Feedly Faces Backlash Over Protest-Tracking AI Models
Is Feedly using AI to help companies surveil and stymie protests against them?
The RSS reader is facing some user backlash after introducing an AI-powered tool that inadvertently sparked dystopian vibes about corporations deploying technology to crush worker dissent. But according to Feedly’s CEO, the whole episode is a misunderstanding that can be blamed on bad marketing.
“We did a really poor job of explaining the use case,” Feedly CEO Edwin Khodabakchian told PCMag. “It’s been a painful lesson for us.”
On Wednesday, Feedly published a blog post(Opens in a new window) titled: “How to track the protests posing a risk to your company’s assets with Feedly AI.” The 81-word post discusses a new tool meant for Feedly’s paid enterprise subscribers.
“Today, we are excited to release two new Feedly AI(Opens in a new window) models: Protests (Opens in a new window)and Violent Protests(Opens in a new window),” the post says. “They help security analysts track riots, strikes, and rallies that pose a risk to a company’s assets and employees.”
However, the title and wording were vague enough for some users to easily imagine the various ways a corporation could deploy AI to suppress employee-sponsored protests. As a result, some users on social media expressed outrage(Opens in a new window) against Feedly, with a few even announcing they had quit(Opens in a new window) the RSS reader.
Feedly has since deleted the blog post, although it's preserved on the Internet Archive. But to find out more about the controversy, PCMag spoke with Feedly’s CEO, who said the AI tool was never designed to help companies silence legitimate protests.
In a bit of irony, Khodabakchian said the idea to use AI to track protests actually came from the
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