Author: The Conversation

Following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter on October 27, the world’s richest man proposed a range of controversial changes to the platform. With mounting evidence that he is making it up as he goes along, these proposals are tweeted out in a stream-of-consciousness manner from Musk’s Twitter account. Primarily to raise revenue, one of the ideas was to charge US$8 a month to obtain a verified status – that is, the coveted blue tick badge next to the account handle. Within the space of a few days, the paid verification change has already been rolled out in several countries, including Australia, under the Twitter Blue subscription service.…

The big idea People who consume a lot of news on social media are more likely to be skeptical of COVID-19 vaccines and also more hesitant about getting vaccinated, according to our newly published research. But we found that social media users with higher levels of news literacy have more confidence in COVID-19 shots. Other research has found that heavy reliance on social media exposed individuals to misinformation related to COVID-19, especially on the efficacy of vaccines. In the thick of the pandemic in 2020, we measured how skeptical social media users were about the development of a safe and effective COVID-19…

A dominant view in science is that there is a mathematical truth structuring the universe. It is assumed that the scientist’s job is to decipher these mathematical relations: once understood, they can be translated into mathematical models. Running the resulting “silicon reality” in a computer may then provide us with useful insights into how the world works. Since science keeps on revealing secrets, models keep getting bigger. They integrate discoveries and newly found mechanisms to better reflect the world around us. Many scholars assume that more detailed models produce sharper estimates and better predictions because they are closer to reality. But our…

Millions of Australians have had their privacy breached in recent cyber attacks against Optus, Medibank and other companies. Cybercriminals stole sensitive health and financial data that can be used for ransom, blackmail or fraud. Law enforcement agencies are still investigating the origin of these attacks, but as experts in cyber and national security we can say two things are already clear. First, anyone affected should check their credit record. Second, Australia’s international cyber engagement strategy – which sets the terms for how we work with other countries to maintain national cybersecurity – is desperately in need of an update. How to turn data into credit…

The story could have been straight out of science fiction – scientists have grown human brain cells in a lab, and taught them to play the video game Pong, similar to squash or tennis. But this didn’t happen on the big screen. It happened in a lab in Melbourne, Australia, and it raises the fundamental question of the legal status of these so-called neural networks. Are they the property of the team that created them, or do they deserve some kind of special status – or even rights? The reason this question needs to be asked is because the ability to play…

It’s been a week since Elon Musk strode into the Twitter headquarters with a kitchen sink, signalling his official takeover of the company. Having had some time to let the news of his US$44 billion (about A$70 billion) purchase “sink in”, Twitter users are now wondering what he’ll do with the platform. Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in! pic.twitter.com/D68z4K2wq7 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2022 What’s Musk going to do with Twitter? After months of trying to walk away from his commitment to buy the platform, and just before entering what was looking to be a long, potentially embarrassing and costly court battle to…

An enormous neutrino observatory buried deep in the Antarctic ice has discovered only the second extra-galactic source of the elusive particles ever found. In results published today in Science, the IceCube collaboration reports the detection of neutrinos from an “active galaxy” called NGC 1068, which lies some 47 million light-years from Earth. How to spot a neutrino Neutrinos are very shy fundamental particles that don’t often interact with anything else. When they were first detected in the 1950s, physicists soon realised they would in some ways be ideal for astronomy. Because neutrinos so rarely have anything to do with other particles,…

Elon Musk announced that “the bird is freed” when his US$44 billion acquisition of Twitter officially closed on Oct. 27, 2022. Some users on the microblogging platform saw this as a reason to fly away. Over the course of the next 48 hours, I saw countless announcements on my Twitter feed from people either leaving the platform or making preparations to leave. The hashtags #GoodbyeTwitter, #TwitterMigration and #Mastodon were trending. The decentralized, open source social network Mastodon gained over 100,000 users in just a few days, according to a user counting bot. As an information scientist who studies online communities, this felt like the…

Tech platforms use recommender algorithms to control society’s key resource: attention. With these algorithms they can quietly demote or hide certain content instead of just blocking or deleting it. This opaque practice is called “shadowbanning”. While platforms will often deny they engage in shadowbanning, there’s plenty of evidence it’s well and truly present. And it’s a problematic form of content moderation that desperately needs oversight. What is shadowbanning? Simply put, shadowbanning is when a platform reduces the visibility of content without alerting the user. The content may still be potentially accessed, but with conditions on how it circulates. It may no longer appear as a…

If you surfed the web this morning, you may have seen news of the latest existential threat to humanity: a “planet killer” asteroid named 2022 AP7. Luckily for us 2022 AP7 “has no chance to hit the Earth currently”, according to Scott Sheppard at the Carnegie Institution for Science. He and his international team of colleagues observed 2022 AP7 in a trio of “rather large” asteroids obscured by the Sun’s glare (the other two don’t pose a risk). 2022 AP7 orbits the Sun every five years, and currently crosses Earth’s orbit when Earth is on the other side of the Sun to it. Eventually…