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New story in Technology from Time: India Is Demanding Social Media Remove References to the ‘Indian Variant’ of COVID-19. But What Should It Be Called?

The Indian government is demanding that social media companies remove all references to the “Indian variant” of COVID-19—saying the term is not scientifically accurate and hurts the country’s image.

Tech companies are unlikely to comply with the sweeping request, which would involve removing countless pieces of content including news articles. But it is bringing attention to the problem of how to refer to the COVID-19 variants that are driving many of the new outbreaks across the world without stoking racist or xenophobic sentiments.

The demand also comes as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is embarking on a campaign to bring social media sites to heel—even as it grapples with the devastating impact a COVID-19 surge across India.

Naming a virus

The World Health Organization (WHO)’s 2015 guidelines warn against naming pathogens after the places where they originate because of a risk of stigmatizing the communities involved. Attacks on people of East Asian origin in the U.S. are rising—which many groups say is the result of former President Donald Trump and others insisting on calling COVID-19 the “China virus.”

There are signs that news of India’s outbreak could be similarly sparking hate. Authorities in Singapore denounced an uptick in anti-Indian racism tied to India’s COVID-19 spike after a woman of Indian descent was assaulted there earlier this month.

India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology claimed in a May 21 letter that the term “Indian variant” is a misnomer. “It has come to our knowledge that a false statement is being circulated online which implies that an ‘Indian variant’ of coronavirus is spreading across the countries. This is completely FALSE. There is no such variant of COVID-19 scientifically cited as such by the World Health Organization (WHO).”

Read more: Why the COVID-19 Variants Spreading in India Are a Global Concern

The WHO has advised against using location-based terms for variants, and has designated an official name for the variant first detected in India: B.1.617. The name follows a format indicating the evolutionary relationships between SARS-CoV-2 lineages, similar to the official terms for other variants of concern, such as those first detected in the U.K. (B.1.1.7) and South Africa (B.1.351).

But the official designations don’t tend to stick in people’s memories, roll off the tongue easily or make for good headlines. Place names have become widely used as shorthand references for these variants, despite warnings that they are problematic.

The WHO says it is working on a new system “that gives variants of concern an easily-recallable name.” But community groups are criticizing the WHO for not moving faster. The organization took six weeks to announce the name “COVID-19” after cases of the coronavirus infection were first reported in Wuhan, China.

“I don’t see why it should take so long for them to give this variant a proper name,” says Sabrina Malhi, a spokesperson for the South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA). On May 7, SAJA issued a note to journalists advising publications not to refer to the “Indian variant,” pointing to WHO guidance on the topic. “The former president of the U.S. called coronavirus the ‘China virus’ and we’ve seen an uptick in violence against Asian-Americans, some people say due to that,” she tells TIME. “We didn’t want that happening with the COVID variant that originated in India.”

The WHO’s new naming convention will likely be similar to the system used for hurricanes in the U.S., the WHO’s chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan told The Hindu newspaper earlier this month. “It will … be easier for the lay public to remember rather than these complicated lineage numbers,” she said.

India clamping down on social media

Social media companies were already preparing for a raft of regulations on their platforms to come into effect in India on Wednesday. The rules mandate greater transparency and give users stronger rights to appeal content takedowns. They also stipulate that social media firms must remove content the government says is illegal within three days of being notified, including content that threatens “the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India,” public order, decency, morality, or incitement to an offense. The companies must also appoint staff members who Indian police can arrest and hold legally accountable if the rules are not followed.

Read more: India’s New Internet Rules Are a Step Toward ‘Digital Authoritarianism,’ Activists Say. Here’s What They Will Mean

But even India’s new Internet rules do not give the government the legal basis to demand such a broad takedown like the removal of “Indian variant.” “But there’s a vague sense of threat which hangs in the air,” says Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a New Delhi-based digital rights group. “The rules that are just about to come into force are so onerous and so vague that they give immense power to governments,” he says. “And you obviously don’t want to do something that harms your business interests. So there is a perception of risk, even though there is no legal penalty or requirement to comply with it.”

State pressure on social media companies has become increasingly common in India. Last month, amid a devastating wave of COVID-19, the government forced Facebook and Twitter to remove posts by elected lawmakers that were critical of the government’s response to the virus. And on Monday, Indian police stormed Twitter’s New Delhi office after the platform affixed “manipulated media” labels to several posts by members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The offices were empty due to pandemic safety measures, but the message to social media platforms operating in India was clear, and broadcast for all to see on national television.

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New story in Technology from Time: Travel Is Coming Back, and Artificial Intelligence May Be Planning Your Next Flight

There are dozens of routes that Alaska Airways Flight 1405 can take from Oklahoma City to Seattle, and dispatcher Brad Ward zeroed in on what he thought was the best one, taking into account weather, wind speeds, and other air traffic.

But his new colleague at the Alaska Airlines operations center had other thoughts.

A storm cell near Oklahoma City was likely to turn into a thunderstorm around the time Flight 1405 took off, and the airspace north of Amarillo would be closed for military exercises. Better to reroute, the young colleague said, suggesting an alternative that Ward admitted was safer and more efficient. The entire conversation lasted just seconds and passed without a word being spoken: a red box lit up on Ward’s computer screen when the colleague, an artificial intelligence program he has affectionately nicknamed Algo, had an idea.

“This is the smartest person in the room,” says Ward, a solidly built man with the corner desk who has been a flight dispatcher for 21 years, responsible for planning flight routes and submitting them to air traffic control for approval. He gestures to the program running silently on his computer. “It’s smarter than me.”

Read more: Airlines’ Emissions Halved During the Pandemic. Can the Industry Preserve Some of Those Gains?

Algo’s formal name is Flyways, and it’s the product of a Silicon Valley company called Airspace Intelligence, which is hoping to make air travel more efficient and safer as airlines try to recover from a year in which the pandemic ravaged the travel industry. The idea of AI setting paths for jets streaking through the skies at hundreds of miles per hour might sound terrifying, but Flyways does not dictate—it advises, and humans always have the final say.

This is a job Ward used to do alone by flipping through tabs on his computer screen and guessing where a flight would be when it encountered rough weather or other conditions. Now he has Algo, who dispenses advice, never gets tired, doesn’t get sick and is always in the office. Its machine learning enables Flyways to spot weather threats and other potential problems before humans are aware of them, which helps dispatchers and pilots avoid stressful last-minute changes. Once, when a government website showing restricted airspace went offline, Algo remembered which areas were usually closed to commercial flights at certain times and planned routes accordingly.

Chona Kasinger for TIMEAlaska Airlines dispatcher Brad Ward at work at his monitor at Alaska Airlines’ Network Operations Center in Seattle on May 14, 2021. Ward is one of dozens of flight dispatchers trained to work alongside a new artificial intelligence program designed to make flights more efficient.

For all the fears that artificial intelligence will replace our jobs, the more common application of AI in the workplace today is as a colleague, like Algo is to Ward. It can search CT scans for early signs of lung cancer, alerting radiologists to lesions they may have overlooked. It can come up with millions of possible designs for a chair working within parameters provided by designers. It can analyze an applicant’s body language and voice tone in interviews, speeding up the hiring process. A growing number of workers are interacting with multiple forms of AI as they go about their jobs every day.

<strong>“The sky is really the big untapped opportunity.”</strong>“A man/machine collaboration will do better than just a man or just a machine,” says Pedro Domingos, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington. Deep Blue, an IBM program, may have beaten Gary Kasparov at chess, he says, but “centaur chess teams,” in which humans worked with AI, beat both humans and machines. “It’s not that people will be out of jobs, it’s that they will use computers to do their jobs more,” Domingos says.

Of course, as workers become more productive, companies may need fewer of them doing the same job. Transport aircraft used to have as many as five people in the cockpit in the 1940s; now commercial planes have two. Some workers will have to learn new skills as their jobs change. Companies closed call centers during the pandemic and deployed AI chatbots, for example, in many cases leaving customer service agents to deal with complicated questions that the chatbots couldn’t answer; they were also needed to train and supervise the chatbots.

Phillip Buckendorf, the 30-year-old CEO and co-founder of Airspace Intelligence, came up with the idea for Flyways after visiting a flight dispatch center. Like most people, he figured it would look something like Star Trek, with complicated computer systems helping dispatchers guide planes through the skies. Buckendorf instead found that many dispatch centers looked like accounting firms from the 1990s. Dispatchers often relied on paper printouts to see weather forecasts and figured out wind speeds by decoding strings of letters and numbers on a federal website.

Chona Kasinger for TIMEPhillip Buckendorf, Airspace Intelligence CEO and co-founder and Pasha Saleh, Alaska Airlines flight operations strategy and innovation director.

Buckendorf, a lanky German who had been working for a self-driving car company, liked the idea of applying to planes in flight the same kind of technology that teaches cars to avoid traffic jams or double-parked vehicles. “You have this incredibly dynamic environment where you want to predict— where are you going to be in the airspace? And what does the environment look like? And how do you optimize for that?” says Buckendorf, who camped out at the Alaska Airlines dispatch center in Seattle for months alongside his co-founders, collaborating with dispatchers like Brad Ward to build Flyways.

He approached various airlines with his idea but says Alaska was the quickest to agree to a trial, and in May 2020 it began using Flyways on all of its continental flights for a six-month trial. During that time, the AI found an opportunity to reduce flight times and fuel on 64% of the flights, says Pasha Saleh, Alaska Airlines’ director of strategy and innovation. It cut an average of 5.3 minutes off each Alaska Airlines flight, saving a total of 480,000 gallons of fuel and avoiding 4,600 tons of carbon emissions. (Aircraft fuel consumption varies and has improved over the years, but large jetliners can burn anywhere from 600 to 750 gallons of fuel an hour. According to one study, a person flying on a round-trip trans-Atlantic flight accounted for about 1.6 tons of carbon emissions.)

The airline, which gave TIME an exclusive look at how the system operates from the dispatchers’ and pilots’ point of view, is now rolling out Flyways to all of its flights, including the ones that go to Alaska and Hawaii, and while it would not say how much it pays for the program, the reduced flight times and fuel consumption seen in the trial could translate to millions of dollars in savings in the long run.

In terms of places to improve efficiency, “the sky is really the big untapped opportunity,” says Saleh.

Chona Kasinger for TIMEAlaska Airlines Captain Kat Pullis with the iPad containing the kind of data pilots once had to cart around in heavy suitcases filled with paper.

<strong>“This is just a huge enhancement to what we do.”</strong>On a recent Friday, Alaska Airlines Captain Kat Pullis scrolled through an iPad outside Gate D4 at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, reviewing the route for Flight 1258 to San Francisco. Pullis, who was wearing small airplane stud earrings, wanted to be sure the Airbus 321 she was piloting wasn’t going to encounter bad weather. Flyways, working in tandem with Ward, had found the most efficient route, which would take Pullis west of the Puget Sound, past waypoints ETCHY and PYE near Point Reyes, and into San Francisco from the west.

Pullis climbed into the cockpit, a silver shell of panels, switches and levers, and uploaded the route into the plane’s system, using an iPad in a rose-colored case. It’s a far cry from just 10 years ago, when pilots like Pullis dragged around 35-pound suitcases filled with paper flight manuals. Ward texted her a greeting, using the ever-evolving technology that would enable him to stay in touch with Pullis throughout the trip and offer assistance if needed.

“This is just a huge enhancement to what we do,” says Ward, whose desk looks out onto a parking garage, a Silver Dollar casino, and the Seattle airport a mile away, where Pullis was preparing for flight.

Read more: Millions of Americans Have Lost Jobs in the Pandemic. AI and Robots Are Replacing Them Faster Than Ever

Not every human/AI relationship is as harmonious as Ward’s and Algo’s, either. A warehouse worker who is told where to walk and what packages to pick by an AI algorithm may find that AI makes the job more physically grueling and stressful. And assuming that AI will be a good colleague has repercussions. Experts said as early as 2017 that AI could diagnose pneumonia better than a radiologist could, which led to a shortage of radiologists being trained, says Gary Marcus, a NYU professor who co-wrote the book Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust.

Yet that AI software is still years from being deployed on a large scale. Companies that use AI to screen loan or mortgage applications often incorporate bias, making it more expensive for Black and Latino families to get loans. Police departments that use AI for facial recognition have wrongfully arrested Black men when the software mistakenly identified them as suspects. Because humans design AI, they can feed their own biases into the algorithms, such as when an AI recruiting tool designed by Amazon discriminated against female applicants.

Chona Kasinger for TIMEAlaska Airlines Captain Kat Pullis boards Flight 1258, heading from Seattle to San Francisco.

But AI is here to stay, and an AI colleague or colleagues can be an advantage as pandemic-era cutbacks force employees to take on extra tasks, all the while dealing with the distractions—think Slack, emails, instant messaging and video meetings—of the modern workplace. AI transcribed the interviews I did for this story, replied to emails scheduling those interviews, and alerted me to spelling errors in my draft.

In the transportation industry in particular, automation and AI could help address impending labor shortages; as people venture out of lockdown and air traffic picks up, experts predict a pilot shortage. The trucking industry is already experiencing driver shortages. That’s before drones and unmanned aircraft make the airspace even more crowded, necessitating more dispatchers and air traffic controllers.

<strong>“There’s no way humans can grasp how to handle 20 or 30 airplanes going into one place at one time.”</strong>Each time you board a commercial flight in the U.S., there is a flight dispatcher somewhere who has plotted your route. Commercial airplanes must pass over a number of “waypoints”—essentially geographic coordinates with names like IKPIF or KUJEF—as they go from Point A to Point B. The dispatcher chooses which waypoints a flight should hit, then submits the plan to air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), who either approve or deny the route.

The algorithm from Flyways draws on data from past flights and current and predicted conditions to run through millions of route possibilities, and it reruns the process every few minutes for every flight. A red box lights up on the dispatcher’s screen if Flyways suggests a flight should be rerouted because of weather or safety issues; a green box lights up if a re-route is suggested for fuel efficiency; purple means a flight needs to be routed around restricted airspace.

The predictive nature of Flyways can help dispatchers avoid things that they can’t see. If it knows that a storm cell in a geographic area usually grows or moves in a certain direction, it can find a new path before that storm shows up on weather maps. If many pilots have reported turbulence on their flights, it can map that turbulence and route other flights to avoid it.

If it knows that many flights are planning to approach Seattle from the north later in the day, it may suggest approaching the airport from the south to avoid congestion. “There’s no way humans can grasp how to handle 20 or 30 airplanes going into a place at one time,” says Ward, who stands, in khakis and a green polo shirt, in front of the four monitors he uses to do his job. “You can have everyone on what you think is an optimal route, but then you create a traffic jam.”

Chona Kasinger for TIMENetwork Operations Center at Alaska Airlines Hub in SeaTac, Wash. on May 14, 2021.

Flyways also shows Ward flights that can be slowed down for “network efficiency,” indicating how making one flight arrive later could help four other flights land earlier.

Sometimes, Flyways suggests routes that Ward would never have tried. That’s when his judgement comes in handy. The FAA prefers that most flights from the east coast to the northwest go over Cleveland, for example, because this avoids traffic jams. If Flyways suggests a different route, Ward will often reject it because he knows that the FAA won’t accept it. If Flyways decides a flight can go close to a storm because there’s a strong chance the storm will dissipate, Ward may reject that route as too risky.

Dispatchers accepted 32% of Flyways recommendations during the Alaska Airlines trial period, but that is expected to increase as Flyways memorizes dispatchers’ choices. Algo is already learning to plot more routes over Cleveland.

“Humans will always be better at making the decisions. And the computer will always be better at supporting those decisions with good information.” says Ward, a self-described nerd who used to spend countless hours trying to find the best routes for his flights.

Read more: Artificial Intelligence Could Help Solve America’s Impending Mental Health Crisis

Alaska hopes to eventually use Flyways to figure out which flights have a lot of passengers making connections when they land, and to slow down other flights so that the connecting passengers can land on time. It could eventually tell Ward which planes have passengers transferring from one flight to another, so he can put them at adjoining gates. Alaska has 67 full-time dispatchers, and all are now trained to use Flyways.

Airspace Intelligence says it is actively working with “multiple U.S. airlines” to deploy Flyways in their operations centers. Over time, if AI helps Ward make customers’ flight experiences more pleasant and less expensive, more people will fly, Domingos says, creating the need for more dispatchers.

That’s what happened in the banking industry initially when ATMs were introduced. More people started using banks, so more branches were opened. The number of tellers increased, and their jobs evolved as they spent less time doling out cash and more time offering financial advice to customers. Now, the number of bank tellers is falling, but the number of financial advisors is projected to grow over the next decade.

Chona Kasinger for TIMEFlight 1258 to San Francisco International Airport via the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport prepares to depart on May 14.

AI has long been creeping into airspace. So many parts of piloting an airplane are done by computers that some pilots spend as little as three minutes actually “flying” the plane, says Mary “Missy” Cummings, a Duke professor who directs the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke Robotics and who was one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots. Manufacturers are talking about designing passenger planes for only one pilot.

As companies add drones and autonomous vehicles to the airspace, artificial intelligence will become more essential, Cummings says. There are already “near-misses” at airports because of heavy traffic, and that’s before drones begin flying at different speeds and levels, she says. “We’ll never be able to integrate unmanned vehicles without automation,” she says.

That doesn’t mean humans won’t be needed, though—in aviation, there are always times when something unexpected like a thunderstorm or a flock of geese requires a human reaction. Besides, passengers want to know there is a human involved who will share their fate if something happens to the plane, says Cummings. There’s a reason it is comforting to walk by the cockpit when you board a plane.

As Captain Pullis prepared to take off for San Francisco, she came on the plane’s loudspeaker, introducing herself and telling the passengers that their flight would be an hour and 33 minutes and they’d be cruising at 33,000 feet.

She reminded them to keep their masks on and then added something very human. “I just want to let you know — I am so happy to see all your beautiful, wonderful eyes—it’s been a rough year,” Pullis said.

There was nothing artificial about it. A few passengers nodded in understanding.

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New story in Technology from Time: Inside Facebook’s Meeting with Palestinian Officials Over Posts Inaccurately Flagged as Incitement to Violence

Senior Facebook executives apologized to the Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh in a virtual meeting on Tuesday, after officials complained to the company about Palestinian posts being blocked amid the conflict with Israel, according to a diplomat who facilitated the meeting.

Palestinian officials left the meeting on Tuesday with the impression that Facebook had admitted there was an “inherent issue with their algorithms” and that they had promised to address it, according to an account of the meeting shared with TIME by Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestinian mission to the U.K.

As tensions rose between Israel and Palestine earlier this month, Instagram restricted access to Arabic-language posts and hashtags that mentioned Al-Aqsa mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam. The mosque in Jerusalem had been the site of recent Palestinian protests amid high communal tensions in the city. Posts mentioning Al-Aqsa were removed as Israeli police were clashing with Palestinian protesters there, leaving more than 300 people injured.

Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, later restored many of the posts mentioning Al-Aqsa, saying the takedowns had been a mistake. “[The] hashtags were restricted in error,” a company spokesperson told regional news outlet The National. In internal posts obtained by BuzzFeed, Facebook reportedly said the mistake had been made by an artificial intelligence system that mistook posts mentioning the mosque for references to a banned terror group.

Ahmad Gharabli—AFP/Getty ImagesPalestinian Muslim worshippers gather at Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem on May 21, 2021.

Zomlot said that Facebook’s team, which was led at the meeting by the company’s vice president for global affairs Nick Clegg, acknowledged that Facebook had inaccurately labeled certain words commonly used by Palestinians, including “martyr” and “resistance,” as incitement to violence. “They promised they would revisit and reevaluate their framework,” Zomlot said. The meeting was also attended by Facebook’s vice president for global public policy, Joel Kaplan, and its Middle East and North Africa policy chief Azzam Alameddin.

In response to questions from TIME, a Facebook spokesperson did not deny that Clegg’s team had apologized to the Palestinian side for the Al-Aqsa episode, nor that the company had committed to revisiting and reevaluating the way it dealt with similar posts and language.

Read more: Facebook Says It’s Removing More Hate Speech Than Ever Before. But There’s a Catch

“Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the horrific ongoing violence,” the spokesperson said in a statement to TIME on Friday. “In response to the violence we are working to make sure our services are a safe place for our community. We will continue to remove content that violates our Community Standards, which do not allow hate speech or incitement to violence, and will proactively explain and promote dialogue on these policies to policymakers. We are also actively working to respond to concerns about our content enforcement. These meetings are an effort to ensure that all parties are aware of steps the company has taken, and will continue to take, to keep the platform safe.”

But activists allege that Facebook is complicit in a systemic pattern of suppression against Palestinian voices on Facebook and Instagram–one that rose in intensity as Israel began a military campaign against Hamas that left at least 219 people dead in Gaza, including 63 children, according to the territory’s health ministry. On the Israeli side, health authorities put the death toll at 12, including two children.

Mostafa Alkharouf—Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesIsraeli police detain some Palestinians during their intervention at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem on May 21, 2021.

As well as the Al-Aqsa hashtags being blocked, as the conflict escalated many Arab users on Instagram and Facebook complained of being unable to share live video, having innocuous posts wrongfully removed for alleged hate speech, and content mentioning “Palestine” reaching fewer viewers than normal, according to public posts and screenshots shared with TIME by Access Now, a digital rights group. “Social media companies often gaslight us into believing that these are just technical errors, and expect us to move on,” says Marwa Fatafta, the Middle East and North Africa manager for Access Now. “For them, it’s anecdotal, but we see the volume. Everyone I know has had some form of censorship when they talk about Palestine.”

Activists say that while Facebook’s suppression of many Palestinian posts may or may not be intentional, it nevertheless reflects the huge power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians in which, they say, Facebook has naturally gravitated toward the richer, more powerful, and better-organized side. The impact, activists say, is reflected not only in Facebook’s business interests, but its policies and the algorithms that enforce them.

Facebook has offices in Israel. It also has a public policy director for Israel and the Jewish diaspora, Jordana Cutler, who used to work as an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “My job is … to speak at Facebook on behalf of Israel and the Jewish diaspora,” Cutler told the Jerusalem Post in 2020. “We have meetings every week to talk about everything from spam to pornography to hate speech and bullying and violence, and how they relate to our community standards,” she said. “I represent Israel in these meetings.” Facebook does not have a dedicated public policy director for Palestinians; they fall under the remit of its Middle East and North Africa policy chief, Azzam Alameddin, who is based in Dubai.

Read more: How a Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Forced Evictions Spiraled Rapidly Toward ‘Full-Scale War’

Five days before Facebook met with the Palestinian Prime Minister, a Facebook delegation including Cutler, Clegg and Kaplan met with the Israeli Justice Minister, Benny Gantz. (Alameddin did not attend.) At that meeting, on May 13, Gantz pressured Facebook to take even stricter action against “extremist elements that are seeking to do damage to our country,” according to a statement from his office. “Gantz called upon them to commit to removing content from their social media sites that incites to violence or that spreads disinformation, and emphasized the importance of responding quickly to appeals from the governmental cyber bureau,” the statement said.

An official in the Israeli Justice Ministry told TIME on Friday that in the week since meeting with Facebook, they had noticed an improvement in the speed with which Facebook had dealt with Israeli takedown requests. “Ahead of the meeting, the Ministry of Justice was disappointed with how Facebook was responding,” the official said. “During the meeting, however, they did voice a willingness to respond more assertively, fully and quickly, and subsequently there has been some improvement. We would like to see even greater responsiveness going forward.”

Facebook already cooperates closely with the Israeli government’s cyber unit, which was established in 2015 to systematically report content to social media platforms that the Israeli security services deem objectionable, saying they contravene the companies’ rules. In 2020, Facebook approved 81% of the unit’s takedown requests, according to 7amleh, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, an activist group that logs and helps users appeal wrongful takedowns. “The follow up question to platforms, of course, is how many posts they are removing in advance of being asked … so as to avoid being asked,” said Evelyn Douek, a platform regulation expert at Harvard Law School, in a tweet.

Photo-illustration by Lon Tweeten for TIME

And through a smartphone app promoted by the Israeli government, pro-Israel volunteers regularly participate in mass-reporting campaigns against Palestinian content perceived to be endorsing violence. “Basically they get notifications to report certain content,” says Nadim Nashif, executive director of 7amleh. “In most cases, they do not really understand what’s in it, because they don’t speak Arabic, but they automatically report it. The platforms get thousands of reports, and often take it down because of the volume of reporting. So it’s a matter of how you manipulate the system.”

Activists say that because Palestinians do not have similar resources, the extent of Facebook’s cooperation with Israel leads to an imbalance in the way it designs and implements its policies. On May 14, the Intercept revealed the existence of previously-unreported Facebook rules that allow for the removal under hate speech rules of the term “Zionist” in certain contexts. “We allow critical discussion of Zionists, but remove attacks against them when context suggests the word is being used as a proxy for Jews or Israelis, both of which are protected characteristics under our hate speech policy,” the company said in a statement to the Intercept.

“Facebook functions in a way where if one side in a conflict is well-organized, wealthy, has the manpower and the resources, it’s very easy to manipulate content and suppress different narratives,” says Nashif. “The Palestinian side is less well-organized than the Israeli side, it’s weak, it doesn’t have the money. They don’t have a sophisticated cyber unit with hundreds of workers, and sophisticated technologies. This is very similar to what has happened in Myanmar and India and other places. It’s the same pattern of power relations being reflected in social media.”

Activists also worry that the power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians may be perpetuating itself by seeping into Facebook’s content-removal algorithms, which work by trying to spot patterns in content that has been previously removed for breaking the site’s rules. “All discussions around AI right now are based on the truism that if you put garbage data in, you get garbage outputs,” says Dia Kayyali, associate director of advocacy at Mnemonic, a digital rights group. “So what is the data being fed into the AI that is impacting Palestinians? Where is that data coming from?”

Read more: These Tech Companies Managed to Eradicate ISIS Content. But They’re Also Erasing Crucial Evidence of War Crimes

A Facebook spokesperson declined to answer a question from TIME about whether content removed from Facebook after being reported by Israel’s cyber unit was used as training data for the company’s content-moderation algorithms.

Zomlot, the Palestinian diplomat, said he had raised the issue of algorithmic bias with Facebook. “The Israeli military machine is feeding their algorithms, absolutely,” he told TIME. “And the main purpose is to stifle the Palestinian voices about anything that has to do with injustices.”

Fox News Breaking News Alert

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Netanyahu warns Hamas of big trouble if terrorists fire more rockets

05/21/21 4:05 AM

New story in Technology from Time: Ford’s New All-Electric F-150 Lightning Is More Than it Seems

While driving around suburban Houston during Texas’ power crisis in February, which left millions without power for days, Ford energy services lead Ryan O’Gorman was thinking less about that disaster than the next one. Ford at the time was putting the finishing touches on an all-electric version of its best-selling F-150 pickup, with a nifty feature for just such an emergency: in a power outage, the truck would be able to function as a backup battery, powering an owner’s house for days. “I can’t tell you how many F-150s I saw parked in driveways while I was driving around Texas during that week,” says O’Gorman. “[I was] just thinking, ‘wow, this is going to change so many people’s lives.'”

Ford unveiled that electric F-150, named the “Lightning,” at a flashy event on Wednesday. The F-150 Lightning, which has up to 300 miles of range (with an optional extended battery) and can haul up to 10,000 pounds of cargo, is the latest offering in Ford’s $22 billion electric vehicle (EV) push, following the Mustang Mach-E SUV. It’s also a huge deal for the Dearborn, Mich.-based automaker, which is fighting both fellow incumbents (like GM) and highly-valued upstarts (like Tesla and Rivian) for what analysts say will at least at first be a limited electric market—but is likely to be the future of the auto industry. “We just absolutely think there’s going to be a big shake out,” Gary Silberg, accounting firm and consultancy KPMG’s automotive sector leader, recently told TIME of the EV market. “There’s going to be clear winners and losers, and the pecking order of the industry is going to change.”

So far, Ford’s EV strategy has revolved around electrifying well-known brands, like the Mustang and F-150. In some sense, the automaker is playing it safe by spinning familiar models into the electric era. However, radically changing beloved vehicles also risks alienating some potential buyers. That the F-150 has been the best-selling vehicle in the United States for nearly four decades makes it especially dicey to mess with. “Ford has the most to risk by being something different,” says Jessica Caldwell, executive director of insights at automotive comparison site Edmunds. Indeed, Ford executives say their customers aren’t looking for radical change. “They want something distinct, but not a science project,” says Darren Palmer, head of Ford’s electric vehicles program. “They want people to know they have the new tool … but not different for difference’s sake.”

The Lightning’s home-battery-backup system—which pumps electricity stored in the truck’s batteries back into an owner’s house through a charging station—underscores another, less-appreciated element of Ford’s plan: packing its EVs full of unique and enticing features to convert electro-skeptics. It’s the kind of tech that pickup drivers “may not have even realized they wanted,” says O’Gorman. “There’s the old Ford adage that if you ask a customer what they want they’ll say, ‘a faster horse,'” he says, referencing the supposed attitude of the company’s founder, who didn’t think buyers knew what they really needed until it was offered to them. When designing the Lightning, Ford tried to both understand pickup drivers’ current needs and anticipate future ones. The battery backup system is a particularly well-timed feature, given that Texas’ recent power outages—during which some residents used their combustion-engine F-150s to run space heaters and coffee makers—awakened much of the nation to the vulnerability of its electric grid.

FordThe standard battery on the F-150 Lightning has 230 miles of range. The extended version brings that up to 300 miles

Other automakers are also adding new and perhaps unexpected features to their EVs. Some Tesla vehicles have a “Bioweapon Defense Mode” (essentially an air filter), for instance, and GM’s new electric Hummer has a “crab walk” feature allowing it to use four-wheel steering to move diagonally, like a chess bishop. Still, as cool as it may sound to turn all four of your electric truck’s wheels slanty-ways to cram the vehicle into seemingly impossible parking spots, Ford’s battery backup system might prove more practical—and alluring—for the kinds of people who choose to buy pickup trucks because they value self-reliance and just-in-case features.

No matter how many people are convinced to ditch their cars for public transport, we will still need some vehicles in 2050, and so a transition from gas-thirsty pickups to electric models is going to have to be part of the equation to get to a zero-emissions future. In that sense, the new electric F-150 may be a milestone of sorts—a move away from EVs as niche products and towards a mass market future. Ford’s new Lightning, says Palmer, “has the chance to accelerate that for the whole country. It’s the best-selling vehicle. It’s completely loved. And now it’s going electric.”