An anonymous reader quotes a report from Time Magazine: While AI could offer transformative benefits, without proper safeguards it could facilitate nuclear and biological threats and cause "potentially irreversible harms," a new report commissioned by California Governor Gavin Newsom has warned. "The opportunity to establish effective AI governance frameworks may not remain open indefinitely," says the report, which was published on June 17 (PDF). Citing new evidence that AI can help users source nuclear-grade uranium and is on the cusp of letting novices create biological threats, it notes that the cost for inaction at this current moment could be "extremely high." [...]

"Foundation model capabilities have rapidly advanced since Governor Newsom vetoed SB 1047 last September," the report states. The industry has shifted from large language AI models that merely predict the next word in a stream of text toward systems trained to solve complex problems and that benefit from "inference scaling," which allows them more time to process information. These advances could accelerate scientific research, but also potentially amplify national security risks by making it easier for bad actors to conduct cyberattacks or acquire chemical and biological weapons. The report points to Anthropic's Claude 4 models, released just last month, which the company said might be capable of helping would-be terrorists create bioweapons or engineer a pandemic. Similarly, OpenAI's o3 model reportedly outperformed 94% of virologists on a key evaluation. In recent months, new evidence has emerged showing AI's ability to strategically lie, appearing aligned with its creators' goals during training but displaying other objectives once deployed, and exploit loopholes to achieve its goals, the report says. While "currently benign, these developments represent concrete empirical evidence for behaviors that could present significant challenges to measuring loss of control risks and possibly foreshadow future harm," the report says.

While Republicans have proposed a 10 year ban on all state AI regulation over concerns that a fragmented policy environment could hamper national competitiveness, the report argues that targeted regulation in California could actually "reduce compliance burdens on developers and avoid a patchwork approach" by providing a blueprint for other states, while keeping the public safer. It stops short of advocating for any specific policy, instead outlining the key principles the working group believes California should adopt when crafting future legislation. It "steers clear" of some of the more divisive provisions of SB 1047, like the requirement for a "kill switch" or shutdown mechanism to quickly halt certain AI systems in case of potential harm, says Scott Singer, a visiting scholar in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a lead-writer of the report.

Instead, the approach centers around enhancing transparency, for example through legally protecting whistleblowers and establishing incident reporting systems, so that lawmakers and the public have better visibility into AI's progress. The goal is to "reap the benefits of innovation. Let's not set artificial barriers, but at the same time, as we go, let's think about what we're learning about how it is that the technology is behaving," says Cuellar, who co-led the report. The report emphasizes this visibility is crucial not only for public-facing AI applications, but for understanding how systems are tested and deployed inside AI companies, where concerning behaviors might first emerge. "The underlying approach here is one of 'trust but verify,'" Singer says, a concept borrowed from Cold War-era arms control treaties that would involve designing mechanisms to independently check compliance. That's a departure from existing efforts, which hinge on voluntary cooperation from companies, such as the deal between OpenAI and Center for AI Standards and Innovation (formerly the U.S. AI Safety Institute) to conduct pre-deployment tests. It's an approach that acknowledges the "substantial expertise inside industry," Singer says, but "also underscores the importance of methods of independently verifying safety claims."

President Trump will extend the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. operations by another 90 days, marking the third extension since taking office. The extension aims to prevent a TikTok ban while negotiations with potential buyers like Oracle and Project Liberty continue. CNBC reports: "President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. "As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure."

ByteDance was nearing the deadline of June 19, to sell TikTok's U.S. operations in order to satisfy a national security law that the Supreme Court upheld just a few days before Trump's second presidential inauguration. Under the law, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok. ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to comply with the national security law, but Trump signed an executive order when he first took office that pushed the deadline to April 5. Trump extended the deadline for the second time a day before that April mark. Trump told NBC News in May that he would extend the TikTok deadline again if no deal was reached, and he reiterated his plans on Thursday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The Spanish government has said that the national grid operator and private power generation companies were to blame for an energy blackout that caused widespread chaos in Spain and Portugal earlier this year. Shortly after midday on April 28, both countries were disconnected from the European electricity grid for several hours. Businesses, schools, universities, government buildings and transport hubs were all left without power and traffic light outages caused gridlocks. While schoolchildren, students and workers were sent home for the day, many other people were stuck in lifts or stranded on trains in isolated rural areas.

In the immediate aftermath, the left-wing coalition government did not provide an explanation, instead calling for patience as it investigated. Nearly two months after the unprecedented outage, the minister for ecological transition, Sara Aagesen, has presented a report on its causes. She said the partly state-owned grid operator, Red Electrica, had miscalculated the power capacity needs for that day, explaining that the "system did not have enough dynamic voltage capacity." The regulator should have switched on another thermal plant, she said, but "they made their calculations and decided that it was not necessary."

Aagesen also blamed private generators for failing to regulate the grid's voltage shortly before the blackout happened. "Generation firms which were supposed to control voltage and which, in addition, were paid to do just that did not absorb all the voltage they were supposed to when tension was high," she said, without naming any of the companies responsible. The day after the outage, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez suggested that private electricity companies might have played a role, saying that his government would demand "all the relevant accountability" from them. However, the new report on the blackout also raises questions about the role of Beatriz Corredor, president of Red Electrica and a former Socialist minister, who had previously insisted that the grid regulator had not been at fault. Aagesen said there was no evidence of a cyberattack behind the blackout. The government also maintained that Spain's renewable energy output was not to blame.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: OpenAI executives have discussed filing an antitrust complaint with US regulators against Microsoft, the company's largest investor, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, marking a dramatic escalation in tensions between the two long-term AI partners. OpenAI, which develops ChatGPT, has reportedly considered seeking a federal regulatory review of the terms of its contract with Microsoft for potential antitrust law violations, according to people familiar with the matter. The potential antitrust complaint would likely argue that Microsoft is using its dominant position in cloud services and contractual leverage to suppress competition, according to insiders who described it as a "nuclear option," the WSJ reports.

The move could unravel one of the most important business partnerships in the AI industry -- a relationship that started with a $1 billion investment by Microsoft in 2019 and has grown to include billions more in funding, along with Microsoft's exclusive rights to host OpenAI models on its Azure cloud platform. The friction centers on OpenAI's efforts to transition from its current nonprofit structure into a public benefit corporation, a conversion that needs Microsoft's approval to complete. The two companies have not been able to agree on details after months of negotiations, sources told Reuters. OpenAI's existing for-profit arm would become a Delaware-based public benefit corporation under the proposed restructuring.

The companies are discussing revising the terms of Microsoft's investment, including the future equity stake it will hold in OpenAI. According to The Information, OpenAI wants Microsoft to hold a 33 percent stake in a restructured unit in exchange for foregoing rights to future profits. The AI company also wants to modify existing clauses that give Microsoft exclusive rights to host OpenAI models in its cloud. The restructuring debate attracted criticism from multiple quarters. Elon Musk alleges that OpenAI violated contract provisions by prioritizing profit over the public good in its push to advance AI and has sued to block the conversion. In December, Meta Platforms also asked California's attorney general to block OpenAI's conversion to a for-profit company.

A new Salesforce-led study found that LLM-based AI agents struggle with real-world CRM tasks, achieving only 58% success on simple tasks and dropping to 35% on multi-step ones. They also demonstrated poor confidentiality awareness. "Agents demonstrate low confidentiality awareness, which, while improvable through targeted prompting, often negatively impacts task performance," a paper published at the end of last month said. The Register reports: The Salesforce AI Research team argued that existing benchmarks failed to rigorously measure the capabilities or limitations of AI agents, and largely ignored an assessment of their ability to recognize sensitive information and adhere to appropriate data handling protocols.

The research unit's CRMArena-Pro tool is fed a data pipeline of realistic synthetic data to populate a Salesforce organization, which serves as the sandbox environment. The agent takes user queries and decides between an API call or a response to the users to get more clarification or provide answers.

"These findings suggest a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the multifaceted demands of real-world enterprise scenarios," the paper said. [...] AI agents might well be useful, however, organizations should be wary of banking on any benefits before they are proven.

Pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk forfeited patent protection for semaglutide -- the active ingredient in blockbuster diabetes and weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy -- in Canada after failing to pay a $450 maintenance fee in 2019. The company had paid maintenance fees through 2018 but requested a refund for the 2017 fee, apparently seeking more time to decide whether to continue protecting the patent.

When the 2019 fee came due at $450 with late penalties, Novo never paid despite having a one-year grace period. Canadian patent authorities confirmed the patent "cannot be revived" once lapsed. The oversight is particularly costly given Canada represents the world's second-largest semaglutide market, worth billions annually. Generic drugmaker Sandoz plans to launch a competing version in early 2026, while Novo's U.S. patent protection extends until at least 2032.

The state of New York is "asking companies to disclose whether AI is the reason for their layoffs," reports Entrepreneur: The move applies to New York State's existing Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) system and took effect in March, Bloomberg reported. New York is the first state in the U.S. to add the disclosure, which could help regulators understand AI's effects on the labor market.

The change takes the form of a checkbox added to a form employers fill out at least 90 days before a mass layoff or plant closure through the WARN system. Companies have to select whether "technological innovation or automation" is a reason for job cuts. If they choose that option, they are directed to a second menu where they are asked to name the specific technology responsible for layoffs, like AI or robots.

Last week America's financial aid program announced that "the rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid programs."

Or, as the Associated Press suggests: Online classes + AI = financial aid fraud. "In some cases, professors discover almost no one in their class is real..." Fake college enrollments have been surging as crime rings deploy "ghost students" — chatbots that join online classrooms and stay just long enough to collect a financial aid check... Students get locked out of the classes they need to graduate as bots push courses over their enrollment limits.

And victims of identity theft who discover loans fraudulently taken out in their names must go through months of calling colleges, the Federal Student Aid office and loan servicers to try to get the debt erased. [Last week], the U.S. Education Department introduced a temporary rule requiring students to show colleges a government-issued ID to prove their identity... "The rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid program," the department said in its guidance to colleges.

An Associated Press analysis of fraud reports obtained through a public records request shows California colleges in 2024 reported 1.2 million fraudulent applications, which resulted in 223,000 suspected fake enrollments. Other states are affected by the same problem, but with 116 community colleges, California is a particularly large target. Criminals stole at least $11.1 million in federal, state and local financial aid from California community colleges last year that could not be recovered, according to the reports... Scammers frequently use AI chatbots to carry out the fraud, targeting courses that are online and allow students to watch lectures and complete coursework on their own time...

Criminal cases around the country offer a glimpse of the schemes' pervasiveness. In the past year, investigators indicted a man accused of leading a Texas fraud ring that used stolen identities to pursue $1.5 million in student aid. Another person in Texas pleaded guilty to using the names of prison inmates to apply for over $650,000 in student aid at colleges across the South and Southwest. And a person in New York recently pleaded guilty to a $450,000 student aid scam that lasted a decade.
Fortune found one community college that "wound up dropping more than 10,000 enrollments representing thousands of students who were not really students," according to the school's president. The scope of the ghost-student plague is staggering. Jordan Burris, vice president at identity-verification firm Socure and former chief of staff in the White House's Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer, told Fortune more than half the students registering for classes at some schools have been found to be illegitimate. Among Socure's client base, between 20% to 60% of student applicants are ghosts... At one college, more than 400 different financial-aid applications could be tracked back to a handful of recycled phone numbers. "It was a digital poltergeist effectively haunting the school's enrollment system," said Burris.

The scheme has also proved incredibly lucrative. According to a Department of Education advisory, about $90 million in aid was doled out to ineligible students, the DOE analysis revealed, and some $30 million was traced to dead people whose identities were used to enroll in classes. The issue has become so dire that the DOE announced this month it had found nearly 150,000 suspect identities in federal student-aid forms and is now requiring higher-ed institutions to validate the identities of first-time applicants for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms...

Maurice Simpkins, president and cofounder of AMSimpkins, says he has identified international fraud rings operating out of Japan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nairobi that have repeatedly targeted U.S. colleges... In the past 18 months, schools blocked thousands of bot applicants because they originated from the same mailing address; had hundreds of similar emails with a single-digit difference, or had phone numbers and email addresses that were created moments before applying for registration.
Fortune shares this story from the higher education VP at IT consulting firm Voyatek. "One of the professors was so excited their class was full, never before being 100% occupied, and thought they might need to open a second section. When we worked with them as the first week of class was ongoing, we found out they were not real people."

Earlier this week looters who stole iPhones "got an unexpected message from Apple," reports the Economic Times.

"Please return to Apple Tower Theatre. This device has been disabled and is being tracked. Local authorities will be alerted."

Stolen phones "were remotely locked and triggered alarms, effectively turning the devices into high-tech bait. Videos circulating online show the phones flashing the message while blaring loudly, making them impossible to ignore." According to LAPD Officer Chris Miller, at least three suspects were apprehended in connection to the Apple Store burglary. One woman was arrested on the spot, while two others were detained for looting.

Meta's standalone AI app is broadcasting users' supposedly private conversations with the chatbot to the public, creating what could amount to a widespread privacy breach. Users appear largely unaware that hitting the app's share button publishes their text exchanges, audio recordings, and images for anyone to see.

The exposed conversations reveal sensitive information: people asking for help with tax evasion, whether family members might face arrest for proximity to white-collar crimes, and requests to write character reference letters that include real names of individuals facing legal troubles. Meta provides no clear indication of privacy settings during posting, and if users log in through Instagram accounts set to public, their AI searches become equally visible.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Two European journalists were hacked using government spyware made by Israeli surveillance tech provider Paragon, new research has confirmed. On Thursday, digital rights group The Citizen Lab published a new report detailing the results of a new forensic investigation into the iPhones of Italian journalist Ciro Pellegrino and an unnamed "prominent" European journalist. The researchers said both journalists were hacked by the same Paragon customer, based on evidence found on the two journalists' devices.

Until now, there was no evidence that Pellegrino, who works for online news website Fanpage, had been either targeted or hacked with Paragon spyware. When he was alerted by Apple at the end of April, the notification referred to a mercenary spyware attack, but did not specifically mention Paragon, nor whether his phone had been infected with the spyware. The confirmation of the first-ever known Paragon infections further deepens an ongoing spyware scandal that, for now, appears to be mostly focused on the use of spyware by the Italian government, but could expand to include other countries in Europe.

These new revelations come months after WhatsApp first notified around 90 of its users in over two dozen countries in Europe and beyond, including journalists, that they had been targeted with Paragon spyware, known as Graphite. Among those targeted were several Italians, including Pellegrino's colleague and Fanpage director Francesco Cancellato, as well as nonprofit workers who help rescue migrants at sea. Last week, Italy's parliamentary committee known as COPASIR, which oversees the country's intelligence agencies' activities, published a report (PDF) that said it found no evidence that Cancellato was spied on. The report, which confirmed that Italy's internal and external intelligence agencies AISI and AISE were Paragon customers, made no mention of Pellegrino. The Citizen Lab's new report puts into question COPASIR's conclusions.

During this week's Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled a secure import/export feature for passkeys that addresses one of their biggest limitations: lack of interoperability across platforms and credential managers. The feature, built in collaboration with the FIDO Alliance, enables encrypted, user-initiated passkey transfers between apps and systems. Ars Technica's Dan Goodin says it "provides the strongest indication yet that passkey developers are making meaningful progress in improving usability." From the report: "People own their credentials and should have the flexibility to manage them where they choose," the narrator of the Apple video says. "This gives people more control over their data and the choice of which credential manager they use." The transfer feature, which will also work with passwords and verification codes, provides an industry-standard means for apps and OSes to more securely sync these credentials.

As the video explains: "This new process is fundamentally different and more secure than traditional credential export methods, which often involve exporting an unencrypted CSV or JSON file, then manually importing it into another app. The transfer process is user initiated, occurs directly between participating credential manager apps and is secured by local authentication like Face ID. This transfer uses a data schema that was built in collaboration with the members of the FIDO Alliance. It standardizes the data format for passkeys, passwords, verification codes, and more data types. The system provides a secure mechanism to move the data between apps. No insecure files are created on disk, eliminating the risk of credential leaks from exported files. It's a modern, secure way to move credentials."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has lost another senior leader: executive director Bridget Bean departed on Wednesday. Bean, who served as the de facto agency boss for five months between former CISA director Jen Easterly's departure in January and Madhu Gottumukkala's appointment to the deputy director post last month, said she was "officially retiring from Federal service once again" in a LinkedIn post. "My time at CISA has been truly remarkable," she wrote. "Having had the privilege to serve as the Senior Official Performing the Duties of Director of CISA for 5 months has been a profound honor."

CISA's executive leadership page now lists Gottumukkala as its acting director, and the agency remains without a Senate-confirmed leader. President Trump nominated Sean Plankey to serve as the agency's director, and his nomination is scheduled for consideration (PDF) by the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee today. However, his appointment still requires a full Senate vote. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has said he will continue to block Plankey's confirmation until CISA releases an unclassified report on American telecommunications networks' weak security.

At the time of her departure, Bean had spent three and a half years with CISA and more than three decades with the federal government, including a job as the Federal Emergency Management Agency's third-ranking official. Before accepting the executive director post, she was CISA's first chief integration officer. In this position, she "led the integration of the agency's operations and ensured CISA's frontline of regional staff seamlessly supported the critical infrastructure that Americans rely on every hour of every day," according to her bio on the agency's website. [...] Bean's retirement comes during a talent exodus from CISA -- and other federal government agencies -- with some folks getting fired and others taking the Trump administration's buyout offer to resign from public service. As of May 30, the heads of five of CISA's six operational divisions and six of its 10 regional offices had left the agency, and around 1,000 people, nearly one-third of its total staff, have reportedly left CISA since Trump took office.

More than a dozen private browsing apps on Apple and Google's app stores have undisclosed ties to Chinese companies, leaving user data at risk of exposure to the Chinese government, according to a new report from the Tech Transparency Project. From a report: Thirteen virtual private network (VPN) apps on Apple's App Store and 11 apps on Google's Play Store have ties to Chinese companies, the tech watchdog group said in the report released Thursday.

Chinese law requires Chinese companies to share data with the government upon request, creating privacy and security risks for American users. Several of the apps, including two on both app stores and two others on Google Play Store, have ties to Chinese cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360, which has been sanctioned by the U.S. government, according to the report. The Tech Transparency Project previously identified more than 20 VPN apps on Appleâ(TM)s App Store with Chinese ties in an April report. The iPhone maker has since removed three apps linked to Qihoo 360.

Agriculture equipment giant Deere must face a lawsuit by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission accusing the company of forcing farmers to use its authorized dealer network and driving up their costs for parts and repairs, a U.S. judge has ruled. From a report: U.S. District Judge Iain Johnston in the federal court in Rockford, Illinois on Monday ruled for now to reject, opens new tab Deere's effort to end the lawsuit, which was filed at the end of Democratic President Joe Biden's administration in January.

The lawsuit alleges Deere is violating federal antitrust law by controlling too tightly where and how farmers can get their equipment repaired, allowing the Illinois-based company to charge artificially higher prices. The FTC was joined in its lawsuit by Michigan, Wisconsin and three other U.S. states.

Since filing for bankruptcy in March, 23andMe has received data deletion requests from 1.9 million users -- around 15% of its customer base. That number was revealed by 23andMe's interim chief executive Joseph Selsavage during a House Oversight Committee hearing, during which lawmakers scrutinized the company's sale following an earlier bankruptcy auction. "The bankruptcy sparked concerns that the data of millions of Americans who used 23andMe could end up in the hands of an unscrupulous buyer, prompting customers to ask the company to delete their data," adds TechCrunch. From the report: Pharmaceutical giant Regeneron won the court-approved auction in May, offering $256 million for 23andMe and its banks of customers' DNA and genetic data. Regeneron said it would use the 23andMe data to aid the discovery of new drugs, and committed to maintain 23andMe's privacy practices. Truly deleting your personal genetic information from the DNA testing company is easier said than done. But if you were a 23andMe customer and are interested, MIT Technology Review outlines that steps you can take.

Disney and NBCUniversal have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI image generator firm Midjourney in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, marking the first time major Hollywood studios have taken legal action against a generative AI company.

The entertainment giants accuse Midjourney, founded in 2021, of training its software on "countless" copyrighted works without permission and enabling users to create images that "blatantly incorporate and copy" famous characters including Darth Vader, the Minions, Frozen's Elsa, Shrek, and Homer Simpson.

The companies claim they attempted to resolve the matter privately, but Midjourney "continued to release new versions" with "even higher quality infringing images" according to the complaint. Disney's general counsel used the word "piracy," to describe Midjourney's practice, while NBCUniversal's general counsel characterized it as "blatant infringement."

WhatsApp has applied to submit evidence in Apple's legal battle against the UK Home Office over government demands for access to encrypted user data. The messaging platform's boss Will Cathcart told the BBC the case "could set a dangerous precedent" by "emboldening other nations" to seek to break encryption protections.

The confrontation began when Apple received a secret Technical Capability Notice from the Home Office earlier this year demanding the right to access data from its global customers for national security purposes. Apple responded by first pulling its Advanced Data Protection system from the UK, then taking the government to court to overturn the request.

Cathcart said WhatsApp "would challenge any law or government request that seeks to weaken the encryption of our services." US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has called the UK's demands an "egregious violation" of American citizens' privacy rights.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Fresh data released by piracy tracking outfit MUSO shows that pirate sites remain popular. In a report released today, MUSO reveals that there were 216 billion pirate site visits globally in 2024, a slight decrease compared to the 229 billion visits recorded a year earlier. TV piracy remains by far the most popular category, representing over 44.6% of all website visits. This is followed by the publishing category with 30.7%, with film, software and music all at a respectable distance. Pirate site visitors originate from all over the world, but one country stands tall above all the rest: America. The United States remains the top driver of pirate site traffic accounting for more than 12% of all traffic globally, good for 26.7 billion visits in 2024. India has been steadily climbing the ranks for years and currently sits in second place with 17.6 billion annual visits, with Russia, Indonesia, and Vietnam completing the top five. As a country with one of the largest populations worldwide, it's not a complete surprise that the U.S. tops the list. If we counted visits per internet user, Canada and Ukraine would top the list.

While pirate site visits dipped by more than 5% in 2024, one category saw substantial growth. Visits to publishing-related pirate sites increased 4.3% from 63.6 to 66.4 billion. The increase is largely driven by the popularity of manga, which accounts for more than 70% of all publishing piracy. Traditional book piracy, meanwhile, is stuck at 5%. The publishing piracy boom is relatively new. Over the past five years, the category grew by more than 100% while the overall number of global pirate site visits remained relatively flat. Looking at the global demand, we see that the U.S. also leads the charge here, followed by Indonesia and Russia. Notably, Japan, the home of manga, ranks fifth in the publishing category. This stands out because Japan is not listed in the global top 15 in terms of total pirate site visits.

In the other content categories, MUSO's data shows a dip in pirate site visits. The changes are relatively modest for TV (-6.8%) and software (-2.1%) but the same isn't true for the music and film categories. In 2024, there were 18% fewer visits for pirated movies compared to a year earlier. MUSO notes that this is due to a "lighter blockbuster calendar" which reduced piracy peaks. "The drop in demand is as much about what wasn't released as it is about access," the report explains. The music category saw a 19% decline in piracy visits year over year, with a more uplifting explanation for rightsholders. According to MUSO, the drop can be partly attributed to "secure app ecosystems" and the "wide adoption of licensed platforms like Spotify and Apple Music."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: YouTube videos may be getting a bit more pernicious soon. Google's dominant video platform has spent years removing discriminatory and conspiracy content from its platform in accordance with its usage guidelines, but the site is now reportedly adopting a lighter-touch approach to moderation. A higher bar for content removal will allow more potentially inflammatory content to remain up in the "public interest." [...]

Beginning late last year, YouTube began informing moderators they should err on the side of caution when removing videos that are in the public interest. That includes user uploads that discuss issues like elections, race, gender, sexuality, abortion, immigration, and censorship. Previously, YouTube's policy told moderators to remove videos if one-quarter or more of the content violated policies. Now, the exception cutoff has been increased to half. In addition, staff are now told to bring issues to managers if they are uncertain rather than removing the content themselves. "Recognizing that the definition of 'public interest' is always evolving, we update our guidance for these exceptions to reflect the new types of discussion we see on the platform today," YouTube's Nicole Bell told the New York Times. "Our goal remains the same: to protect free expression on YouTube while mitigating egregious harm."

Most of the videos hosted on YouTube won't be affected by this change, the company says. "These exceptions apply to a small fraction of the videos on YouTube, but are vital for ensuring important content remains available," a YouTube spokesperson tells Ars. "This practice allows us to prevent, for example, an hours-long news podcast from being removed for showing one short clip of violence."