From The Intercept, December 2:
Trust Lab, founded by a former Google exec for content moderation, will identify “online harmful content, including toxicity and misinformation.”
Trust Lab was founded by a team of well-credentialed Big Tech alumni who came together in 2021 with a mission: Make online content moderation more transparent, accountable, and trustworthy. A year later, the company announced a “strategic partnership” with the CIA’s venture capital firm.
Trust Lab’s basic pitch is simple: Globe-spanning internet platforms like Facebook and YouTube so thoroughly and consistently botch their content moderation efforts that decisions about what speech to delete ought to be turned over to completely independent outside firms — firms like Trust Lab. In a June 2021 blog post, Trust Lab co-founder Tom Siegel described content moderation as “the Big Problem that Big Tech cannot solve.” The contention that Trust Lab can solve the unsolvable appears to have caught the attention of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm tasked with securing technology for the CIA’s thorniest challenges, not those of the global internet.
The quiet October 29 announcement of the partnership is light on details, stating that Trust Lab and In-Q-Tel — which invests in and collaborates with firms it believes will advance the mission of the CIA — will work on “a long-term project that will help identify harmful content and actors in order to safeguard the internet.” Key terms like “harmful” and “safeguard” are unexplained, but the press release goes on to say that the company will work toward “pinpointing many types of online harmful content, including toxicity and misinformation.”
Though Trust Lab’s stated mission is sympathetic and grounded in reality — online content moderation is genuinely broken — it’s difficult to imagine how aligning the startup with the CIA is compatible with Siegel’s goal of bringing greater transparency and integrity to internet governance. What would it mean, for instance, to incubate counter-misinformation technology for an agency with a vast history of perpetuating misinformation? Placing the company within the CIA’s tech pipeline also raises questions about Trust Lab’s view of who or what might be a “harmful” online, a nebulous concept that will no doubt mean something very different to the U.S. intelligence community than it means elsewhere in the internet-using world.
No matter how provocative an In-Q-Tel deal may be, much of what Trust Lab is peddling sounds similar to what the likes of Facebook and YouTube already attempt in-house: deploying a mix of human and unspecified “machine learning” capabilities to detect and counter whatever is determined to be “harmful” content.
“I’m suspicious of startups pitching the status quo as innovation,” Ángel Díaz, a law professor at the University of Southern California and scholar of content moderation, wrote in a message to The Intercept. “There is little separating Trust Lab’s vision of content moderation from the tech giants’. They both want to expand use of automation, better transparency reports, and expanded partnerships with the government.”....
....MUCH MORE
There's a steep and sometimes expensive learning curve when dealing with In-Q-Tel.
Here's a 2016 post:
The CIA’s Venture-Capital Firm, Like Its Sponsor, Operates in the Shadows
This is a pretty good look at the spook shop vehicle.
As a side note, back in the early years of this century, especially immediately after the mass murders of 9/11, it was thought that investing alongside In-Q-Tel was the cool thing to do.
It took a while for the realization to sink in that they weren't necessarily in it for the money return to the VC's....
"As the SEC Cracks Down on Shady SPACs, CIA Officials Get In on the Action"
"Fake news 2.0: personalized, optimized, and even harder to stop"
"CIA has 137 projects going in artificial intelligence"
Paging M. Macron: "CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA"
"China and the CIA Are Competing to Fund Silicon Valley’s AI Startups"
"Pokémon Go Is a Government Surveillance Psyop Conspiracy"
Quantum Computing: CIA and Bezos Invest in D-Wave Systems In.
"Hedge funds, VCs and the CIA are Throwing Money at ex-Bridgewater Data Scientists’ Startup"
Peter Thiel’s Pursuit Of Technological Progress; It’s Not About Democracy and It’s Definitely Not About Capitalism – Part 1
Inside Palantir, Silicon Valley’s Most Secretive Company
Amazon and the CIA Want to Teach Artificial Intelligence to Watch Us From Space (AMZN; NVDA)
Venture Capital: "Tech Companies And Their Love Affair With NSA and CIA" (GOOG)
And perhaps most alarming of all:
Robot Writing Moves from Journalism to Wall Street
The level of alarm is of course directly related to one's perspective.
