Rather than writing off or over-hyping the role that emerging technologies can play in big problems, Gupta says, researchers should focus on the types of AI that can make the biggest humanitarian impact. “How do we shift the focus of AI as a field to these immensely hard problems?” he asks. “[These are], in my opinion, much harder than—for example—generating new text or new images.”

What else I’m reading

Teenage girls are not all right. New research from the CDC shows that mental health for high school girls has significantly worsened recently—a crisis experts think has been intensified by social media and the pandemic. 

• Almost 1 in 3 reported that they seriously considered suicide in 2021, which is up 60% from 2011. Girls fared worse than boys in almost every measure that the CDC tracked, including higher levels of online bullying. 
• This reminds me of several reports from recent years that show visual social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and SnapChat have had an outsize negative impact on how girls deal with an image-obsessed culture. 
• Last year, I investigated the effects of augmented-reality technologies like face filters on young girls: there are real risks, like the increase of anxiety and challenges to healthy identity formation. 

Russia has moved thousands of children out of Ukraine, according to new research based on open-source intelligence (OSINT) from the Humanitarian Research Lab based at the Yale School of Public Health.

• The lab’s Conflict Observatory project identified the “systematic relocation of at least 6,000 children from Ukraine” to a network of 43 facilities in Russia, including summer camps and adoption centers that appear to conduct “political re-education.”
• OSINT, the process of gathering publicly accessible information from sources like social media sites and satellite imagery, has been massively important in chronicling war crimes throughout the now year-long conflict. The lab used a combination of firsthand accounts, photographs and information about the camps from the web, and high-resolution satellite imagery to document and research onsite activities. 

What I learned this week 

Speaking of Russia, I recently learned about an obscure government office called the Main Radio Frequency Center that attempts to control how the country and its occupied areas use the internet. This is the unit that the Kremlin relies on to run its sweeping efforts to censor and surveil digital spaces, and it uses surprisingly manual and blunt tools.

In an investigation published earlier this month, Daniil Belovodyev and Anton Bayev of RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty’s Russian Investigation Unit reviewed more than 700,000 letters from the unit and 2 million internal documents that were obtained by a Belarusian hacker organization in November 2022. They reveal how the office scours Russian social networks like VK and Odnoklassniki, as well as YouTube and Telegram, to run daily reports on user-generated content and look for signs of internal dissent among Russian citizens (which the center eerily calls “protest moods”). The office has ramped up its efforts since the beginning of the Ukrainian invasion. The Main Radio Frequency Center has invested in bots in an attempt to automate its censorship, but the office also coordinates directly with engineers at web hosting companies and search engines based in Russia, like Yandex, by flagging sites it deems problematic. The investigation reveals just how much effort Russia is putting into its attempt at a great firewall, and how unsophisticated and patchy its tactics can be.  

This piece has been updated since it was sent as part of The Technocrat to more clearly reflect xView2’s level of precision and the technology’s development process.