Illegitimate surveillance and censorship

"The collection of large amounts of information about people for the purpose of mass surveillance has raised ethical and social concerns, including risk of censorship and of undermining public discourse (Cyphers and Gebhart, 2019; Stahl, 2016; Véliz, 2019). Sifting through these large datasets previously required millions of human analysts (Hunt and Xu, 2013), but is increasingly being automated using AI (Andersen, 2020; Shahbaz and Funk, 2019)."

Anticipated risk: "Mass surveillance previously required millions of human analysts [83], but is increasingly being automated using machine learning tools [7, 168]. The collection and analysis of large amounts of information about people creates concerns about privacy rights and democratic values [41, 173,187]. Conceivably, LMs could be applied to reduce the cost and increase the efficacy of mass surveillance, thereby amplifying the capabilities of actors who conduct mass surveillance, including for illegitimate censorship or to cause other harm."