to the upkeep of large AI data centres. Vast Data may also consider an initial public offering in the future. Some of its clients include Elon Musk's xAI and CoreWeave. However, news of a potential investment has not yet been officially confirmed by Vast Data and CapitalG. An explosion in Generative AI startups, products, and models has also triggered demand for facilities that will allow tech companies to scale their data centres without facing hurdles.
The Hindu
7 days ago
- Business
- The Hindu
TikTok launches crowd-sourced debunking tool in U.S.
TikTok on Wednesday rolled out a crowd-sourced debunking system in the United States, becoming the latest tech platform to adopt a community-driven approach to combating online misinformation. Footnotes, a feature that the popular video-sharing app began testing in April, allows vetted users to suggest written context for content that might be wrong or misleading, similar to Community Notes on Meta and X. "Footnotes draws on the collective knowledge of the TikTok community by allowing people to add relevant information to content," Adam Presser, the platform's head of operations and trust and safety, said in a blog post. "Starting today, U.S. users in the Footnotes pilot program can start to write and rate footnotes on short videos, and our US community will begin to see the ones rated as helpful, and rate them, too," he added. TikTok said nearly 80,000 U.S.-based users, who have maintained an account for at least six months, have qualified as Footnotes contributors. The video-sharing app has some 170 million U.S. users. TikTok said the feature will augment the platform's existing integrity measures such as labelling content that cannot be verified and partnering with fact-checking organisations, such as AFP, to assess the accuracy of posts on the platform. The crowd-sourced verification system was popularised by Elon Musk's platform X, but researchers have repeatedly questioned its effectiveness in combating falsehoods. Earlier this month, a study found more than 90% of X's Community Notes are never published, highlighting major limits in efficacy. The Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA) study analysed the entire public dataset of 1.76 million notes published by X between January 2021 and March 2025. TikTok cautioned it may take some time for a footnote to become public, as contributors get started and become more familiar with the feature. "The more footnotes get written and rated on different topics, the smarter and more effective the system becomes," Presser said. Tech platforms increasingly view the community-driven model as an alternative to professional fact-checking. Earlier this year, Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the United States, with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg saying it had led to "too much censorship." The decision was widely seen as an attempt to appease U.S. President Donald Trump, whose conservative base has long complained that fact-checking on tech platforms serves to curtail free speech and censor right-wing content. Professional fact-checkers vehemently reject the claim. As an alternative, Zuckerberg said Meta's platforms, Facebook and Instagram, would use "Community Notes." Studies have shown Community Notes can work to dispel some falsehoods, like vaccine misinformation, but researchers have long cautioned that it works best for topics where there is broad consensus. Some researchers have also cautioned that Community Notes users can be motivated to target political opponents by partisan beliefs.
The Star
01-08-2025
- Business
- The Star
TikTok asks users to help police misinformation
TikTok is drawing attention to safety on its platform after a tumultuous few years in the United States. — Reuters TikTok will soon let some of its users help fight misinformation on the app, it said Wednesday, following similar moves from Meta and social platform X. With a new feature, Footnotes, TikTok will let a select group of users add context and background information to some of the short videos on the app, along with links to the information's sources. That group – for now, nearly 80,000 qualified users – will be able to rate those notes for helpfulness. Those with the highest ratings will be displayed at the bottom of all US users' screens. Meta and Elon Musk's X previously rolled out 'community notes' programs, which have allowed the social media giants to back away from making decisions about what content to remove from their sites, and to avoid making fraught and sometimes politically loaded choices. Unlike Meta and X, TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, said it was not ending any of its fact-checking programs or partnerships as it introduced Footnotes. Meta and X drew criticism for reducing investments in fact-checking and moderation that they had made in response to the viral spread of misinformation online, especially around the 2016 presidential election. 'Footnotes is not a replacement for content moderation. Rather, it adds context to content on TikTok,' a company spokesperson said in an email. At least initially, TikTok will let its contributors cite any sources to back up their Footnotes. The contributor program is open to US users who are 18 or older, had been on the app at least six months as of April and had no recent history of violating TikTok's community guidelines. 'We do expect that links to fact-checking articles, links to Wikipedia, these will be among some of the examples of what our users are directing to,' Erica Ruzic, TikTok's head of integrity and authenticity, said Tuesday at a company trust and safety event before the launch. 'But we will let our users decide what they're deeming an authoritative source, to begin.' TikTok is drawing attention to safety on its platform after a tumultuous few years in the United States. The app, which boasts 170 million American users, has been fending off a ban under a new federal law that demanded that the company find a non-Chinese owner. President Donald Trump has extended the deadline repeatedly, most recently to mid-September. At the event Tuesday, panelists discussed other harm-reduction efforts on the app, including new features that allow parents to have more oversight of their child's account. It's a reminder that amid all the political turmoil, TikTok also faces the same problems that any other social media company does, including disinformation and safety issues involving children and teenagers. – © 2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times
Express Tribune
31-07-2025
- Business
- Express Tribune
TikTok allows US users to debunk misinformation
TikTok on Wednesday rolled out a crowd-sourced debunking system in the United States, becoming the latest tech platform to adopt a community-driven approach to combating online misinformation, reported AFP. Footnotes, a feature that the popular video-sharing app began testing in April, allows vetted users to suggest written context for content that might be wrong or misleading - similar to Community Notes on Meta and X. "Footnotes draws on the collective knowledge of the TikTok community by allowing people to add relevant information to content," Adam Presser, the platform's head of operations and trust and safety, said in a blog post. "Starting today, US users in the Footnotes pilot program can start to write and rate footnotes on short videos, and our US community will begin to see the ones rated as helpful - and rate them, too," he added. TikTok said nearly 80,000 US-based users, who have maintained an account for at least six months, have qualified as Footnotes contributors. The video-sharing app has some 170 million US users. TikTok said the feature will augment the platform's existing integrity measures such as labeling content that cannot be verified and partnering with fact-checking organisations, such as AFP, to assess the accuracy of posts on the platform. Just like X The crowd-sourced verification system was popularised by Elon Musk's platform X, but researchers have repeatedly questioned its effectiveness in combating falsehoods. Earlier this month, a study found more than 90 per cent of X's Community Notes are never published, highlighting major limits in its efficacy. The Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA) study analysed the entire public dataset of 1.76 million notes published by X between January 2021 and March 2025. As with Footnotes on TikTok, X's community-driven moderation model allows volunteers to contribute notes that add context or corrections to posts. ??Other users then rate the proposed notes as "helpful" or "not helpful." If the notes get "helpful" ratings from enough users with diverse perspectives, they are published on X, appearing right below the challenged posts. "The vast majority of submitted notes — more than 90 per cent — never reach the public," DDIA's study said. "For a program marketed as fast, scalable, and transparent, these figures should raise serious concerns." A vast number of notes remain unpublished due to lack of consensus among users during rating. Thousands of notes also go unrated, possibly never seen and never assessed, according to the report. When it comes to TikTok, the platform cautioned it may take some time for a footnote to become public, as contributors get started and become more familiar with the feature. "The more footnotes get written and rated on different topics, the smarter and more effective the system becomes," Presser said. As with X, tech platforms increasingly view the community-driven model as an alternative to professional fact-checking. Earlier this year, Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the United States, with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg saying it had led to "too much censorship." The decision was widely seen as an attempt to appease President Donald Trump, whose conservative base has long complained that fact-checking on tech platforms serves to curtail free speech and censor right-wing content. Professional fact-checkers vehemently reject the claim. As an alternative, Zuckerberg said Meta's platforms, Facebook and Instagram, would use "Community Notes." Studies have shown Community Notes can work to dispel some falsehoods, like vaccine misinformation, but researchers have long cautioned that it works best for topics where there is broad consensus. Some researchers have also cautioned that Community Notes users can be motivated to target political opponents by partisan beliefs.
The Hindu
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Performance artist MR Vishnuprasad's ‘Footnotes' explores climate change and its impact on Kochi's coastal regions
MR Vishnuprasad sits atop a column, at the central gallery space at Durbar Hall, while his audience gathers around him in a semicircle. He is set to present 'Footnotes', a performance based on tidal flooding in Kochi. There are no props in sight, other than a visual of a graph projected on the wall behind him, and no fanfare. How is a performance artist going to tackle a complex environmental issue in a gallery setting? As Vishnuprasad begins his narration, the questions begin to dissolve. He opens the piece by recounting a recurring nightmare — of everyday household objects floating about him. Broaching the issue gently, he builds a steady narrative around tidal flooding, bringing fact, data and real voices to the fore. 'It is the daily reality of people living in Kochi's coastal areas — how they deal with the quiet terror of the rising waters that refuse to leave their homes and how their lives now are defined by these tidal surges,' says Vishnuprasad, whose inquiry into climate change — climate injustices and ecological grief led him to the project. He visited the regions in Kochi plagued by saline water intrusion to understand and experience it first hand. No longer a seasonal phenomenon, tidal flooding has forced several families in Kochi's coastal belt, including Vypin, Edavanakkad, Enikkara, Edakochi, and Thanthonithuruth, to abandon their homes. Though local collectives such as the Edakochi Janakeeya Samithi have been fighting for the cause, their plight continues. Vishnuprasad gathered video footage of flooded homes from the archives of the Edakochi Janakeeya Samithi, and collaborating with video artist Akarsh Karunakaran, combined the footage with poetry, narrative text and live speech by residents of Edakochi to create his 'lecture performance'. 'I wanted real voices to be represented. It is their reality,' he adds. 'Footnotes' has been conceived as a lecture performance, a relatively new form of performance art combining elements of a traditional lecture with that of performance art. The piece offers space for the scientific and the artistic worlds to meet, where fact blends with creative expression. Vishnuprasad's own journey has been through these seemingly disparate worlds. With a masters in Environmental Science, and a background studying hydro geology, Vishnuprasad has worked with several organisations including the Centre for Environment Education. A poet and writer as well, he later took to the arts, especially intrigued by the spontaneity and thrill of performance art. He earned a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from JNU, Delhi and since then, has been exploring the various possibilities of the genre. After his debut Malayalam novel Matthias published earlier this year, Vishnuprasad is working on his next. 'Footnotes' will be an ongoing project, says Vishnuprasad, where he would continue his engagement with the issue. 'It is not just a documentation, but a response to the changing realities.'
