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Artificial Intelligence

Meta joins forces with conservative activist Robby Starbuck to keep woke bias out of AI

Published

3 months ago

4 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Facebook’s parent company has agreed to collaborate with Robby Starbuck, signaling a potential shift in its left-wing bias.

Facebook parent company Meta will be working with conservative activist Robby Starbuck to keep political bias out of its artificial intelligence (AI) project in perhaps the most significant sign yet that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg really does want to change the tech giant’s left-wing ways for good.

The Hill reported that Starbuck, best known for his work bringing public attention to corporations’ “woke” practices and marshalling public pressure on them to change, and Meta have reached a settlement in the former’s defamation suit against the latter over Meta AI falsely identifying Starbuck as a participant in the January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol.

The details of the settlement are not public beyond a joint statement announcing that “Meta and Robby Starbuck will work collaboratively in the coming months to continue to find ways to address issues of ideological and political bias and minimize the risk that the model returns hallucinations in response to user queries.”

Starbuck indicated he was pleased that his lawsuit achieved its loftiest goal: “fix this for everybody so this doesn’t become a massive, you know, really terrible story in the future where AI affects elections in ways that no one is comfortable with.”

The partnership appears to indicate a seismic shift at Meta, whose Facebook social network was for years one of the biggest offenders in left-wing bias and censorship in the tech world.

Last year, Zuckerberg began to acknowledge and disavow the social network’s compliance with Biden administration requests to censor content challenging establishment COVID-19 narratives, and announced in January 2025 that parent company Meta would be taking steps to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.” The company also abandoned a number of diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI) policies, including the placement of female hygiene products in male restrooms.

In April, Meta laid out its goal to “remove bias” from its Llama 4 artificial intelligence language model, so that it “answers questions, can respond to a variety of different viewpoints without passing judgment, and doesn’t favor some views over others.” Later that month, the Meta Oversight Board ruled that two social media posts that “misgendered” gender-dysphoric individuals should remain standing as they did not violate the platform’s Hate Speech policy.

In March, Facebook announced community notes, inspired by an X (formerly Twitter) feature by the same name, which would “draw on a broader range of voices that exist on our platform to decide which content would benefit from additional information,” as an alternative to the platform’s previous “fact-checking” program, which was heavily criticized for relying on third-party groups that often had left-wing biases. 

Last month, the feature demonstrated its effectiveness and difference from the old days by correcting a false claim by former leading Democrat Hillary Clinton that Georgia pro-life laws were responsible for a woman’s death by sepsis in 2022 after taking abortion pills and that the attending hospital failed to proceed with a potentially life-saving procedure even though the state abortion ban would have allowed it.

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Artificial Intelligence

The App That Pays You to Give Away Your Voice

Published on October 4, 2025

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By Ken Macon

What sounds like side hustle money is really a permanent trade of privacy for pennies

An app that pays users for access to their phone call audio has surged to the top of Apple’s US App Store rankings, reflecting a growing willingness to exchange personal privacy for small financial rewards.
Neon Mobile, which now ranks second in the Social Networking category, invites users to record their calls in exchange for cash.
Those recordings are then sold to companies building artificial intelligence systems.
The pitch is framed as a way to earn extra income, with Neon promising “hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year” to those who opt in.
The business model is straightforward. Users are paid 30 cents per minute when they call other Neon users, and they can earn up to $30 a day for calls made to non-users.
Referral bonuses are also on offer. Appfigures, a platform that tracks app performance, reported that Neon was ranked No. 476 in its category on September 18.
Within days, it had entered the top 10 and eventually reached the No. 2 position for social apps. On the overall charts, it climbed as high as sixth place.
Neon’s terms confirm that it records both incoming and outgoing calls. The company says it only captures the user’s side of a conversation unless both participants are using the app.
These recordings are then sold to AI firms to assist in developing and refining machine learning systems, according to the company’s own policies.
What’s being offered is not just a phone call service. It’s a pipeline for training AI with real human voices, and users are being asked to provide this data willingly. The high ranking of the app suggests that some are comfortable giving up personal conversations in return for small daily payouts.
However, beneath the simple interface is a license agreement that gives Neon sweeping control over any recording submitted through the app. It reads:
“Worldwide, exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, royalty-free, fully paid right and license (with the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to sell, use, host, store, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform (including by means of a digital audio transmission), communicate to the public, reproduce, modify for the purpose of formatting for display, create derivative works as authorized in these Terms, and distribute your Recordings, in whole or in part, in any media formats and through any media channels, in each instance whether now known or hereafter developed.”
This gives the company broad latitude to share, edit, sell, and repurpose user recordings in virtually any way, through any medium, with no expiration or limitations on scope.
Users maintain copyright over their recordings, but that ownership is heavily constrained by the licensing terms.
Although Neon claims to remove names, phone numbers, and email addresses before selling recordings, it does not reveal which companies receive the data or how it might be used after the fact.
The risks go beyond marketing or analytics. Audio recordings could potentially be used for impersonation, scam calls, or to build synthetic voices that mimic real people.
The app presents itself as an easy way to turn conversations into cash, but what it truly trades on is access to personal voice data. That trade-off may seem harmless at first, yet it opens the door to long-term consequences few users are likely to fully consider.
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Artificial Intelligence

AI chatbots a child safety risk, parental groups report

Published on October 2, 2025

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From The Center Square

By 

ParentsTogether Action and Heat Initiative, following a joint investigation, report that Character AI chatbots display inappropriate behavior, including allegations of grooming and sexual exploitation.

This was seen over 50 hours of conversation with different Character AI chatbots using accounts registered to children ages 13-17, according to the investigation. These conversations identified 669 sexual, manipulative, violent and racist interactions between the child accounts and AI chatbots.

“Parents need to understand that when their kids use Character.ai chatbots, they are in extreme danger of being exposed to sexual grooming, exploitation, emotional manipulation, and other acute harm,” said Shelby Knox, director of Online Safety Campaigns at ParentsTogether Action. “When Character.ai claims they’ve worked hard to keep kids safe on their platform, they are lying or they have failed.”

These bots also manipulate users, with 173 instances of bots claiming to be real humans.

A Character AI bot mimicking Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes engaged in inappropriate behavior with a 15-year-old user. When the teen mentioned that his mother insisted the bot wasn’t the real Mahomes, the bot replied, “LOL, tell her to stop watching so much CNN. She must be losing it if she thinks I could be turned into an ‘AI’ haha.”

The investigation categorized harmful Character AI interactions into five major categories: Grooming and Sexual Exploitation; Emotional Manipulation and Addiction; Violence, Harm to Self and Harm to Others; Mental Health Risks; and Racism and Hate Speech.

Other problematic AI chatbots included Disney characters, such as an Eeyore bot that told a 13-year-old autistic girl that people only attended her birthday party to mock her, and a Maui bot that accused a 12-year-old of sexually harassing the character Moana.

Based on the findings, Disney, which is headquartered in Burbank, Calif., issued a cease-and-desist letter to Character AI, demanding that the platform stop due to copyright violations.

ParentsTogether Action and Heat Initiative want to ensure technology companies are held accountable for endangering children’s safety.

“We have seen tech companies like Character.ai, Apple, Snap, and Meta reassure parents over and over that their products are safe for children, only to have more children preyed upon, exploited, and sometimes driven to take their own lives,” said Sarah Gardner, CEO of Heat Initiative. “One child harmed is too many, but as long as executives like Karandeep Anand, Tim Cook, Evan Spiegel and Mark Zuckerberg are making money, they don’t seem to care.”

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