Apple Says iPhone 15 Pro Overheating Due to iOS 17 Bug, Not Hardware Design - CNET

Apple Says iPhone 15 Pro Overheating Due to iOS 17 Bug, Not Hardware Design

"Recent updates to some third-party iOS 17 apps, like Instagram and Uber, also contribute to the issue, Apple tells CNET. Here's how to keep your phone cool while a fix is in the works.

Sept. 30, 2023 9:13 a.m. PT

Some owners of the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are complaining about their phones overheating.

James Martin/CNET

Widespread complaints about overheating of the new iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max can be traced to several factors, including a software bug in iOS 17, Apple told CNET on Saturday. 

The company said the new phones' titanium frame and aluminum substructure aren't contributing to the issue, and that they dissipate heat better than the stainless steel used in prior Pro models.

Days after the iPhone 15 series went on sale, people started to share stories about how their new phones overheated or felt excessively hot. Some users couldn't comfortably hold their phone. Others shared pictures of infrared thermometers showing the temperature of their iPhone hitting more than 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

While spending time with the phones for my iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max review, I didn't have trouble with either one overheating. The 15 Pro Max did become noticeably hot after I used my MacBook Pro's 140W power adapter to charge it. It also got quite warm after I played Resident Evil Village for 30 minutes.

"We have identified a few conditions which can cause iPhone to run warmer than expected," Apple said in a statement to CNET. "The device may feel warmer during the first few days after setting up or restoring the device because of increased background activity. We have also found a bug in iOS 17 that is impacting some users and will be addressed in a software update. Another issue involves some recent updates to third-party apps that are causing them to overload the system. We're working with these app developers on fixes that are in the process of rolling out."

Tech reviewer Faruk Korkmaz published a video earlier this week documenting his iPhone 15 Pro Max's temperature climbing to 98 degrees within minutes after he opened the Instagram app. The same thing occurred on his iPhone 14 Pro Max running iOS 17.

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11:06

Apple explained that recent updates to some third-party apps on iOS 17, like Instagram, Asphalt 9 and Uber, overload the A17 Pro chip's CPU, causing the iPhone to get warmer than normal. The company is working with third-party developers to implement fixes. As a result, Instagram released an updated version of its app on Sept. 27.

Neither Instagram, Uber nor Asphalt 9 developer Gameloft immediately responded to requests for comment.

There's no word when the software update that addresses the iOS 17 bug will come out, but Apple did explain that the fix won't reduce the iPhone's performance.

In terms of charging, Apple said the 15 Pro and Pro Max support any USB-C adapter that's compliant with the USB-C standard, including USB Power Delivery. The company said the iPhone regulates itself to cap charging to a max 27W and that if you're using a 20W or higher charger, the phone can temporarily get warmer as a result.

Some people have noticed the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max getting uncomfortably hot while it charges.

James Martin/CNET

Apple's support page notes that the iPhone may feel warm when you first set it up, restore it from a backup, or wirelessly charge it. That's been my experience with a number of previous iPhone models and Android phones.

If you have an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max and are experiencing overheating, there are a few things you can try until Apple releases the iOS 17 update. Turn on Low Power Modefrom the Control Center or in the Battery section of the Settings app. This will kill any background tasks, temporarily limit the display's refresh rate to 60Hz and reduce the brightness. Don't keep your phone in direct sunlight or in an extremely hot environment for prolonged periods. And if, like Korkmaz, you suspect an app might be the issue, disable background refresh for that app under the General section in the Settings app."

Apple Says iPhone 15 Pro Overheating Due to iOS 17 Bug, Not Hardware Design - CNET

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Apple ‘Punishing’ iPhone 15 Users By Disabling New iOS Battery Feature

Janhoi McGregorSep 28, 2023,

The iPhone 15's new battery health meter is disabled when the battery is replaced independently. ... [+]

© 2023 Bloomberg Finance LP

“Apple’s iPhone 15 includes a feature that shows how many cycles the battery has been through, which appears to be a direct response to concerns aboutrapid battery degradation in the iPhone 14. But a repair specialist has found that the new feature is disabled when the battery is replaced.

Ricky Panesar, founder of repair specialists iCorrect, discovered this when tearing down the recently released iPhone 15 Pro. When an iPhone 15 Pro battery is independently replaced with another genuine battery from the same iPhone model, the option to view the new battery health measurements disappears.

“If you replace the battery you will immediately lose functionality of battery health, and also the new cycle count feature. So there's extra levels of pairing this year than there was last year with the battery… you're punishing me [users] by not giving me the features.”

The new iOS 17 battery features include detailing exactly how many times the battery has been fully charged to 100% (known as a cycle), when it was manufactured and when it was first used. If the power pack is replaced without Apple's authorization, it will simply say “unknown” next to the aforementioned categories. A warning message will also pop up saying that the device is unable to determine if the battery is a genuine Apple part, even if it is.

The error message that pops up when the battery is replaced without Apple's authorization. 

Ricky Panesar

The new battery health feature is a win for longevity and for giving secondhand buyers confidence when shopping. But the loss of the cycle count, and other metrics, undermines the new feature’s pro-user credentials because it makes it harder, and more expensive, for owners to replace their batteries by limiting who can carry out that repair.

Disabling battery metrics when the component isn’t replaced in a specific way is part of Apple’s policy of serialization, otherwise known as parts pairing.

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The company is adding integrated circuits to individual components with unique serial numbers. If you want to replace your iPhone 15 battery, or any other component, you will need to use a genuine part—that can only be purchased from Apple—with a corresponding unique serial number, and the parts have to be synced up using Apple’s proprietary calibration tool. Serialization can be found all over the iPhone, MacBook Pro and iPad—from the camera to the display.

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Elsewhere in the device, Panesar discovered that the front-facing camera “glitches” when replaced with another genuine iPhone 15 camera module. The LiDAR sensor will lose some core functionality in certain apps if its replaced, which Panesar says has been the case since the iPhone 13, and the display loses its True Tone function when swapped.

There is some good news, though. There were concerns among the repair community that the introduction of USB-C could see the charging port paired to the logic board, which in theory could restrict iPhone 15 owners to only using Apple chargers or cables through reductions in data speed or warning messages. This was fueled by some leaked images of the charging port before the iPhone 15 was released. However Panesar says that this isn’t the case and that the level of serialization in the iPhone 15 isn’t wildly different to the iPhone 14.“

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Tensions With China Cross a New Line in the South China Sea

“The Philippines is pushing back against China’s territorial claims. But Chinese forces have been unrelenting in using direct confrontation, raising worries about an escalation.

Sept. 26, 2023, 6:06 a.m. ET

Chinese Coast Guard boats sailing close to a floating barrier near the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea in September.Philippine Coast Guard, via Reuters

Sign up for The Interpreter newsletter, for Times subscribers only.  Original analysis on the week’s biggest global stories, from columnist Amanda Taub.

The video may seem too simple, too understated to mark a serious international incident in the South China Sea: a quick clip of a diver using a knife to cut a section of rope underwater.

But that diver was with the Philippine Coast Guard, and the rope was part of a sea barrier placed by Chinese forces to keep Philippine boats away from an area they had a legal right to fish in. In that moment, the Philippines took one of the most forceful steps yet in contesting China’s unrelenting territorial claims ever closer to the Philippine Islands.

“The barrier posed a hazard to navigation, a clear violation of international law,” the Philippines said in a statement, adding that the action had come on direct orders from President Ferdinand E. Marcos Jr.

Since he took office in June 2022, Mr. Marcos has signaled wanting a more muscular foreign policy approach toward China. But until now, those actions were confined mostly to rhetoric, deepening alliances with the United States and other countries, and releasing videos of aggressive activities undertaken by the Chinese Coast Guard against Philippine vessels.

The surprise this time was that the action was being taken by Manila. It has left little doubt that the Philippines is offering more forceful resistance to China’s territorial designs.

While the Biden administration is likely to see that as good news, apprehension is rising in the region about how China might counter that resistance, and whether there could be a risk of sparking a direct military clash among China and the Philippines and its allies, including the United States Navy fleet patrolling the region.

An image taken from video and released on Monday by the Philippine Coast Guard showing a diver cutting through the ropes that kept a Chinese barrier in place in the South China Sea.Philippine Coast Guard, via Associated Press

After the rope was cut and the Philippines lifted the anchor that kept it in place, China removed the barrier. On Tuesday, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry brusquely dismissed the Philippine statement. “We advise the Philippines not to cause provocation and cause trouble,” he said.

Song Zhongping, a commentator in Beijing who is a former military officer, said the Philippines was emboldened to cut the barrier “because the United States continues to encourage the Philippines to confront China in the South China Sea.”

“China must take decisive measures to put an end to the Philippines’ provocation,” Mr. Song said. “We can’t allow the Philippines to commit endless provocations and pose a serious threat to China’s national sovereignty and security.”

China claims 90 percent of the South China Sea, some of it thousands of miles from the mainland and in waters surrounding Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines. In the past decade or so, China has asserted ever greater control over these waters, using two island chains called the Paracels and the Spratlys to expand its military footprint by building and fortifying outposts and airstrips.

These actions have alarmed much of Asia and the United States, which says it has a vested interest in maintaining freedom of navigation in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. China’s military buildup, and increasingly aggressive action by its coast guard and maritime militia, have also raised questions about China’s intentions in the region and its willingness to comply with international law and norms.

The tensions are particularly pronounced in the Philippines, where fishermen have been blocked by Chinese vessels from fishing, and Manila has been prevented from fully exploring oil and gas deposits within an area that an international tribunal in The Hague ruled in 2016 to be part of the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

The anchor that held China’s floating barrier. The Philippines’ cutting of the barrier was one of its boldest moves amid tensions with China in the South China Sea.Philippine Coast Guard, via Associated Press

Many analysts say China is likely to stop short of taking any military action against the Philippines, a treaty ally of the United States, for fear of being embroiled in a broader conflict with Washington and other U.S. allies in the region. In August, the American defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, reaffirmed that a mutual defense treaty with the United States “extends to Philippine public vessels, aircraft and armed forces — to include those of its Coast Guard — in the Pacific, including in the South China Sea.”

“If the U.S. has to engage in a military confrontation with China in the South China Sea, you can’t expect Australia and Japan, for example, to just sit there and idle about while their American allies are fighting the Chinese,” said Collin Koh, a senior fellow at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore. “They will be drawn into it somehow. So this is something that I believe any good Chinese planner will have to consider.”

Mr. Koh said he expects China to ramp up its presence in the South China Sea, perhaps by sending more vessels around disputed areas like Thitu Island and the Second Thomas Shoal to prevent Filipino fishermen from operating freely and to block maritime law enforcement vessels.

Bilahari Kausikan, a former ambassador at large with Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said he believes “Beijing has enough problems at home without wanting to add to them by picking a confrontation with the U.S. as well.”

Mr. Kausikan said “the risk of conflict would be higher” if the Philippines had not removed the barrier, “because then the Chinese would be tempted to push the boundaries even further.”

But Leonardo Cuaresma, president of the New Masinloc Fishermen’s Association in the Philippines, said that in the municipality where the barrier was cut, he was nervous about how China could react.

“Here in Masinloc, it’s natural to feel fear because should there be a conflict, we will be the first one to feel it,” Mr. Cuaresma said. “It’s difficult, because we don’t know if there will be a war or what. We are anxious.”

Mr. Cuaresma said he and his peers have not been able to fish in the Scarborough Shoal for years because of China. “The moment we get near the entrance of the shoal, they would immediately block us,” he said. “Their smaller boats would sail beside us and tell us: ‘Go away, Filipino.’”

A Chinese Coast Guard vessel shadowing Philippine fishing boats near the Scarborough Shoal in September. Both countries lay claim to that area of the South China Sea.Ted Aljibe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Alongside the high emotions, there is still anxiety in Manila about how to deal with China.

Koko Pimentel, the Philippine Senate Minority Leader, told a Senate hearing that he agreed with the Marcos government’s decision to remove the Chinese barrier. But later, in a text message to a New York Times reporter, he offered a cautious addition: “We should avoid conflict as much as possible. Do everything through dialogue and diplomacy. Differing positions are a fact of life, and we should be able to navigate through life with this reality.”

Antonio Carpio, a former Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice in the Philippines and an expert on the South China Sea, said the Philippines was just mirroring what Malaysia and Indonesia did recently when both countries sent their ships to survey in disputed waters despite threats from China.

“If you assert your right and you stand your ground, well, China will not do anything,” he added.

Mr. Carpio said that, more broadly, the international community must pay attention to what is happening in the South China Sea because “what is at stake in Ukraine and in the South China Sea are exactly the same.”

“All nations must oppose this, because this is not just a matter of the Philippines, it’s about the future of the world,” he said. “If the U.N. Charter, which outlawed the wars of aggression, is overturned, then only nuclear powers will be able to settle disputes according to their dictates. It will be ‘might is right’ again.”

Camille Elemia and Joy Dong contributed reporting.

Sui-Lee Wee is the Southeast Asia bureau chief for The Times. She was part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for public service for coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. More about Sui-Lee Wee”

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Opinion | I Was Attacked by Donald Trump and Elon Musk. I Believe It Was a Strategy To Change What You See Online. - The New York Times

Trump Attacked Me. Then Musk Did. It Wasn’t an Accident.

Sept. 18, 2023

Timo Lenzen

By Yoel Roth

Dr. Roth is the former head of trust and safety at Twitter.

"When I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. Following the violence of Jan. 6, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether. Nothing prepared me for what would happen next.

Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.

This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just personal vindictiveness or “cancel culture.” It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.

Private individuals — from academic researchers to employees of tech companies — are increasingly the targets of lawsuits, congressional hearings and vicious online attacks. These efforts, staged largely by the right, are having their desired effect: Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online. Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Platforms had finally begun taking these risks seriously only after the 2016 election. Now, faced with the prospect of disproportionate attacks on their employees, companies seem increasingly reluctant to make controversial decisions, letting misinformation and abuse fester in order to avoid provoking public retaliation.

These attacks on internet safety and security come at a moment when the stakes for democracy could not be higher. More than 40 major elections are scheduled to take place in 2024, including in the United States, the European Union, India, Ghana and Mexico. These democracies will most likely face the same risks of government-backed disinformation campaigns and online incitement of violence that have plagued social media for years. We should be worried about what happens next.

My story starts with that fact check. In the spring of 2020, after years of internal debate, my team decided that Twitter should apply a label to a tweet of then-President Trump’s that asserted that voting by mail is fraud-prone, and that the coming election would be “rigged.” “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” the label read.

On May 27, the morning after the label went up, the White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway publicly identified me as the head of Twitter’s site integrity team. The next day, The New York Post put several of my tweets making fun of Mr. Trump and other Republicans on its cover. I had posted them years earlier, when I was a student and had a tiny social media following of mostly my friends and family. Now, they were front-page news. Later that day, Mr. Trump tweeted that I was a “hater.”

Legions of Twitter users, most of whom days prior had no idea who I was or what my job entailed, began a campaign of online harassment that lasted months, calling for me to be fired, jailed or killed. The volume of Twitter notifications crashed my phone. Friends I hadn’t heard from in years expressed their concern. On Instagram, old vacation photos and pictures of my dog were flooded with threatening comments and insults. (A few commenters, wildly misreading the moment, used the opportunity to try to flirt with me.)

I was embarrassed and scared. Up to that moment, no one outside of a few fairly niche circles had any idea who I was. Academics studying social media call this “context collapse”: things we post on social media with one audience in mind might end up circulating to a very different audience, with unexpected and destructive results. In practice, it feels like your entire world has collapsed.

The timing of the campaign targeting me and my alleged bias suggested the attacks were part of a well-planned strategy. Academic studies have repeatedlypushed back on claims that Silicon Valley platforms are biased against conservatives. But the success of a strategy aimed at forcing social media companies to reconsider their choices may not require demonstrating actual wrongdoing. As the former Republican Party chair Rich Bond once described, maybe you just need to “work the refs”: repeatedly pressure companies into thinking twice before taking actions that could provoke a negative reaction. What happened to me was part of a calculated effort to make Twitter reluctant to moderate Mr. Trump in the future and to dissuade other companies from taking similar steps.

It worked. As violence unfolded at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Jack Dorsey, then the C.E.O. of Twitter, overruled Trust and Safety’s recommendation that Mr. Trump’s account should be banned because of several tweets, including one that attacked Vice President Mike Pence. He was given a 12-hour timeout instead (before being banned on Jan. 8). Within the boundaries of the rules, staff members were encouraged to find solutions to help the company avoid the type of blowback that results in angry press cycles, hearings and employee harassment. The practical result was that Twitter gave offenders greater latitude: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was permitted to violate Twitter’s rules at least five times before one of her accounts was banned in 2022. Other prominent right-leaning figures, such as the culture war account Libs of TikTok, enjoyed similar deference.

Similar tactics are being deployed around the world to influence platforms’ trust and safety efforts. In India, the police visited two of our offices in 2021 when we fact-checked posts from a politician from the ruling party, and the police showed up at an employee’s home after the government asked us to block accounts involved in a series of protests. The harassment again paid off: Twitter executives decided any potentially sensitive actions in India would require top-level approval, a unique level of escalation of otherwise routine decisions.

And when we wanted to disclose a propaganda campaign operated by a branch of the Indian military, our legal team warned us that our India-based employees could be charged with sedition — and face the death penalty if convicted. So Twitter only disclosed the campaign over a year later, without fingering the Indian government as the perpetrator.

In 2021, ahead of Russian legislative elections, officials of a state security service went to the home of a top Google executive in Moscow to demand the removal of an app that was used to protest Vladimir Putin. Officers threatened her with imprisonment if the company failed to comply within 24 hours. Both Apple and Google removed the app from their respective stores, restoring it after elections had concluded.

In each of these cases, the targeted staffers lacked the ability to do what was being asked of them by the government officials in charge, as the underlying decisions were made thousands of miles away in California. But because local employees had the misfortune of residing within the jurisdiction of the authorities, they were nevertheless the targets of coercive campaigns, pitting companies’ sense of duty to their employees against whatever values, principles or policies might cause them to resist local demands. Inspired, India and a number of other countries started passing “hostage-taking” laws to ensure social-media companies employ locally based staff.

In the United States, we’ve seen these forms of coercion carried out not by judges and police officers, but by grass-roots organizations, mobs on social media, cable news talking heads and — in Twitter’s case — by the company’s new owner.

One of the most recent forces in this campaign is the “Twitter Files,” a large assortment of company documents — many of them sent or received by me during my nearly eight years at Twitter — turned over at Mr. Musk’s direction to a handful of selected writers. The files were hyped by Mr. Musk as a groundbreaking form of transparency, purportedly exposing for the first time the way Twitter’s coastal liberal bias stifles conservative content.

What they delivered was something else entirely. As tech journalist Mike Masnick put it, after all the fanfare surrounding the initial release of the Twitter Files, in the end “there was absolutely nothing of interest” in the documents, and what little there was had significant factual errors. Even Mr. Musk eventually lost patience with the effort. But, in the process, the effort marked a disturbing new escalation in the harassment of employees of tech firms.

Unlike the documents that would normally emanate from large companies, the earliest releases of the Twitter Files failed to redact the names of even rank-and-file employees. One Twitter employee based in the Philippines was doxxed and severely harassed. Others have become the subjects of conspiracies. Decisions made by teams of dozens in accordance with Twitter’s written policies were presented as having been made by the capricious whims of individuals, each pictured and called out by name. I was, by far, the most frequent target.

The first installment of the Twitter Files came a month after I left the company, and just days after I published a guest essay in The Times and spoke about my experience working for Mr. Musk. I couldn’t help but feel that the company’s actions were, on some level, retaliatory. The next week, Mr. Musk went further by taking a paragraph of my Ph.D. dissertation out of context to baselessly claim that I condoned pedophilia — a conspiracy trope commonly used by far-right extremists and QAnon adherents to smear L.G.B.T.Q. people.

The response was even more extreme than I experienced after Mr. Trump’s tweet about me. “You need to swing from an old oak tree for the treason you have committed. Live in fear every day,” said one of thousands of threatening tweets and emails. That post, and hundreds of others like it, were violations of the very policies I’d worked to develop and enforce. Under new management, Twitter turned a blind eye, and the posts remain on the site today.

On Dec. 6, four days after the first Twitter Files release, I was asked to appear at a congressional hearing focused on the files and Twitter’s alleged censorship. In that hearing, members of Congress held up oversize posters of my years-old tweets and asked me under oath whether I still held those opinions. (To the extent the carelessly tweeted jokes could be taken as my actual opinions, I don’t.) Ms. Greene said on Fox News that I had “some very disturbing views about minors and child porn” and that I “allowed child porn to proliferate on Twitter,” warping Mr. Musk’s lies even further (and also extending their reach). Inundated with threats, and with no real options to push back or protect ourselves, my husband and I had to sell our home and move.

Academia has become the latest target of these campaigns to undermine online safety efforts. Researchers working to understand and address the spread of online misinformation have increasingly become subjects of partisan attacks; the universities they’re affiliated with have become embroiled in lawsuits, burdensome public record requests and congressional proceedings. Facing seven-figure legal bills, even some of the largest and best-funded university labs have said they may have to abandon ship. Others targeted have elected to change their research focus based on the volume of harassment.

Bit by bit, hearing by hearing, these campaigns are systematically eroding hard-won improvements in the safety and integrity of online platforms — with the individuals doing this work bearing the most direct costs.

Tech platforms are retreating from their efforts to protect election security and slow the spread of online disinformation. Amid a broader climate of belt-tightening, companies have pulled back especially hard on their trust and safety efforts. As they face mounting pressure from a hostile Congress, these choices are as rational as they are dangerous.

We can look abroad to see how this story might end. Where once companies would at least make an effort to resist outside pressure, they now largely capitulate by default. In early 2023, the Indian government asked Twitter to restrict posts critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In years past, the company had pushed back on such requests; this time, Twitter acquiesced. When a journalist noted that such cooperation only incentivizes further proliferation of draconian measures, Mr. Musk shrugged: “If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.”

It’s hard to fault Mr. Musk for his decision not to put Twitter’s employees in India in harm’s way. But we shouldn’t forget where these tactics came from or how they became so widespread. From pushing the Twitter Files to tweeting baseless conspiracies about former employees, Mr. Musk’s actions have normalized and popularized vigilante accountability, and made ordinary employees of his company into even greater targets. His recent targeting of the Anti-Defamation League has shown that he views personal retaliation as an appropriate consequence for any criticism of him or his business interests. And, as a practical matter, with hate speech on the rise and advertiser revenue in retreat, Mr. Musk’s efforts seem to have done little to improve Twitter’s bottom line.

What can be done to turn back this tide?

Making the coercive influences on platform decision making clearer is a critical first step. And regulation that requires companies to be transparent about the choices they make in these cases, and why they make them, could help.

In its absence, companies must push back against attempts to control their work. Some of these decisions are fundamental matters of long-term business strategy, like where to open (or not open) corporate offices. But companies have a duty to their staff, too: Employees shouldn’t be left to figure out how to protect themselves after their lives have already been upended by these campaigns. Offering access to privacy-promoting services can help. Many institutions would do well to learn the lesson that few spheres of public life are immune to influence through intimidation.

If social media companies cannot safely operate in a country without exposing their staff to personal risk and company decisions to undue influence, perhaps they should not operate there at all. Like others, I worry that such pullouts would worsen the options left to people who have the greatest need for free and open online expression. But remaining in a compromised way could forestall necessary reckoning with censorial government policies. Refusing to comply with morally unjustifiable demands, and facing blockages as a result, may in the long run provoke the necessary public outrage that can help drive reform.

The broader challenge here — and perhaps, the inescapable one — is the essential humanness of online trust and safety efforts. It isn’t machine learning models and faceless algorithms behind key content moderation decisions: it’s people. And people can be pressured, intimidated, threatened and extorted. Standing up to injustice, authoritarianism and online harms requires employees who are willing to do that work.

Few people could be expected to take a job doing so if the cost is their life or liberty. We all need to recognize this new reality, and to plan accordingly.

Yoel Roth is a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the former head of trust and safety at Twitter."

Opinion | I Was Attacked by Donald Trump and Elon Musk. I Believe It Was a Strategy To Change What You See Online. - The New York Times