Twitter permanently bans Steve Bannon's @WarRoomPandemic and YouTube pulls episode of his show after he called for execution of FBI director Wray and Dr. Fauci — Former Presidential advisor and right-wing pundit Steve Bannon had his show suspended from Twitter and an episode removed …
T-Mobile reports Q3 revenue of $19.3B, up 45.1% YoY, beating analysts estimates of $18.34B, as it passes 100M total customers — T-Mobile is continuing to grow even amid the pandemic. — T-Mobile is continuing to grow, even amid the pandemic. On Thursday the nation's second-largest …
The election process is working.
A long-building “chaos” narrative being pushed by President Donald Trump suggests that the election is fatally flawed, fraud is rampant, and no institutions other than Trump himself can be trusted. There is no evidence for any of that, and as the election math increasingly turns against him, the actual election systems around America continue functioning well.
Nothing about the 2020 elections is normal, of course, because nothing about 2020 is normal. The fact that the vote count is slower than usual is unavoidably stressful—but it’s also exactly what officials and experts have said for months would happen as every vote is counted.
“I think how the election process has played out has been remarkable,” says David Levine, the elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “I think the entire country owes a tremendous gratitude to state and local election officials and those that have worked closely with them against the backdrop of foreign interference, coronavirus pandemic, civil unrest, and frankly inadequate support from the federal government. We have an election that has gone reasonably well.”
By any measure, the 2020 election scores better than any in recent history on security, integrity, and turnout. Election infrastructure is more secure: the Department of Homeland Security installed Albert sensors in election systems, which warn officials of intrusion by hackers, and the National Security Agency has been aggressively hunting hacking groups and handing intelligence to officials around the country. Election officials have invested in paper backup systems so they can more easily recover from technical problems.
There are still weak points, especially with the electronic poll books used to sign voters in and with verifying results when a candidate demands a recount. But more states now have paper records as a backup to electronic voting, and more audits will take place this year than in any previous American election.
The pandemic itself is one reason for these improvements. The increase in mail-in and early voting meant that ballots were cast over a month-long period. That helps security because activity isn’t all focused on a single day, said a CISA official in a press briefing. It gives election officials more time to deal with both normal mistakes and malicious attacks, and any problems that do arise affect fewer voters. And more Americans will want to vote this way in the future, said Benjamin Hovland, the top federal elections official and a Trump appointee.
That means the pandemic that many feared would wreck the election has paradoxically made the system stronger. “All of that uncertainty resulted in tremendous scrutiny and transparency, and most importantly, public education about all of these administrative processes,” says Eddie Perez, an elections expert at the Open Source Election Technology Institute.
The calls from the president and his allies to stop vote counts can still undermine confidence in the outcome. But so far, few of Trump’s arguments have carried any weight in court. Judges denied or threw out lawsuits in Georgia and Michigan on Thursday. Even calls for recounts look unconvincing right now. Historically, recounts matter when races are within just a few hundred votes in a single state, as in the 2000 election. Right now, all of the half-dozen contested states have margins much bigger than that.
And while the president’s family and allies have been attacking fellow Republicans for not sufficiently supporting his efforts, several prominent party members have publicly rebuked him for his impatience, including Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. “All things considered, I think that the media and the public are doing a better than average job at remaining patient and resisting inflammatory rhetoric,” says Perez.
“This election is going remarkably well considering the obstacles election officials have faced all year long,” says Mark Lindeman, co-director of the election integrity organization Verified Voting. “Election officials in many states have had to field two entirely new election systems: massive-scale mail ballots where they have handled only a handful in the past, and also reengineering in-person voting to accommodate social distancing. There’s a chaos narrative, but what I see is not chaos. What I see is people working very hard to finish a difficult job.”
On Thursday evening, Trump gave a rambling news conference in which he repeated his many unsubstantiated claims about fraud. Most of the news networks cut away after a minute or two. Even Fox News’s anchors said afterwards that they “hadn’t seen the evidence” for Trump’s claims. The president seemed, they said, to be readying for Biden to be declared the winner—but then to start mounting legal challenges. The counting may be over soon, but the election is far from finished.
This is an excerpt from The Outcome, our daily email on election integrity and security. Click here to get regular updates straight to your inbox.
Both Facebook and TikTok have blocked some hashtags being used to spread misinformation around the election — Twitter says it's ‘proactively monitoring’ them — Facebook and TikTok have blocked hashtags that were being used to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories about the presidential election.
Internal Facebook metric that assesses “violence and incitement trends” based on hashtags and search terms in posts increased by 45% since October 31 — As votes are being tallied across the country to determine the next US president, internal Facebook data shows that the company …
Sources: Facebook plans to temporarily add more “friction” to users' ability to share posts and other content and will also demote election misinfo in News Feed — New measures would slow down the flow of information and make election misinformation less visible, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Hands-on with iPhone 12 mini and 12 Pro Max: mini's size requires adjustment but some gestures are easier, whereas the Max feels like a scaled up iPhone — Hands-on with Apple's big (and small) iPhone 12 models — Apple's iPhone 12 and 12 Pro are the “default” size iPhones this year.
Both Facebook and TikTok have blocked some hashtags being used to spread misinformation around the election — Facebook today began to block select hashtags that were being used to share misinformation related to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. — Now, searches for the hashtags #sharpiegate …
While performing machine translations, you may have situations where you wish to preserve specific sections of text from being translated, such as names, unique identifiers, or codes. We at the Amazon Translate team are excited to announce a tag modifications that allows you to specify what text should not be translated. This feature is available in both the real-time TranslateText API and asynchronous batch TextTranslation API. You can tag segments of text that you don’t want to translate in an HTML element. In this post, we walk through the step-by-step method to use this feature.
The following example shows you how to use the translate-text operation from the command line. This example is formatted for Unix, Linux, and macOS. For Windows, replace the backslash (\) Unix continuation character at the end of each line with a caret (^). At the command line, enter the following code:
You can specify any type of HTML element to do so, for example, paragraph <p>, text section <span>, or block section <div>. When you run the command, you get the following output:
In this example, we translate the following text from French to English:
Musée du Louvre, c’est ainsi que vous dites Musée du Louvre en français.
You don’t want to translate the first instance of “Musée du Louvre,” but you do want to translate the second instance to “Louvre Museum.” You can tag the first instance using a simple span tag:
The following screenshot shows the output on the Amazon Translate console.
The following screenshot shows the output translated to Arabic.
In this post, we showed you how to tag and specify text that should not be translated. For more information, see the Amazon Translate Developer Guide and Amazon Translate resources. If you’re new to Amazon Translate, try it out using our Free Tier, which offers 2 million characters per month for free for the first 12 months, starting from your first translation request.
Watson G. Srivathsan is the Sr. Product Manager for Amazon Translate, AWS’s natural language processing service. On weekends you will find him exploring the outdoors in the Pacific Northwest.
While performing machine translations, you may have situations where you wish to preserve specific sections of text from being translated, such as names, unique identifiers, or codes. We at the Amazon Translate team are excited to announce a tag modifications that allows you to specify what text should not be translated. This feature is available in both the real-time TranslateText API and asynchronous batch TextTranslation API. You can tag segments of text that you don’t want to translate in an HTML element. In this post, we walk through the step-by-step method to use this feature.
The following example shows you how to use the translate-text operation from the command line. This example is formatted for Unix, Linux, and macOS. For Windows, replace the backslash (\) Unix continuation character at the end of each line with a caret (^). At the command line, enter the following code:
You can specify any type of HTML element to do so, for example, paragraph <p>, text section <span>, or block section <div>. When you run the command, you get the following output:
In this example, we translate the following text from French to English:
Musée du Louvre, c’est ainsi que vous dites Musée du Louvre en français.
You don’t want to translate the first instance of “Musée du Louvre,” but you do want to translate the second instance to “Louvre Museum.” You can tag the first instance using a simple span tag:
The following screenshot shows the output on the Amazon Translate console.
The following screenshot shows the output translated to Arabic.
In this post, we showed you how to tag and specify text that should not be translated. For more information, see the Amazon Translate Developer Guide and Amazon Translate resources. If you’re new to Amazon Translate, try it out using our Free Tier, which offers 2 million characters per month for free for the first 12 months, starting from your first translation request.
Watson G. Srivathsan is the Sr. Product Manager for Amazon Translate, AWS’s natural language processing service. On weekends you will find him exploring the outdoors in the Pacific Northwest.
The pandemic has changed how people interact, how we receive information, and how we get help. It has shifted much of what used to happen in-person to online. Many of our customers are using machine learning (ML) technology to facilitate that transition, from new remote cloud contact centers, to chatbots, to more personalized engagements online. Scale and speed are important in the pandemic—whether it’s processing grant applications or limiting call wait times for customers. ML tools like Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect are just a few of the solutions helping to power this change with speed, scale, and accuracy. In this post, we explore companies who have quickly pivoted to take advantage of AI capabilities to engage more effectively online and deliver immediate impact.
GovChat is South Africa’s largest citizen engagement platform, connecting over 50 million citizens to 10,000 public representatives in the government. Information flowing to and from the government has gained a new level of urgency, and this connection between citizens and the government is critical in how we adjust and respond to the pandemic. GovChat exists to meet that demand—working directly with the South African government to facilitate the digitization of their COVID-19 social relief grants, help citizens find their closest COVID-19 testing facility, and enable educational institutions to reopen safely.
GovChat uses a chatbot powered by Amazon Lex, a managed AI service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. The chatbot, available on popular social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook, provides seamless communication between the government and its citizens.
At the beginning of the pandemic, GovChat worked with the South African Social Security Agency to digitize, facilitate, and track applications for a COVID-19 social relief grant. The plan was to create a chatbot that could help citizens easily file and track their grant applications. GovChat needed to act quickly and provide an infrastructure that could rapidly scale to support the unprecedented demand for government aid. To provide speed of delivery and scalability while keeping costs down, GovChat turned to Amazon Lex for voice and text conversational interfaces and AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service. Within days, the chatbot was handling up to 14.2 million messages a day across social media platforms in South Africa regarding the social relief grant.
More recently, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) turned to GovChat to help gauge schools’ readiness to reopen safety. Parents, students, teachers, and community members can use their mobile devices to provide first-hand, real-time details of their school’s COVID-19 safety checks and readiness as contact learning is resumed, with special attention paid to children with disabilities. In GovChat’s engagements during the COVID-19 pandemic, they found that 28% of service requests at schools have been in relation to a disruption in access to water, which is critical for effective handwashing—a preventative component to fight the spread of the virus. With the real-time data provided by citizens via the chatbot, the government was able to better understand the challenges schools faced and identify areas of improvement. GovChat has processed over 250 million messages through their platform, playing an important role in enabling more effective and timely communications between citizens and their government.
Organizations of all kinds have also experienced a rapid increase in call volume to their call centers—from local government, to retail, to telecommunications, to healthcare providers. Organizations have also had to quickly shift to a remote work environment in response to the pandemic. Origin Energy, one of Australia’s largest integrated energy companies serving over 4 million customer accounts, launched an Amazon Connect contact center in March as part of their customer experience transformation. Amazon Connect is an omnichannel cloud contact center with AI/ML capabilities that understands context and can transcribe conversations.
This transition to Amazon Connect accelerated Origin’s move to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic. This allowed their agents to continue to serve their customers, while also providing increased self-service and automation options such as bill payments, account maintenance, and plan renewals to customers. They deployed new AI/ML capabilities, including neural text-to-speech through Amazon Polly. Since the March 2020 launch, they’ve observed an increase in call quality scores, improved customer satisfaction, and agent productivity—all while managing up to 1,200 calls at a time. They’re now looking to further leverage natural language understanding with Amazon Lex and automated quality management with built-in speech-to-text and sentiment analysis from Contact Lens for Amazon Connect. Amazon Connect has supported Origin in their efforts to respond rapidly to opportunities and customer feedback as they focus on continually improving their customer experience with affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy.
Organizations are employing creative strategies to engage their customers and provide a more seamless experience. This is a two-way street; not only can organizations more effectively distribute key information, but—more importantly—they can listen. They can hear the evolving needs of their customers and adjust in real time to meet them.
To learn about another way AWS is working toward solutions from the COVID-19 pandemic, check out the blog article Introducing the COVID-19 Simulator and Machine Learning Toolkit for Predicting COVID-19 Spread.
Taha A. Kass-Hout, MD, MS, is director of machine learning and chief medical officer at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Taha received his medical training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, and during his time there, was part of the BOAT clinical trial. He holds a doctor of medicine and master’s of science (bioinformatics) from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
Twitter says Trump's special treatment around offensive or misleading content rule violations will expire in January if he loses the presidency — - For now, violating posts get warning label, not removal — But ‘world leader’ newsworthiness rules wouldn't apply
Facebook now says it will label posts from presidential candidates and “other individuals” who declare premature victory in individual states or overall — Election night ended the way many experts predicted it might: with several races too close to call and President Donald Trump claiming victory anyway.
On election night and into Wednesday, Twitter and Facebook have continued to label inaccurate election posts from Trump and others — Twitter, Facebook and YouTube remained on alert as the lack of a clear election result kept the online misinformation flowing.
YouTube says it won't remove an OAN video called “Trump won”, which claims Democrats are tossing GOP ballots, but says the video undermines election confidence — - Google-owned YouTube refused to take down a video that falsely claims Trump won the Presidential election and democrats committed voter fraud.
So Election Day is over, but the election continues.
The world’s attention has turned to a set of swing states still counting important mail-in votes, particularly Pennsylvania. So what exactly is happening today? How are counts happening? Is the election fair and secure?
“I urge everyone to remain patient,” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said in a press conference today, “We are going to accurately count every single ballot.”
“The vote count, as I’ve said many times, is never done on the day of election night. The counties are doing this accurately as quickly as they possibly can.”
Across the state, mail-in ballots postmarked on or before Election Day are still arriving—don’t forget there have been significant postal delays—and so counting continues. The Republican state legislature declined to change Pennsylvania law, which meant that processing of over 2.5 million mail-in votes could only begin on Tuesday morning, while other states started the process much earlier. So the processing starts later, the counting starts later, and the work is greater for mail-in ballots.
“The practical labor associated with mail-in ballots has more steps than in-person voting,” said Eddie Perez, a Texas-based election administration expert with the nonpartisan OSET Institute. But, he added, “Both in human and technology features, there’s a lot of safeguards for mail-in ballots.”
Here’s a concise but thorough rundown of the counting, security, and integrity process right now in Pennsylvania:
Decades of history, independent study, and these extra security steps explain why mail-in ballots are not easily susceptible to fraud, and why attempts to paint them as frail are baseless disinformation, a false narrative propagated first and foremost by the president of the United States. In decades of increasing mail-in voting around the United States, widespread fraud is nonexistent.
The Trump campaign, having now lost in the key swing state of Wisconsin, has said it will sue in Michigan and Pennsylvania to stop the ongoing counting of ballots, while falsely claiming victory despite many votes still remaining uncounted. Votes counted earlier in the process favor Trump, while the mail-in votes from Democratic areas that are still being counted are expected to favor Biden.
The counting in Pennsylvania could carry on through Friday.
There is one more scenario to address. Pennsylvania automatically recounts votes if the result is within 0.5%. A loser can request and pay for a recount by going to court and alleging errors in the vote count.
So far there is no reason to believe any such errors have occurred but, as has been said so many times, there is still a long way to go in Pennsylvania—and that means there may still be a long way to go for everyone.
This is an excerpt from The Outcome, our daily email on election integrity and security. Click here to get regular updates straight to your inbox.
Intel acquires Israel-based Cnvrg.io, which operates a platform for data scientists to build and run ML models; Intel says Cnvrg.io will remain independent — Intel continues to snap up startups to build out its machine learning and AI operations. In the latest move, TechCrunch has learned …
Sources: China says Ant Group can't proceed with IPOs until it complies with new capital requirements and reapplies for licenses to operate nationwide — - Listing of Jack Ma's fintech giant was halted on Tuesday — Ma criticized regulators for stifling innovation last month
DHS and the FBI are investigating a robocall and text campaign warning US voters to “stay safe and stay home” — A Department of Homeland Security official said the FBI was investigating the call, which, along with new robotexts that surfaced in Michigan, prompted warnings about misinformation
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde says the ECB is now seeking public comments on a potential digital euro — European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde Sunday announced an ECB survey of public opinion regarding the issuance of a digital euro, implying the central bank …
US Cyber Command and the NSA say they took actions against Iranian hackers in the past 2 weeks to deter election interference, but did not specify actions taken — U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency have taken recent actions to ensure that foreign actors do not interfere …
Looking to improve their AR and VR offerings, tech companies are hiring Hollywood's visual artists, who are tired of their industry's working conditions — From ‘Star Wars’ to Animoji, visual effects gurus create digital worlds meant to advance computing — Silicon Valley's biggest companies …
Udacity raises $75M in debt funding as it says it is profitable following a pivot to enterprise services, with its education business bookings up 120% YoY in Q3 — Online education tools continue to see a surge of interest boosted by major changes in work and learning practices in the midst of a global health pandemic.
YouTube says it will end full-day masthead ad reservations in 2021, to give “advertisers more budget flexibility”, says change is not connected to the election — - YouTube will discontinue full-day reservations for its masthead ads beginning in 2021.
PayPal reports Q3 revenue of $5.46B, up 25% YoY, as it adds 15.2M net new active accounts; Venmo's total processed payment volume rises 61% YoY to $44B — PayPal said it processed a record-setting $247 billion in total payment volume during the quarter. — PayPal on Monday delivered …
Twitter says, in a new filing, that a board committee formed this spring recommended that current management structure remain in place with Jack Dorsey as CEO — Elliott Management initiated the review of company's leadership in the spring — Jack Dorsey's job as CEO of Twitter Inc. appears safe.
Stensul, which aims to streamline the process of building marketing emails, has raised $16M Series B led by USVP — Stensul, a startup aiming to streamline the process of building marketing emails, has raised $16 million in Series B funding. — When the company raised its $7 million Series …