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sidd

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #100 on: July 04, 2019, 09:46:39 PM »
This has been beaten to death a long time ago. I suggest Mill "On Liberty," Chapter 2. Is it taught in schools anymore ? I fear not.

"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."

"All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility."

"Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility, when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain."

" For even this doctrine acknowledges that mankind ought to have a rational assurance that all objections have been satisfactorily answered; and how are they to be answered if that which requires to be answered is not spoken? or how can the answer be known to be satisfactory, if the objectors have no opportunity of showing that it is unsatisfactory?"

"If there are any persons who contest a received opinion, or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves."

"First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility."

"Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied."

"Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds."

"And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience."

https://www.bartleby.com/130/2.html

Read the whole thing. Or perhaps, Milton in "Aeropagitica"

" We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of publick men, how we spill that season'd life of man preserv'd and stor'd up in Books; since we see a kinde of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdome, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kinde of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elementall life, but strikes at that ethereall and fift essence, the breath of reason it selfe, slaies an immortality rather then a life."

"As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdome can there be to choose, what continence to forbeare without the knowledge of evill?"

"Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. That vertue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evill, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank vertue, not a pure; her whitenesse is but an excrementall whitenesse"

"Since therefore the knowledge and survay of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human vertue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with lesse danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity then by reading all manner of tractats, and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read."

"Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopoliz'd and traded in by tickets and statutes, and standards. We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the Land, to mark and licence it like our broad cloath, and our wooll packs. "

"that if it come to inquisitioning again, and licencing, and that we are so timorous of our selvs, and so suspicious of all men, as to fear each book, and the shaking of every leaf, before we know what the contents are, if some who but of late were little better then silenc't from preaching, shall come now to silence us from reading, except what they please, it cannot be guest what is intended by som but a second tyranny over learning"

"Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirr'd up in this city. What some lament of, we rather should rejoyce at, should rather praise this pious forwardnes among men, to reassume the ill deputed care of their Religion into their own hands again."

"What would ye doe then, should ye suppresse all this flowry crop of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in this City, should ye set an Oligarchy of twenty ingrossers over it, to bring a famin upon our minds again, when we shall know nothing but what is measur'd to us by their bushel?"

"it is the liberty, Lords and Commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchast us, liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; this is that which hath rarify'd and enlighten'd our spirits like the influence of heav'n; this is that which hath enfranchis'd, enlarg'd and lifted up our apprehensions degrees above themselves. Ye cannot make us now lesse capable, lesse knowing, lesse eagarly pursuing of the truth, unlesse ye first make your selves, that made us so, lesse the lovers, lesse the founders of our true liberty. We can grow ignorant again, brutish, formall, and slavish, as ye found us; but you then must first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary, and tyrannous, as they were from whom ye have free'd us. That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the search and expectation of greatest and exactest things, is the issue of your owne vertu propagated in us; ye cannot suppresse that unlesse ye reinforce an abrogated and mercilesse law, that fathers may dispatch at will their own children"

"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. "

"And though all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licencing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falshood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and open encounter. Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing."

"Truth is strong next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licencings to make her victorious, those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power: give her but room, & do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true"

"We doe not see that while we still affect by all means a rigid externall formality, we may as soon fall again into a grosse conforming stupidity, a stark and dead congealment "

"if it come to prohibiting, there is not ought more likely to be prohibited then truth it self"

" And if the men be erroneous who appear to be the leading schismaticks, what witholds us but our sloth, our self-will, and distrust in the right cause, that we doe not give them gentle meeting and gentle dismissions, that we debate not and examin the matter throughly with liberall and frequent audience; if not for their sakes, yet for our own? "

"we in the hast of a precipitant zeal shall make no distinction, but resolve to stop their mouths, because we fear they come with new and dangerous opinions, as we commonly forejudge them ere we understand them, no lesse then woe to us, while thinking thus to defend the Gospel, we are found the persecutors. "

https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/text.html

sidd

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #101 on: July 04, 2019, 10:00:04 PM »
But this is an issue, it is important. Free speech radicalism is certifiably wrong!

Sorry, but I must disagree here because, as has been mentioned, who decides? There are many things that are true, that are being denounced simply because it doesn't neatly fit into the current narrative. Nothing is ever cut and dried and the process is messy.

If you ban free speech, you do not ban the thoughts and I hope to hell we never do. I would much prefer to know the person next door is a Nazi, rather than have him be in disguise, and holding secret meetings.

If you have people that think that way, or if you have people that would be susceptible to such speech, then you have a much bigger problem in your society. Speech laws paper over a symptom, and ignore the root.

They also stop light from getting in to some very dark corners, like certain religious groups.

Have you noticed how patronizing speech laws can be? Every time someone advocates censorship, they never say that they are too stupid to think for themselves. No, it's because of those "other people" that need to be protected or controlled. That screams arrogance and self-righteousness. I always have to ask myself, "What's their agenda?"

I know I don't want my world to be that "safe".

Quote
Killing and stealing and cheating are also in our nature. How do we deal with it? In order to have a society, we have rules. Why no rules on speech?

Actually, we have quite a few rules. There is libel, slander and tort law. When someone does harm, there are legal remedies, and by harm I don't mean that my opinions offend someone or make them sad. To those I say, "Grow up and get a life".

But take heart, sometimes things do work out.

Oberlin college just got a major tune-up and I hope it is just the first of many.

Now, if we could just bankrupt a few politicians and corporations.

Cheers

PS, just before I post, I notice sidd has posted a better preamble that I could hope for. John Stuart Mill makes my scratchings look feeble. The third quote is brilliant amongst brilliance.

*edit* typos
« Last Edit: July 04, 2019, 10:10:32 PM by Pragma »

TerryM

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #102 on: July 04, 2019, 10:05:59 PM »
Yea - but Milton was attempting to justify Cromwell's well known aversion to truth. ::)


Besides the guy obviously never even took the time to learn how to spell.
Terry :)

sidd

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #103 on: July 04, 2019, 10:26:21 PM »
Re: Milton,Cromwell

Milton's defense of Cromwell's Republic was not in Aeropagitica, rather in "Kings and Magistrates,"  "Eikonoklastes," the two "Defensio,"  "Civil Power," and "Ready and Easy Way."

I would guess these are not mentioned in schools either.

sidd


TerryM

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #104 on: July 05, 2019, 12:04:41 AM »
He still can't spell.
Terry

sidd

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #105 on: July 05, 2019, 08:59:44 AM »
How your mind is made up: government shapes public discourse

"pre-planning social media campaigns that are designed to appear to be a spontaneous public response "

"operations that contingency planners term “controlled spontaneity”, politicians’ statements, vigils and inter-faith events are also negotiated and planned "

"Many of the operations are said to be modelled on extensive plans that were drawn up in the UK to channel public anger in the wake of any attack on the 2012 London Olympics"

"Although there was no terrorist incident at the 2012 Olympics, variants are said to have been deployed in the wake of every attack in the UK since then."

" ‘We would like the people to do that, how do you get them there?’ "

"A number of Western governments are understood to have exchanged information"

"hashtags, posters and vigils ...  Twitter, Facebook and mainstream media campaign..."

"approached The Sun, a tabloid newspaper, which agreed to dedicate its entire front page ...devoted a further six pages ... "

"the unit is working “at an industrial scale and pace” to develop messages that aim to “effect attitudinal and behavioural change”  ... The involvement of the UK government is rarely acknowledged."

"They could be seen being admitted behind the police cordon, where they plastered walls with a number of posters bearing images of London, and number of hashtags that were already circulating on Twitter"

"surrounded by apparently impromptu signs of the public’s defiance and unity"

 ‘We’re sending you a hundred imams’”

"One of the organisers described it as “a symbolic gesture of love”  ... did not say is that she worked at the Home Office, in law enforcement ... told MEE that it was entirely a "grassroots" initiative with no government assistance"

"Cabinet Office teams will work very quickly with the Red Cross and with local contingency planners, who usually send out the first social media messages"

"will also advise on the form of words that political leaders should use after such an attack, and enact the pre-planned vigils and inter-faith events"

“In Salisbury, people were telling us: ‘We’re not going to wear T-shirts saying I heart Salisbury – we just want you to get the Novichok cleared up.’

" ... some misgivings about the way in which emergency planning for the immediate aftermath of terrorist attacks is being combined with propaganda techniques that are intended to influence the responses of the public."

" may not always be the best way to respond ... "

"you can distract people by putting up a photograph of a French flag or whatever"

“When there’s nothing people can actually do, they can change the photo on their Facebook page. Then they can feel they’ve done something about it, they can go to work, and they’re not agitating the government."

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/mind-control-secret-british-government-blueprints-shaping-post-terror-planning

"Controlled spontaneity."  What a concept. Back to 1984.

sidd
 

Neven

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #106 on: July 14, 2019, 05:18:14 PM »
Boycot corporate media now, never watch it again:

The enemy is within
Don't confuse me with him

E. Smith

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #107 on: July 14, 2019, 05:56:53 PM »
Boycot corporate media now, never watch it again:


Posted on Youtube no less. Oh, the irony, and how telling that Youtube controls so much.

I don't watch corpororate media now, but mainly because it is so appalling. While I agree generally they should be boycotted, there is more than one way to do it.

For an interminable week, I had to use a computer that had no ad blocker or script controller and the internet was unusable.

I had no idea it was so bad. I also have no idea how people put up with it.

With the appropriate tools, I pick and choose what I watch and provide no direct revenue to them. I probably give them some metadata, but they have to work for it.

At the same time, combined with blogs and websites as pointers, I have access to a huge amount of information for free. I can then directly support the channels I find worthwhile and avoid Patreon whenever possible.

Another valuable, and painless, change is to drop Chrome etc, and move to open source, like Firefox.

This all happens while Alphabet has the significant burden of infrastructure.

I do not engage in any social media of any kind and I make no apologies to anyone. I have been expecting it to become "uncool" and collapse, but no luck so far.

Boycotting is good, but killing them by parasitism can work and is quite fitting as well.  :)

Tunnelforce9

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #108 on: July 14, 2019, 06:22:33 PM »
You should get used to hear people calling out nazism for what it is, you can't expect people to look away if you speak the language of genocidal maniacs...

You know what i would do when i see a guy walking with a nazi flag ?
I would strangle him with his flag and so would the rest of my fellow countrymen.

That is why you don't see any of that shit in my country.

blumenkraft

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #109 on: October 01, 2019, 07:12:14 PM »
Facebook removes pro-Trump patriotic 'Police Lives Matter' pages after they were found to be run from Kosovo

Link >> https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-popular-information-kosovo-police-lives-matter-1462297

Hey America, here is news for you. It's not only Russia, but it's also fucking everyone else!

blumenkraft

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #110 on: October 01, 2019, 07:30:54 PM »
Trolls for hire: Russia's freelance disinformation firms offer propaganda with a professional touch

Quote
Firms charged varying prices for services, such as $8 for a social media post, $100 per 10 comments made on an article or post and $65 for contacting a media source.

Link >> https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/trolls-hire-russia-s-freelance-disinformation-firms-offer-propaganda-professional-n1060781


blumenkraft

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #111 on: November 10, 2019, 08:11:38 AM »
Daphne Keller on Legal Liability for Tech Platforms
THE LAWFARE PODCAST - 57:05

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In this episode of the Arbiters of Truth series—Lawfare's new podcast series on disinformation in the run-up to the 2020 election—Quinta Jurecic and Evelyn Douek spoke with Daphne Keller, the director of intermediary liability at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, about the nuts and bolts of content moderation. People often have big ideas for how tech platforms should decide what content to take down and what to keep up, but what kind of moderation is actually possible at scale? And what happens when those decisions come into conflict with different norms of free speech—for example, between the U.S. and Europe? They talked about intermediary liability law in the United States, recent rulings by the Court of Justice of the European Union, and everything in-between.


Link >> https://overcast.fm/+BEBMzAGoo

blumenkraft

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #112 on: November 23, 2019, 10:02:46 AM »
Ben Nimmo on the Whack-a-Mole Game of Disinformation
THE LAWFARE PODCAST - 45:14

Quote
In a new episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation in the run-up to the 2020 election, Quinta Jurecic, Evelyn Douek, and Alina Polyakova, spoke with Ben Nimmo, the director of investigations at Graphika. They talked about how disinformation works; how a researcher knows where to look to find disinformation; how to tell when a strange pattern of tweets or Facebook posts is actually a disinformation campaign; and whether it's possible to counter these campaigns effectively, or if this work is just a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

Link >> https://overcast.fm/+BEBO0zB9g

Neven

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #113 on: November 26, 2019, 12:39:00 PM »
I'm not sure if Ben Nimmo is a good source of information, given his involvement with the Atlantic Council, pushing stories that benefit the neoliberal/neoconservative status quo (ie conflict and war). Maybe the Lawfare podcast is something entirely different, but I don't have time to listen to it.

Here's Craig Murray on Nimmo, in August last year:

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Facebook Censorship, Mad Ben Nimmo and the Atlantic Council

Facebook has deleted all of my posts from July 2017 to last week because I am, apparently, a Russian Bot. For a while I could not add any new posts either, but we recently found a way around that, at least for now. To those of you tempted to say “So what?”, I would point out that over two thirds of visitors to my website arrive via my posting of the articles to Facebook and Twitter. Social media outlets like this blog, which offer an alternative to MSM propaganda, are hugely at the mercy of these corporate gatekeepers.

Facebook’s plunge into censorship is completely open and admitted, as is the fact it is operated for Facebook by the Atlantic Council – the extreme neo-con group part funded by NATO and whose board includes serial war criminal Henry Kissinger, Former CIA Heads Michael Hayden and Michael Morrell, and George Bush’s chief of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, among a whole list of horrors.

The staff are worse than the Board. Their lead expert on Russian bot detection is an obsessed nutter named Ben Nimmo, whose fragile grip on reality has been completely broken by his elevation to be the internet’s Witchfinder-General. Nimmo, grandly titled “Senior Fellow for Information Defense at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab”, is the go-to man for Establishment rubbishing of citizen journalists, and as with Joseph McCarthy or Matthew Clarke, one day society will sufficiently recover its balance for it to be generally acknowledged that this kind of witch-hunt nonsense was not just an aberration, but a manifestation of the evil it claimed to fight.

There is no Establishment cause Nimmo will not aid by labeling its opponents as Bots. This from the Herald newspaper two days ago, where Nimmo uncovers the secret web of Scottish Nationalist bots that dominate the internet, and had the temerity to question the stitch-up of Alex Salmond.

Nimmo’s proof? 2,000 people had used the hashtag #Dissolvetheunion on a total of 10,000 tweets in a week. That’s five tweets per person on average. In a week. Obviously a massive bot-plot, eh?

When Ben’s great expose for the Herald was met with widespread ridicule, he doubled down on it by producing his evidence – a list of the top ten bots he had uncovered in this research. Except that they are almost all, to my certain knowledge, not bots but people. But do not decry Ben’s fantastic forensic skills, for which NATO and the CIA fund the Atlantic Council. Ben’s number one suspect was definitely a bot. He had got the evil kingpin. He had seen through its identity despite its cunning disguise. That disguise included its name, IsthisAB0T, and its profile, where it called itself a bot for retweets on Independence. Thank goodness for Ben Nimmo, or nobody would ever have seen through that evil, presumably Kremlin-hatched, plan.

No wonder the Atlantic Council advertise Nimmo and his team as “Digital Sherlocks”.

Nimmo’s track record is simply appalling. In this report for the Atlantic Council website, he falsely identified British pensioner @Ian56789 as a “Russian troll farm”, which led to Ian being named as such by the British government, and to perhaps the most surreal Sky News interview of all time. Perhaps still more remarkably, Nimmo searches for use of the phrase “cui bono?” in reference to the Skripal and fake Douma chemical weapons attacks. Nimmo characterises use of the phrase cui bono as evidence of pro-Assad and pro-Kremlin bots and trolls – he really does. Most people would think to consider cui bono indicates a smattering more commonsense than Nimmo himself displays.

It is at least obvious cui bono from Nimmo’s witchfinding – the capacious, NATO and CIA stuffed pockets of Ben Nimmo himself. That Facebook allows this utterly discredited neo-conservative charlatan the run of its censorship operations needs, given Facebook’s pivotal role in social media intercourse, to concern everybody. The freedom of the internet is under fundamental attack.
The enemy is within
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E. Smith

blumenkraft

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #114 on: November 26, 2019, 05:18:58 PM »
Good to know, Neven. Thanks for the link.

Now i'm eager to hear what you think about the podcast. Because for me he sounded reasonable.  ???

gerontocrat

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #115 on: November 26, 2019, 05:40:12 PM »
Social media is doing a superb job in transmitting lies, falsehoods, prejudice, hate, human trafficking, sexual exploitation of children....

Social media is doing a lousy job in spreading reason, facts and countering the above.

Therefore, the major social media companies making loads-a-money from it by establishing what is essentially a Cartel, are on balance, evil.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/22/sacha-baron-cohen-facebook-propaganda
Read Sacha Baron Cohen's scathing attack on Facebook : 'greatest propaganda machine in history'
In a speech, the actor argued that Facebook would have run ads by Hitler.

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In a speech last night at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen attacked Facebook and other social media platforms for enabling the proliferation of hate speech and misinformation.

The speech was striking in its sincerity – Baron Cohen appeared as himself, rather than “in character” as one of his satirical personas – and its blistering tone.

Describing Facebook as “the greatest propaganda machine in history”, Baron Cohen argued that the company, which does not vet political ads for truthfulness, would have allowed Hitler to run propaganda on its platform.

Quote
Thank you, ADL, for this recognition and your work in fighting racism, hate and bigotry. And to be clear, when I say “racism, hate and bigotry” I’m not referring to the names of Stephen Miller’s Labradoodles.

Now, I realize that some of you may be thinking, what the hell is a comedian doing speaking at a conference like this! I certainly am. I’ve spent most of the past two decades in character. In fact, this is the first time that I have ever stood up and given a speech as my least popular character, Sacha Baron Cohen. And I have to confess, it is terrifying.

I realize that my presence here may also be unexpected for another reason. At times, some critics have said my comedy risks reinforcing old stereotypes.

The truth is, I’ve been passionate about challenging bigotry and intolerance throughout my life. As a teenager in the UK, I marched against the fascist National Front and to abolish apartheid. As an undergraduate, I traveled around America and wrote my thesis about the civil rights movement, with the help of the archives of the ADL. And as a comedian, I’ve tried to use my characters to get people to let down their guard and reveal what they actually believe, including their own prejudice.

Now, I’m not going to claim that everything I’ve done has been for a higher purpose. Yes, some of my comedy, OK probably half my comedy, has been absolutely juvenile and the other half completely puerile. I admit, there was nothing particularly enlightening about me – as Borat from Kazakhstan, the first fake news journalist – running through a conference of mortgage brokers when I was completely naked.

But when Borat was able to get an entire bar in Arizona to sing “Throw the Jew down the well,” it did reveal people’s indifference to antisemitism. When – as Bruno, the gay fashion reporter from Austria – I started kissing a man in a cage fight in Arkansas, nearly starting a riot, it showed the violent potential of homophobia. And when – disguised as an ultra-woke developer – I proposed building a mosque in one rural community, prompting a resident to proudly admit, “I am racist, against Muslims” – it showed the acceptance of Islamophobia.

That’s why I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you. Today around the world, demagogues appeal to our worst instincts. Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It’s as if the Age of Reason – the era of evidential argument – is ending, and now knowledge is delegitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march. Hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities.

What do all these dangerous trends have in common? I’m just a comedian and an actor, not a scholar. But one thing is pretty clear to me. All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.

The greatest propaganda machine in history.

Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others – they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged – stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It’s why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It’s why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it’s no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history – the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, “Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook.”
"Para a Causa do Povo a Luta Continua!"
"And that's all I'm going to say about that". Forrest Gump
"Damn, I wanted to see what happened next" (Epitaph)

TerryM

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #116 on: November 26, 2019, 08:51:37 PM »
Ramen!!!
& down with Facebook's guardians of the truth - or at least the truth as they'd prefer it.


I've no following, but have been called a bot.
I actually had to refer them back to my years here above the line before they admitted that OK, perhaps they were wrong in this particular instance.
My ideas may seem strange to some, but they are my ideas.
I'm sure the same can be said for Craig and his ideas.


I don't "follow" Craig Murray, but I have interacted with him and I'm much more convinced that he's an actual person than I am that Ben Nimmo shares that distinction.


The internet started out with such high hopes, some actually saw digital commerce as an evil to be avoided - what we did on the internet we did in the interest of the community, eschewing personal reward. - How things have changed. How disastrously for the most part things have changed.


TGF Neven, and a few of his kind. Still more interested in facts than solely in financial gain.
Terry

blumenkraft

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #117 on: November 27, 2019, 04:20:32 PM »
Social media is doing a superb job in transmitting lies, falsehoods, prejudice, hate, human trafficking, sexual exploitation of children....

You know what?

The radio is doing a superb job in transmitting lies, falsehoods, prejudice, hate, racism. See Nazi Germany.

TV is doing a superb job in transmitting lies, falsehoods, prejudice, hate, and marketing for the worst people and companies on earth.

It's not the medium. It's human nature.


be cause

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #118 on: November 27, 2019, 04:53:47 PM »
it'snot humN NATURE .. IT IS INHUMAN NURTURE  .. B.C.
Conflict is the root of all evil , for being blind it does not see whom it attacks . Yet it always attacks the Son Of God , and the Son of God is you .

nanning

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #119 on: November 27, 2019, 05:40:22 PM »
Indeed. Thank you very much bc. Beautiful.

blumenkraft, I remember from the 70's when there were only a few public TV channels in Europe and that was not used to broadcast those bad things. Although we already had advertising and that is a bad thing in this context. Perhaps I have rosy glasses because I was a child then (TV was still black&white).
Today there are hardly any trustworthy news sources anymore. Especially online via social media. You have to actively look for it.
"It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly" - Bertrand Russell
"It is preoccupation with what other people from your groups think of you, that prevents you from living freely and nobly" - Nanning
Why do you keep accumulating stuff?

Florifulgurator

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #120 on: November 27, 2019, 07:40:59 PM »
My ideas may seem strange to some, but they are my ideas.
Perhaps. Here I've seen you share some ideas right out the Putin propaganda kitchen. The internets neurosurgeon in me (some of my ideas dwarf Dr. Frankenstein) would place you as a major neuron in the disinformation warfare awareness part of the human driven meta AI/data mining/ontology knitting/... brainware I would plant over the subcortical level AI's of Facebook.
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or committed communist, but rather people for whom the difference between facts and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." ~ Hannah Arendt
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Neven

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #121 on: November 30, 2019, 12:53:37 PM »
You're Putin's greatest asset, Martin.
The enemy is within
Don't confuse me with him

E. Smith

blumenkraft

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #122 on: December 01, 2019, 03:25:50 PM »
Let's talk about opening a can and the future...


Neven

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #123 on: January 07, 2020, 10:46:10 PM »
Cambridge Analytica scandal the sequel (the real and much bigger Russiagate):

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/7/the_great_hack_cambridge_analytica
The enemy is within
Don't confuse me with him

E. Smith

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #124 on: January 08, 2020, 04:39:48 AM »
Cambridge Analytica scandal the sequel (the real and much bigger Russiagate):

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/1/7/the_great_hack_cambridge_analytica
Except CA wasn't a foreign power. But well, who cares. Maybe there was some collusion? :) Looks like we need to wait for the Mueller grand jury evidence.

Why did Manafort give secret GOP polling data to Kilimnik? Likely to coordinate their high-precision disinformation attacks on swing states. The swing state flips altogether were highly unlikely. Someone did the maths, but I lost the link. Couldn't find any better than this:

Quote
At the time, all eyes were on Brad Parscale, Jared Kushner, and their digital team, especially Cambridge Analytica, whose swing-state targeting was suspiciously spot-on. But it seemed to be one of the few instances in which Manafort, who had left the campaign shortly after Cambridge Analytica had been hired, escaped public scrutiny. Mueller, who had launched his investigation a month earlier, has long had his sights on Manafort. We now know that his investigation into the former Trump-campaign chairman involves far more than financial crimes.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-would-paul-manafort-share-polling-data-with-russia
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or committed communist, but rather people for whom the difference between facts and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." ~ Hannah Arendt
"Вчи українську це тобі ще знадобиться" ~ Internet

Neven

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #125 on: January 08, 2020, 11:18:43 AM »
Except CA wasn't a foreign power.

Much worse, it was and is a transnational power. Concentrated wealth very much wants people like you to think in terms of 'borders' and 'countries'.

Much worse, because CA is doing it all over the world to help install far-right, violent lunatics. And it is using massive amounts of social media data, not just posting colourful calendars of Buff Bernie.

Quote
But well, who cares. Maybe there was some collusion? :) Looks like we need to wait for the Mueller grand jury evidence.

I would think that by now you would have realised that Mueller is nothing more than a corrupt puppet, just like he was when he parrotted the WMD lies.

Please, don't post that overhyped Russiagate circular crap in this thread.
The enemy is within
Don't confuse me with him

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #126 on: January 08, 2020, 06:21:06 PM »
CA represents the end of representative democracy.


Paying Whack-A-Mole won't end the problem and the Left won't attack, but will emulate.


Weakened (crippled) media, data via the internet & personalized messaging via the internet equals the end of democracy. The technology doesn't favor anyone but those who pay for its use.


It's a damn shame that this occurs just as climate change is becoming evident to the masses!
Terry

Tom_Mazanec

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #127 on: January 08, 2020, 11:42:18 PM »
Well, I don't post anonymously here, although I was called a troll in the past here.
There are a couple sites I've been on for a couple decades like the Alternate History Forum (where I'm 'tom') but that was when I was first starting, and even there I make it easy for you to find out all about me (just google "planet Mazanec"). And I never intentionally lie.

Florifulgurator

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #128 on: January 09, 2020, 04:47:28 PM »
Except CA wasn't a foreign power.

Much worse, it was and is a transnational power. Concentrated wealth very much wants people like you to think in terms of 'borders' and 'countries'.
Who founded CA? Who paid them? And hahaha, who was their lawyer? (First name is Rudy.)

It was an American operation whatever your semantics.

Quote
I would think that by now you would have realised that Mueller is nothing more than a corrupt puppet, just like he was when he parrotted the WMD lies.
That of course invalidates all the evidence Mueller (all alone) had collected. An old climate denier trick.

-------------------
Anyhow I'm with you here. We have a huge problem.

And it isn't just stealth operations like CA. Even the YouTube recommendation algorithms can wreck havoc on people's brains.  (Here is a hilarious example from Germany: An "alternative media" guy complaining that in 2019 his world collapsed when Youtube changed the algorithms... )




=========================
P.S.: The Mueller WMD thing deserves a closer look. Nice work of Trumputin propaganda. Mueller's testimony was about FBI efforts against terrorism in general. The FBI was under huge pressure by the GWB administration to restructure. The cherrypicked snippet weaponized by Russia Today et al. starts with: "As director Tenet has pointed out, secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its WMD."

Need to check the timeline more. But that should be Neven's work to check the stuff he parrots. E.g. Was the British aluminum tube hoax already known?
« Last Edit: January 09, 2020, 06:16:12 PM by Florifulgurator »
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or committed communist, but rather people for whom the difference between facts and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." ~ Hannah Arendt
"Вчи українську це тобі ще знадобиться" ~ Internet

Neven

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #129 on: January 09, 2020, 10:48:26 PM »
Mueller was a corrupt puppet who would publish the report that was asked of him. Like I said all along, Trump was doing so much great stuff for concentrated wealth, that Mueller wasn't going to frame him, even if there had been hard evidence of collusion. That people who consider themselves on the left, put all their hopes in some former FBI director, is a perfect example of Trump Derangement Syndrome. That guy's testimony was one of the saddest performances I have seen in my life. But keep on believing in Mueller, Comey, Brennan, Clapper and other fascist sociopaths. They will save you from the Axis of Evil, Martin.

Quote
Anyhow I'm with you here. We have a huge problem.

Yes, social media is a huge problem. Almost as big as mainstream media that will hype Russiagate for three years straight without a pause (and zero results), and devotes maybe half a news cycle to Cambridge Analytica, a much bigger scandal with some rock hard evidence.
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E. Smith

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #130 on: January 10, 2020, 02:44:09 AM »
Mueller was a corrupt puppet who would publish the report that was asked of him. Like I said all along, Trump was doing so much great stuff for concentrated wealth, that Mueller wasn't going to frame him, even if there had been hard evidence of collusion. That people who consider themselves on the left, put all their hopes in some former FBI director, is a perfect example of Trump Derangement Syndrome. That guy's testimony was one of the saddest performances I have seen in my life. But keep on believing in Mueller, Comey, Brennan, Clapper and other fascist sociopaths. They will save you from the Axis of Evil, Martin.
This is too delusional to start answering.
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or committed communist, but rather people for whom the difference between facts and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." ~ Hannah Arendt
"Вчи українську це тобі ще знадобиться" ~ Internet

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"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or committed communist, but rather people for whom the difference between facts and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." ~ Hannah Arendt
"Вчи українську це тобі ще знадобиться" ~ Internet

blumenkraft

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #132 on: May 29, 2020, 03:17:23 PM »
"Yey" for fact-checking warnings!

Go Twitter! (never thought i would ever say that, believe me)

Quote
Twitter, under intense scrutiny for its use of fact-checking warnings, has added them to tweets from China's foreign ministry spokesperson.
The warning has been added to tweets from spokesman Lijian Zhao, in which he warned: "It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan."
Twitter added the warning more than two months after the tweets were posted.
It comes amid a row with the White House, after similar warnings were added to tweets from President Trump.

Link >> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52833063

igs

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #133 on: May 29, 2020, 11:27:04 PM »
"Yey" for fact-checking warnings!

Go Twitter! (never thought i would ever say that, believe me)

Quote
Twitter, under intense scrutiny for its use of fact-checking warnings, has added them to tweets from China's foreign ministry spokesperson.
The warning has been added to tweets from spokesman Lijian Zhao, in which he warned: "It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan."
Twitter added the warning more than two months after the tweets were posted.
It comes amid a row with the White House, after similar warnings were added to tweets from President Trump.

Link >> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52833063


Censoring is never good, no matter who does it and flagging a post as "not good" is censoring because it directly impacts the reach and the reputation.


Sometimes a censoring may come in handy or we share the opinion behind it but THE NEXT TIME it can and WILL backfire towards those who before found it good and enjoyed it.


How to make censoring accepted ?


By censoring the obvious bullshit and make people find it good, just to turn the weapon around in the future.


CENSORING IS THEREFORE A BAD THING always, even when bullshit is written.


A really strong community has to be able to let the bullshit stand, the moment we start to fight it the weapon, developed and established in the process will point at ourselves one day.


Think ahead !!!!


[And learn from history]

johnm33

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #134 on: May 30, 2020, 09:29:57 AM »
I'm a great fan of Derren Brown for one of his shows he placed a one off small ad in Londons evening newspaper and, weeks later, demonstrated to the audience, who were obviously selected for their detailed reading of every line in that edition, the depth to which that reading had sunk into their consciousness. Scary.
Here CHS discusses the plantation of the mind and just like DB's audience we're generally subsumed into a small reality defined by the confines of the overton windows framing, each oblivious to their particular blindness, so bemused, defining everything in terms of the known. As planned.
"I've been discussing the neocolonial-plantation structure of the U.S. economy since 2008, and now this model has reached perfection in social media's Plantation of the Mind. Once you're firmly enmeshed in this social media Plantation, you lose sight of the fact that there's a larger world outside the plantation: social media platforms aren't exploitive plantations in the World Wide Web/Internet, they are the Internet as far as their users are concerned."

The Walrus

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #135 on: May 30, 2020, 04:37:19 PM »
"Yey" for fact-checking warnings!

Go Twitter! (never thought i would ever say that, believe me)

Quote
Twitter, under intense scrutiny for its use of fact-checking warnings, has added them to tweets from China's foreign ministry spokesperson.
The warning has been added to tweets from spokesman Lijian Zhao, in which he warned: "It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan."
Twitter added the warning more than two months after the tweets were posted.
It comes amid a row with the White House, after similar warnings were added to tweets from President Trump.

Link >> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52833063


Censoring is never good, no matter who does it and flagging a post as "not good" is censoring because it directly impacts the reach and the reputation.


Sometimes a censoring may come in handy or we share the opinion behind it but THE NEXT TIME it can and WILL backfire towards those who before found it good and enjoyed it.


How to make censoring accepted ?


By censoring the obvious bullshit and make people find it good, just to turn the weapon around in the future.


CENSORING IS THEREFORE A BAD THING always, even when bullshit is written.


A really strong community has to be able to let the bullshit stand, the moment we start to fight it the weapon, developed and established in the process will point at ourselves one day.


Think ahead !!!!


[And learn from history]

“Better to remain silent and thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.”

blumenkraft

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #136 on: May 30, 2020, 04:47:48 PM »
And learn from history

As a German, i learned this from history: If you let a populists scapegoat the shit out of people, if you allow them to spread lies and hate speech, if there is unchecked radical free speech, this may lead you to genocide. This is what i learned.

nanning

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #137 on: May 31, 2020, 04:11:18 AM »
Thank you johnm33 for that great post.


Quote
Once you're firmly enmeshed in this social media Plantation, you lose sight of the fact that there's a larger world outside the plantation: social media platforms aren't exploitive plantations in the World Wide Web/Internet, they are the Internet as far as their users are concerned."

This what I call a 'bubble'.
You give me an opportunity to explain what I mean by the phrase I often use: 'civilisation bubble'.


 There are many bubbles. Please consider these:

 The same sentence from above quote would hold for the U.S.A. centric bubble (not only for those living in the U.S.A. but all those living in the media bubble of U.S.A. news and programmes). As if it is the whole world.

 The same sentence would hold for rich developed countries' culture where everything 'normal' in poor developing countries is unknown and out of sight. For privileged people their world is all there is.

 The same sentence would hold for civilisation bias i.e. people from civilisation culture don't see anything human outside of it and think civilisation is all there is and all humanity consists of civilisation.
"It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly" - Bertrand Russell
"It is preoccupation with what other people from your groups think of you, that prevents you from living freely and nobly" - Nanning
Why do you keep accumulating stuff?

vox_mundi

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #138 on: July 09, 2020, 02:52:13 AM »
The results from an audit of hate speech, misinformation and bias on Facebook are finally in (PDF). And it’s pretty bad for Facebook Inc.

https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Civil-Rights-Audit-Final-Report.pdf

Background: “Facebook commissioned the audit in 2018 as part of its response to a range of criticism over issues such as data privacy, voter suppression, incitement of violence and a lack of transparency in political advertising,” Reuters reports, noting, “The audit was led by Laura Murphy, a former director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative office.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-rights-audit/weaponized-facebook-fails-to-protect-civil-rights-audit-says-idUSKBN2491CC?il=0

In short, “the report faulted Facebook for not investing more in fighting organized hate against Muslims and Jews, inadequately policing political speech, and failing to root out many strains of white nationalist activity,” the Wall Street Journal reported off the findings, which were released publicly this morning.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-is-doing-too-little-on-civil-rights-concerns-auditors-say-11594198537?mod=hp_lead_pos7

‘Does Facebook even care?’ The authors very nearly asked, writing, “The Auditors do not believe that Facebook is sufficiently attuned to the depth of concern on the issue of polarization and the way that the algorithms used by Facebook inadvertently fuel extreme and polarizing content.”

Said Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg in a statement: “As hard as it has been to have our shortcomings exposed by experts, it has undoubtedly been a really important process for our company. We would urge companies in our industry and beyond to do the same.”

Some important context: “More than 900 companies have joined an advertising boycott of Facebook to protest its handling of hate speech and misinformation,” AP reminds us.
https://apnews.com/94189e0798d2ca7701d5c248c2843dbe
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

vox_mundi

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #139 on: July 16, 2020, 02:42:47 AM »
Twitter Accounts of Prominent Figures, Including Biden, Musk and Obama, Compromised In Major Hack
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/15/twitter-elon-musk-joe-biden-hacked-bitcoin

The Twitter accounts of major public figures and corporations, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Apple were hijacked Wednesday, in a stunning show of force by hackers. Twitter said it was aware of “a security incident” and “taking steps to fix it”, but provided no further information hours after the hack began.

... The compromised accounts, which count tens of millions of followers, sent a series of tweets proposing a classic bitcoin scam: followers were told that if they transferred cryptocurrency to a specific bitcoin wallet, they would receive double the money in return.

While the motives and source of the attack are not yet known, the coordinated hijacking of the verified communications streams of world leaders, celebrities and major corporate accounts was a frightening prospect. Twitter has become a de facto wire service for the world and is used for official communications by governments during emergencies; a hack on the scale of Wednesday’s attack could have been more disruptive or even dangerous.

[... what's telling is that nothing right of center has been affected]
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

blumenkraft

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #140 on: July 16, 2020, 06:30:14 AM »
https://btc.com/bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh

Total Received   12.86204920 BTC
Total Sent   12.85345191 BTC
Final Balance   0.00859729 BTC

"Only" $118k seems like a waste of resources for a Twitter 0-day exploit.

They could've shorted TSLA or AAPL instead and not risked being tracked on-chain.

Edit: Actually, this is only what they scammed from the Musk account. They used a different BTC address for evert hacked accounts. So they scammed a multiple of the above amout.
« Last Edit: July 16, 2020, 10:47:45 AM by blumenkraft »

blumenkraft

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #141 on: July 16, 2020, 06:18:36 PM »
PSA: No one will ever send you bitcoins for free! Keep this in mind. Period.


blumenkraft

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #142 on: August 03, 2020, 03:37:05 PM »
Nathan J. Robinson at it again. Brilliant article. Please read.

The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free

Link >> https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-lies-are-free

blumenkraft

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #143 on: August 07, 2020, 08:07:01 PM »
A lot of Reddit moderator accounts hacked and sabotaged by (not so law and order) right-wing trolls.

Ongoing incident with compromised mod accounts

Link >> https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/i5hhtf/ongoing_incident_with_compromised_mod_accounts/

kassy

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #144 on: August 22, 2020, 10:47:32 AM »
Facebook Suspends Pages Of Local Climate Advocacy Groups With No Explanation

The Facebook pages of several local chapters of a national climate change advocacy nonprofit, including Jacksonville’s, have been suspended with no warning or explanation.

The volunteer-driven Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL) is a non-partisan organization focused on climate change solutions. There are about 600 local chapters around the world.

Adam Rosenblatt, an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of North Florida, is the founder of the Jacksonville chapter.

...

But in mid-July, the page was taken down suddenly with no warning or explanation.

Without that Facebook page, Rosenblatt said the Jacksonville CCL chapter has no web presence at all.

“And I just found out the other day that we are not the only chapter of the Citizens Climate Lobby that this has happened to,” Rosenblatt said.

In an email to WJCT News, Lesley Beatty, the Marketing Director for the CCL, wrote that they were recently made aware of about ten chapters that have had their Facebook pages removed.

“We are still looking into the full scope of the problem as we are not automatically alerted when it happens - we only know about the ones where the groups have notified us,” she wrote. “The message we've seen is that the pages violate Facebook's community standards, but we are not sure what specifically is causing the pages to be flagged.”

...

It’s not clear if this is why these CCL Facebook pages were taken down, but, “If they're lumping in climate change activists with conspiracy theory groups, then that's a pretty big flaw in Facebook’s algorithm,” Rosenblatt said.

https://news.wjct.org/post/facebook-suspends-pages-local-climate-advocacy-groups-no-explanation
Þetta minnismerki er til vitnis um að við vitum hvað er að gerast og hvað þarf að gera. Aðeins þú veist hvort við gerðum eitthvað.

vox_mundi

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #145 on: September 22, 2020, 11:43:10 AM »
Facebook Suspends Environmental Groups Despite Vow to Fight Misinformation
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/22/facebook-climate-change-environment-groups-suspended

Facebook has suspended the accounts of several environmental organizations less than a week after launching an initiative it said would counter a tide of misinformation over climate science on the platform.

Groups such as Greenpeace USA, Climate Hawks Vote and Rainforest Action Network were among those blocked from posting or sending messages on Facebook over the weekend. Activists say hundreds of other individual accounts linked to indigenous, climate and social justice groups were also suspended for an alleged “intellectual property rights violation”.

The suspended people and groups were all involved in a Facebook event from May last year that targeted KKR & Co, a US investment firm that is backing the Coastal GasLink pipeline, a 670km-long gas development being built in northern British Columbia, Canada.

The suspensions, the day before another online action aimed at KKR & Co, has enraged activists who oppose the pipeline for its climate impact and for cutting through the land of the Wetʼsuwetʼen, a First Nations people.

“Videos of extreme violence, alt-right views and calls for violence by militias in Kenosha, Wisconsin, are allowed to persist on Facebook,” said Delee Nikal, a Wet’suwet’en community member. “Yet we are banned and receive threats for permanent removal, for posting an online petition.”

... “Actions speak louder than words and once again Facebook has taken actions that are in stark contrast to public statements from the company,” said Elizabeth Jardim, senior corporate campaigner at Greenpeace USA.

“The recent bans targeting people fighting to save their communities from climate change and the continued exploitation of fossil fuel companies show us that when push comes to shove, Facebook will side with polluters at the cost of their users’ trying to organize.”
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

vox_mundi

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #146 on: September 25, 2020, 12:50:28 AM »
Former Facebook Manager: “We Took a Page from Big Tobacco’s Playbook”
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/former-facebook-manager-we-took-a-page-from-big-tobaccos-playbook/

Speaking to Congress today, the former Facebook manager first tasked with making the company make money did not mince words about his role. He told lawmakers that the company "took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset" and arguing that his former employer has been hugely detrimental to society.



Tim Kendall, who served as director of monetization for Facebook from 2006 through 2010, spoke to Congress today as part of a House Commerce subcommittee hearing examining how social media platforms contribute to the mainstreaming of extremist and radicalizing content.

"The social media services that I and others have built over the past 15 years have served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity," Kendall said in his opening testimony (PDF). "At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding—at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war."



https://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/files/documents/09.24.20%20CPC%20Witness%20Testimony_Kendall.pdf

As director of monetization, he added, "We sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible... We took a page form Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset."

His analogy continued:

... Tobacco companies initially just sought to make nicotine more potent. But eventually that wasn't enough to grow the business as fast as they wanted. And so they added sugar and menthol to cigarettes so you could hold the smoke in your lungs for longer periods. At Facebook, we added status updates, photo tagging, and likes, which made status and reputation primary and laid the groundwork for a teenage mental health crisis.

Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco's bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs. But that incendiary content alone wasn't enough. To continue to grow the user base and in particular, the amount of time and attention users would surrender to Facebook, they needed more.


Engagement leads to profits, and so engagement with content is everything, Kendall later expanded in response to questions, adding that "engagement" was the metric that drove all Facebook decisions when he was at the company, and he assumes that's still true today.

"We initially used engagement as sort of a proxy for user benefit," Kendall explained. "But we also started to realize that engagement could also mean [users] were sufficiently sucked in that they couldn't work in their own best long-term interest to get off the platform... We started to see real-life consequences, but they weren't given much weight. Engagement always won, it always trumped."

"There's no incentive to stop [toxic content] and there's incredible incentive to keep going and get better," Kendall said. "I just don't believe that's going to change unless there are financial, civil, or criminal penalties associated with the harm that they create. Without enforcement, they're just going to continue to be embarrassed by the mistakes, and they'll talk about empty platitudes... but I don't believe anything systemic will change... the incentives to keep the status quo are just too lucrative at the moment."

“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

vox_mundi

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #147 on: November 14, 2020, 11:41:50 PM »


“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

vox_mundi

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #148 on: December 19, 2020, 02:31:42 PM »
AI ‘Pre-Cog’ Predicts Which Twitter Users Will Spread Disinformation
https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/12/15/ai-pre-cog-predicts-which-twitter-users-will-spread-disinformation/

Researchers from the University of Sheffield have developed an AI system that detects which social media users spread disinformation — before they actually share it.

The team found that Twitter users who share content from unreliable sources mostly tweet about politics or religion, while those who repost trustworthy sources tweet more about their personal lives.

“We also found that the correlation between the use of impolite language and the spread of unreliable content can be attributed to high online political hostility,” said study co-author Dr Nikos Aletras, a lecturer in Natural Language Processing at the University of Sheffield.

The team reported their findings after analyzing more than 1 million tweets from around 6,200 Twitter users.

... the researchers used the linguistic information in the tweets to train a series of models to forecast whether a user would likely spread disinformation.

Their most effective method used a neural model called T-BERT. The team says it can predict with 79.7% accuracy whether a user will repost unreliable sources in the future:

Identifying Twitter users who repost unreliable news sources with linguistic information, PeerJ Computer Science (2020)
https://peerj.com/articles/cs-325/
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― anonymous

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late

John Palmer.

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Re: The problem of social media
« Reply #149 on: December 19, 2020, 04:57:32 PM »
AI ‘Pre-Cog’ Predicts Which Twitter Users Will Spread Disinformation
https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/12/15/ai-pre-cog-predicts-which-twitter-users-will-spread-disinformation/

Researchers from the University of Sheffield have developed an AI system that detects which social media users spread disinformation — before they actually share it.

The team found that Twitter users who share content from unreliable sources mostly tweet about politics or religion, while those who repost trustworthy sources tweet more about their personal lives.

“We also found that the correlation between the use of impolite language and the spread of unreliable content can be attributed to high online political hostility,” said study co-author Dr Nikos Aletras, a lecturer in Natural Language Processing at the University of Sheffield.

The team reported their findings after analyzing more than 1 million tweets from around 6,200 Twitter users.

... the researchers used the linguistic information in the tweets to train a series of models to forecast whether a user would likely spread disinformation.

Their most effective method used a neural model called T-BERT. The team says it can predict with 79.7% accuracy whether a user will repost unreliable sources in the future:

Identifying Twitter users who repost unreliable news sources with linguistic information, PeerJ Computer Science (2020)
https://peerj.com/articles/cs-325/

 I assume this has been discussed here before, but the problem is what you define as reliable source. Snowden’s info was reliable. Many years later, the journalist that undertook the publication of the Snowden revelations, Glenn Greenwald, had to leave the Intercept because his editorial against Twitter’s censorship of The NY Post’s Hunter Biden news was blocked by his peer editors (in fact, his editorial was against any kind of censorship). Meanwhile the “trusted & true” CNN kept silence about Hunter Biden corruption affairs until after the election. Why should then an algorithm or person consider CNN reliable and Greenwald unreliable? Or even the NY Post, which is a tabloid, but in all appearance was not bringing Fake News with respect to Hunter Biden’s laptop?

Who is going to determine what is reliable and what is not? Censorship is just a tool that a myriad of bad agents can use. They just say the magic word “Russia” and the thing is buried.

Another interesting thing is that the most vocal individuals against any kind of censorship find themselves in opposite side of the fringes so to speak:
- Alex Jones and MAGA QAnon type loons
- Genuine constitutionalists, usually leaning to the right
- Genuine libertarians which are vilified by the Corporate GOP
- Genuine leftists (Dore, Kulinski, Greenwald, Krystal Ball, Taibbi, Halper, etc) which are vilified by the Corporate Left.

The commonality here is the Corporate Left or Right, which are alternately in power, and together with the Information State, are a vert ugly, dangerous agent owning the handle of Censorship. And this has just started...
« Last Edit: December 19, 2020, 05:35:58 PM by John Palmer. »