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AI

FIFA Used AI to Identify 300 People Harassing World Cup Players, Notified Law Enforcement (espn.com) 55

Posted by EditorDavid from the now-is-all dept.
The Associated Press reports: A project using artificial intelligence to track social media abuse aimed at players at the 2022 World Cup identified more than 300 people whose details are being given to law enforcement, FIFA said Sunday.

The people made "abusive, discriminatory, or threatening posts [or] comments" on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, soccer's governing body said in a report detailing efforts to protect players and officials during the tournament played in Qatar. The biggest spike in abuse was during the France-England quarterfinals game, said the report from a project created jointly by FIFA and the players' global union FIFPRO. It used AI to help identify and hide offensive social media posts... About 20 million posts and comments were scanned and more than 19,000 were flagged as abusive...

The identities of the more than 300 people identified for posting abuse "will be shared with the relevant member associations and jurisdictional law authorities to facilitate real-world action being taken against offenders," FIFA said. "Discrimination is a criminal act. With the help of this tool, we are identifying the perpetrators and we are reporting them to the authorities so that they are punished for their actions," FIFA President Gianni Infantino said in a statement. "We also expect the social media platforms to accept their responsibilities and to support us in the fight against all forms of discrimination."

FIFA and FIFPRO have extended the system for use at the Women's World Cup that starts next month in Australia and New Zealand.
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FIFA Used AI to Identify 300 People Harassing World Cup Players, Notified Law Enforcement More

FIFA Used AI to Identify 300 People Harassing World Cup Players, Notified Law Enforcement

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  • There are no privacy rights in Qatar (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday June 18, 2023 @05:20PM (#63613612)

    THAT is the news in this article.

    • Pretty much this. Being a dick to celebrities is basically Twitter's raison d'etre. Even Musk himself gets in on it. [reddit.com]

    • Did you see the article about USA vs Mexico football match get shutdown with about 4 minutes of game time left because some amount of (presumably) Mexican fans were chanting homophobic slurs? The event was in Las Vegas at Allegiant Stadium.

      I'm sure AI cameras will be soon rolled out to ban those kinds of fans, despite that pesky 1st Amendment we use to have.

      • Allegiant Stadium, private forum, their rules rule. No criminal charge, but they can ban anybody they want from the stadium.
        • And in the near future, social media comments like yours will trigger someone into banning you from all forms of societal life.

          Need to buy groceries? Not on my property you pesky non-believer!

          Need to pay your bills with your virtual wallet because why would you use cash (what are you trying to hide? HMMM!) ? Not if you've pissed off the great private payment processors. (Hi, Paypal!)

          Need to file your taxes? Not with my company you abortionist! (Have fun having no protections from errors when dealing w

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

            And in the near future, social media comments like yours will trigger someone into banning you from all forms of societal life.

            You might be thinking of the "woke" crowd "cancel culture" doing it, but it' turns out it's the "anti-woke" crowd actually cancelling it.

            After all, you have Ron DeSantis cancelling Disney and Disney World. His whole campaign is basically based around it now - how the woke needs to go broke.

            Or how the anti-LGBTQ people are gathering to shut down all events from drag readings and othe

      • Did you see the article about USA vs Mexico football match get shutdown with about 4 minutes of game time left because some amount of (presumably) Mexican fans were chanting homophobic slurs? The event was in Las Vegas at Allegiant Stadium.

        I'm sure AI cameras will be soon rolled out to ban those kinds of fans, despite that pesky 1st Amendment we use to have.

        Not sure the first amendment is intended to enable hate-speech. I mean, I get it that heckling is a time-honored tradition but... as a straight guy I can still imagine what it must feel like to be a gay person in a stadium with hundreds of people chanting slurs.

        We've got enough words that just mean "bad thing", I don't know we need to protect mass use of words that mean other things in the context of "bad thing". One person using a slur likely feels annoying. A crowd using that slur... must feel like

        • Yes, hate-speech is very protected by the first amendment. It's the entire point of free speech. Otherwise, you could censor almost anything because you decided anything and or everything was offensive to you. Hate-speech is just speech you don't like. It's subjective and could easily be abused by anyone in power. It's your right to offend others. It's your right to be offended.

    • Or, they're just more honest about it?

  • Not a fan of facial rec / tracking as a rule, but for those of us who follow football, there's also been some serious assholes out there who should never be let into a stadium again.

    However, what I'm not sure of is connecting it with law enforcement, ban them from the stadiums or block their social media, etc., but when they say "Discrimination is a criminal act" are they saying they're trying to criminalize some football hooligans for social media posts -- that's a slippery slope.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      FIFA world view: discrimination is only a criminal act when other people do it, we only do it to protect the game (and our profits).

    • Not a fan of facial rec / tracking as a rule,

      They used ai to flag abusive comments then simply get the author account, no facial rec I think.

  • They're pitched as the next great thing for the advancement of humanity, and they're invariably used for stupid sports or dreadful military purposes.

  • ... so it is entirely impossible that some unlucky person just got mixed up in some hallucination of some AI system which nobody bothered to double-check, because that would have taken actual manual labor, and such FIFA cannot possibly waste money on.

    Where there was additional escalation to Twitter after failure to act on immediate automated reporting, ...

    • Thereâ(TM)s a matter of evidence. If that "AI" posted a list of 300 names, that wouldnâ(TM)t be evidence. If they have actual photo or video evidence, and an AI found names and addresses of assumed perpetrators, then someone needs to check that the photo or video evidence actually shows a crime, and that the person named is actually the person in the evidence.

  • FIFA, the players, and the fans all suck. Unprofessional and unsportsmanlike.

    • Yeah. Soccer is dull and boring as a spectator sport. Nil all after 120 minutes then decide the result in the stupidest way possible. There's no wonder why there's so much fan hooliganism and violence. They call them "passionate" but it's just the result of decades of intergenerational boredom.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

        I don't have a problem against the sport itself. Just FIFA and anyone involved or adjacent. They are not a respectable organization.

  • Acceptable? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by godel_56 ( 1287256 ) on Sunday June 18, 2023 @07:18PM (#63613802)
    From TFA:

    "Violence and threat became more extreme as the tournament progressed, with players' families increasingly referenced and many threatened if players returned to a particular country -- either the nation they represent or where they play football," the report said.

    When it gets to threats of violence against players, their families, or officials, I don't have a problem with reporting them to the cops. In the past there have been acts of violence against players and families, especially in South America

    .

  • Good luck proving your innocence once AI identified you. More so, unlike drug sniffing dog there isn't "no drugs were found" resolution to this.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by armada ( 553343 )
      FYI, "no drugs were found" is still tracked as a correct hit for the dog instead of a false positive. They assume the dog is infallible and there were drugs there before.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        Yes, but you don't get charged with drug possession if there were no drugs found. You might get charged with online harassment even if you made no such posts.

  • Huh? (Score:2)

    by armada ( 553343 )
    Being a troll is discrimination now? What if you troll everyone? Does that resolve the issue?

    • What if you troll everyone? Does that resolve the issue?

      If it does, then 4chan and Reddit were ahead of the curve.....

  • Considering that, clearly, this kind of "abuse" wasn't actually reported by the individuals in question (since that would need no AI), one has to wonder what's the point of prosecuting a few hundred people for the equivalent of running their mouth at a pub

    Of course, this only goes to show the main use of AI, which I've been mentioning ever since the articles about "Google AI can understand humour" were popping up a year and something ago, which is that at the end, this will be used to suppress political
  • From my experience with AI I would say the AI guessed 300 people who may have harassed world cup players. Someone has to check each person to see which of this data is real.
    • Also, "Artificial Intelligence" is a misnomer. It is not a replication of our intelligence, but just of our intuition. It makes very fast guesses based on the experience. It should be called Artificial Intuition, but of course that wouldn't sell.

  • Discrimination is a criminal act

    Says the group that hosted their worldwide soccer match in a civil rights atrocity desert where they happily toss gay people off roofs with their hands tied or just dump them in the desert.

    If you virtue signaled any harder, FIFA, people will think fucking Gondor is calling for aid.

  • Dear police, magic 8 ball says to arrest these people.

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