The Bane That Is Social Media

[goldenvalley]

Here's an article in WaPo about the heretofore mysterious algorithms of Facebook.  This is a fairly long read.

Also something from Vox..about mis and disinformation.   I want to know why propaganda as a term isn't used more often in talking about this stuff.   

[Bact PhD]

Oct 26, 2021 18:25:00 GMT goldenvalley said:

Also something from Vox..about mis and disinformation.   I want to know why propaganda as a term isn't used more often in talking about this stuff.   

“Propaganda” —that’s such a Cold War-era term, dontcha know? That what those Godless Pinko Commies in the old Soviet Union did, nothing at all to do with today, right? Right??

[indy]

Oct 27, 2021 1:38:49 GMT Bact PhD said:

Oct 26, 2021 18:25:00 GMT goldenvalley said:

Also something from Vox..about mis and disinformation.   I want to know why propaganda as a term isn't used more often in talking about this stuff.   

“Propaganda” —that’s such a Cold War-era term, dontcha know? That what those Godless Pinko Commies in the old Soviet Union did, nothing at all to do with today, right? Right??

To me, the difference between 'propaganda' and 'mis-dis-information' is pretty simple. Propaganda is misleading someone with the intent of supporting a particular political point of view, while disinformation is misleading someone with the intent to attack or undermine the opposing point of view.

[goldenvalley]

Oct 27, 2021 15:24:52 GMT indy said:

Oct 27, 2021 1:38:49 GMT Bact PhD said:

“Propaganda” —that’s such a Cold War-era term, dontcha know? That what those Godless Pinko Commies in the old Soviet Union did, nothing at all to do with today, right? Right??

To me, the difference between 'propaganda' and 'mis-dis-information' is pretty simple. Propaganda is misleading someone with the intent of supporting a particular political point of view, while disinformation is misleading someone with the intent to attack or undermine the opposing point of view.

From an analytical standpoint that distinction makes sense. But without propaganda to offer a different point of view, there is no reason to simply offer disinformation. Those offering propaganda want to make sure a view point is readily available to replace the opposing point of view.  So it almost seems that dis and propaganda are the same thing, very tightly compressed together and probably coming from the same source.  

[LFC]

From TPM: A Revealing Look At Zuckerberg. I've been convinced for a long time that he is a sociopath and really is just incapable of feeling any compassion for people he harms.

I haven’t been reading all of the articles now coming out of the so-called “Facebook Papers”. But this article from the Post captures some important issues, ones that aren’t tied necessarily to the specific revelations getting the most attention but a general picture. There are two big focuses to the piece. The first is that for a company of its scale Facebook still has an extremely top-down management structure. Basically Zuckerberg is deep in the details and makes all the big decisions. The second is that he has repeatedly shot down internal ‘harm reduction’ proposals because they threaten core engagement metrics.

I noted a few weeks back that these tradeoffs get to the heart of Facebook’s problem and the heart of what the site is. The harm is inherent to Facebook’s business model. When you find ways to reduce harm they’re almost always at the expense of engagement metrics the maximization of which are the goal of basically everything Facebook does. The comparison may be a loaded or contentious one. But it is a bit like the Tobacco companies. The product is the problem, not how it’s used or abused. It’s the product. That’s a challenging place for a company to be.

But this article captures something a bit different. Facebook now makes up a very big part of the whole global information ecosystem. In many countries around the world Facebook for all intents and purposes is the Internet. The weather patterns of information as we might call them are heavily shaped by Facebook’s algorithms and the various tweaks and adjustments it makes to them in different countries. Facebook may not create the misinformation or hate speech or hyper-nationalist frenzies but its algorithms help drive them.

What this article shows is first that the guiding light for those algorithms is first to maximize engagement. That part we know. That’s the business model. But in a different way they are driven by goals and drives of this one guy, Mark Zuckerberg. Often I think of these high profile CEOS or founders as symbols of a corporate culture but not necessarily really the guys running the show. This article and much else makes pretty clear that it really is still Mark Zuckerberg that runs the show. And what drives him? This article and much else suggests that what shapes Zuckerberg’s goals are perhaps three things in descending order: 1) to win (in all its dimensions), 2) to maximize profits and 3) to cater to the complaints of the right which is most effective and aggressive about complaining about purported mistreatment.

[goldenvalley]

Zuckerman, Mosk, probably Steve Jobs and maybe Bill Gates are like Trump in personality and self regard. The only difference from Trump is that they are really are smart...not people smart though.

[AnBr]

I certainly would not place Gates in that category. He may have been ruthless during his business career, but his post career foundation is something none of the others would have done. And its whole purpose is to do the greatest good.

[AnBr]

[LFC]

Facebook knew they were losing teens so they discussed how to go after 1st graders.

Facebook has a demographic problem. Even before investigations revealed that the company’s products were destroying teens’ mental health, interest in its flagship product was dropping off a cliff. Since 2019, teen usage of the app has declined by 13 percent, and over the next two years, it’s expected to drop another 45 percent.

“Aging up is a real issue” a researcher wrote in an internal memo revealed last week. Perhaps that’s why Facebook was considering new products targeted at children as young as six years old, according to a new document handed over to Congress by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

“Our company is making a major investment in youth and has spun up a cross-company virtual team to make safer, more private, experiences for youth that improve their and their household’s well-being,” the internal post from April 9 said. “For many of our products, we historically haven’t designed for under 13 (with the exception of Messenger Kids) and the experiences built for those over 13 didn’t recognize distinctive maturity levels across the age spectrum.”

There’s a reason that Facebook has mostly avoided targeting kids under 13—the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) limits what companies can do to target and collect and share data on children. For example, companies are restricted from giving data to third parties without parental consent.

Regulation of capitalism for the win!

[LFC]

Gee, what a shock.

Facebook Has A Disinfo Problem. And It’s Blocking Access To Data About How Bad It Is.

[pg]

Oct 27, 2021 15:24:52 GMT indy said:

Oct 27, 2021 1:38:49 GMT Bact PhD said:

“Propaganda” —that’s such a Cold War-era term, dontcha know? That what those Godless Pinko Commies in the old Soviet Union did, nothing at all to do with today, right? Right??

To me, the difference between 'propaganda' and 'mis-dis-information' is pretty simple. Propaganda is misleading someone with the intent of supporting a particular political point of view, while disinformation is misleading someone with the intent to attack or undermine the opposing point of view.

Great take. I tend to concentrate first on misinformation vs disinformation. Misinformation is, for me, the garden variety junk that people blindly post on social media platforms.  Even without intent to deceive, much is still false or out-of-context info.  Disinformation, as you already note, presents false information as fact with the intent to deceive. Politicians and certain (most?) agenda driven media masquerading as "news"- propaganda that today utilizes all three components for a triple threat.

It's no wonder that at least half our possible voting populous is confused...Too many voices in all the white noise are hard to sift through for far too many.  Separating intention from blind stupidity is tricky.





 

[AnBr]

[Bact PhD]

I had missed this piece in The Atlantic when it first ran about three months ago. A very long, worthwhile, and somewhat unnerving read.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/disinformation-propaganda-amplification-ampliganda/620334/

Through my work at the Internet Observatory, I’d witnessed many attempts to push messages by gaming the algorithms that Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms use to identify popular content and surface it to users. Confronted with campaigns to make certain ideas seem more widespread than they really are, many researchers and media commentators have taken to using labels such as “misinformation” and “disinformation.” But those terms have fallen victim to scope creep. They imply that a narrative or claim has deviated from a stable or canonical truth; whether Pelosi should go is simply a matter of opinion.

In fact, we have a very old word for persuasive communication with an agenda: propaganda. That term, however, comes with historical baggage. It presumes that governments, authority figures, institutions, and mass media are forcing ideas on regular people from the top down. But more and more, the opposite is happening. Far from being merely a target, the public has become an active participant in creating and selectively amplifying narratives that shape realities. Perhaps the best word for this emergent bottom-up dynamic is one that doesn’t exist quite yet: ampliganda, the shaping of perception through amplification. It can originate from an online nobody or an onscreen celebrity. No single person or organization bears responsibility for its transmission. And it is having a profound effect on democracy and society.

“We have met the enemy and they is us.”

[LFC]

Another supposedly MAGAt friendly social media platform turns out to be a grift. Is it any wonder why these people are constant targets? All you have to do is scream "FREEDUMB!" an hundreds of thousands will come a runnin' with their mouths open and their minds closed. Oh, yeah. And it's also full of potential security holes.

Gettr, just one of the interminable Facebook/Twitter clones for MAGA chuds angry about social media rules against conspiracy theories and bigotry, sold itself to potential users as a way to escape the totalitarian tyranny of tech giants like Facebook and Google. Surprise! That pitch comes with a million caveats, the first and foremost of which is that Gettr doesn’t actually seem to do that at all.

According to new research conducted by Yale Law School’s privacy lab founder Sean O’Brien and recently published by Talk Liberation Investigates, Gettr’s web and smartphone apps contain trackers that would allow Facebook and Google to follow users as they roam Gettr’s supposed free-speech utopia. (O’Brien is also the chief security officer of Panquake.com, a crowdfunded, blockchain-enabled social network that has yet to launch, meaning he works for a competitor.)

Gettr’s code includes two trackers which are ubiquitous across the web—a browser cookie that tracks users for Google’s sprawling AdSense network, and the infamous Facebook pixel, a tiny dot embedded in millions of sites across the web that pings Facebook every time it’s loaded. These tools functionally allow Gettr to take advantage of the same kind of omnipresent web-tracking technology its principals, such as former Donald Trump aide and CEO Jason Miller, have decried. The price of admission is of course sharing that trove of data with Facebook and Google.

In addition to the Facebook and Google trackers, Gettr uses similar tools from third parties like AppsFlyer and Countly, which provide web browser fingerprinting (the creation of unique user identifiers) and behavioral data. Altogether, these trackers are capable of transmitting “fine-grained behavior and location data” on and enable persistent, cross-device tracking of Gettr users, according to the report. AppsFlyer alone is capable of collecting such details as “IP address, cell network provider, operating system version, phone model, and both coarse and fine-grained location information.”

The privacy issues don’t end there, with the report also identifying a number of major security flaws.

Gettr is also fundamentally dishonest about the number of followers.

“Rejoice,” Joe Rogan wrote earlier this month when he joined Gettr, the MAGA-friendly Twitter alternative founded by former Trump aide Jason Miller.

Now the influential comedian and podcaster seemingly regrets his decision, blasting the social-media app this week as a “fugazi” site that engages in “fuckery.”

“I might be part of the Chinese Communist Party now, I believe,” Rogan joked on Monday—referencing how Gettr is bankrolled by exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui—after fellow comedian Tim Dillon noted how the former Fear Factor host had recently joined Gettr and generated a flurry of media headlines.

“Well, the news story is their fucking amount of people that signed up increased by 1,150 percent or something” as a result of his joining, Rogan remarked on The Tim Dillon Show.

“Yeah, you have like 9 million followers on Gettr,” Dillon responded, before Rogan tossed cold water on that metric. “Yeah, it’s not real, though,” he explained, “Gettr doesn’t even have 9 million people.” According to the podcasting star, the social-media site merely combines pre-existing Twitter followings to its user profiles.

“This is where the fuckery is,” Rogan continued. “They take all my Twitter followers... and then they port those over.”

“So Gettr is fugazi,” Dillion replied.

“Definitely fugazi,” Rogan agreed.

[LFC]

Mozilla is going to do more to track Facebook's ubiquitous and sneaky trackers.

Aside from the plethora of scummy privacy practices Facebook uses to track your every move on its myriad platforms, the company’s also come up with plenty of sneaky ways to keep tabs on you off its sites as well. Now, a new study wants to fight back against these offsite trackers by... tracking them back. Researchers at Mozilla announced this week the launch of its “Facebook Pixel Hunt” study, which seeks to track the company’s immense web-wide tracking network and investigate the intel it’s collecting on users.

As the name suggests, this study is focused on a piece of tracking tech known as the “Facebook pixel.” Chances are, you’ve visited a site that uses it; these tiny pieces of tech are buried in literally millions of sites across the web, from online stores to news outlets to... well, you name it. In exchange for onboarding a free pixel on their site, these sites can then track their own visitors and microtarget ads with the same sort of precision you’d expect from a data-hungry company like Facebook.

In exchange for giving these sites the power to track every pageview, purchase, search query, and much, much more, Facebook (naturally) requires that this data be shared with it, too. In cases where the website visitor has an account on some Facebook platform, this offsite data just gets glombed onto whatever Facebook already knows about that person. If they don’t have a Facebook account, then the company collects that data anyway, and uses it to create a “shadow profile” of that particular person.

These are the sorts of shadowy practices that Mozilla’s team wants to research with this study—and you can help them do it if you’re a Firefox user. Mozilla teamed up with reporters from the Markup to gather details about Facebook tracking using a free-to-download browser extension, Mozilla Rally, that will hoover up data sent out by Facebook’s pixels as you browse across the web.

[AnBr]

[goldenvalley]

The social media world is insane

Charli D’Amelio, who started posting videos of herself dancing on TikTok in 2019, brought in $17.5 million last year, according to Forbes, which recently ranked the highest-earning TikTok stars of 2021. With 133 million followers on TikTok, she makes her money from a clothing line and promoting products in TikTok videos and other ads.

By comparison, median pay for chief executives of S&P 500 companies was $13.4 million in 2020, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from MyLogIQ. CEO compensation figures include stock and option awards, which typically make up most of executive pay, as well as annual salary and bonus, perks and some kinds of retirement-benefit gains. Only some 2021 CEO compensation figures have been released so far.

Ms. D’Amelio’s compensation was higher than several CEOs of big publicly traded companies, including Exxon Mobil Corp. ’s Darren Woods ($15.6 million in 2020), Starbucks Corp. ’s Kevin Johnson ($14.7 million), Delta Air Lines Inc. ’s Ed Bastian ($13.1 million) and McDonald’s Corp. ’s Chris Kempczinski ($10.8 million), according to the Journal’s analysis of their recent compensation figures.

Don't get me wrong...I think CEO salaries are insane too.

[pnwguy]

Human societies have devolved to where fame matters more than anything. The GOP absorbed this lesson with Dumpster, and now the focus of candidates up and down the board are a function of celebrity, not competence. No behavior that brings fame is off limits now, even killing other humans like teen F-Up Kyle Rittenhouse.

[Bact PhD]

Jan 13, 2022 16:05:19 GMT pnwguy said:

Human societies have devolved to where fame matters more than anything. The GOP absorbed this lesson with Dumpster, and now the focus of candidates up and down the board are a function of celebrity, not competence. No behavior that brings fame is off limits now, even killing other humans like teen F-Up Kyle Rittenhouse.

Re-read my sig line.
We’re screwed.

[LFC]

The right-wingnut platforms are already seeing peak MAGAt with a few exceptions.

After Donald Trump got canned from virtually every major social media site, conservative pundits and personalities urged the MAGA crowd towards a mass exodus to so-called “alt-tech” venues promising freedom from a supposed plague of left-wing censorship. This hasn’t worked out quite as well as planned, according to a new analysis by the Washington Post.

The Post tracked 47 “prominent right-wing influencers” on four sites: neo-Nazi hub Gab, MAGA-themed microblogging website Gettr, YouTube clone Rumble, and messaging app Telegram. In the year since Trump got himself kicked off sites ranging from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube and Pinterest, these sites have competed for a niche crowd of right-wingers who were urged by pro-Trump pundits and media personalities to register new accounts in solidarity with their big banned ex-president. Prominent right-wingers either saw an opportunity to cater to these new audiences or had little option but to do so following their own bans. Apparently, there isn’t enough chud to smear around, because the Post analysis found those 47 influencers’ followings on those sites have largely either stagnated or declined.

That’s bad news for all of the sites. Each of them will face even more competition from the forthcoming launch of Trump’s Truth Social network, with the exception of Rumble, which signed a partnership deal with him.

These kinds of platforms aren’t known for offering transparent metrics on their users and engagement. So the Post used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to track how those 47 accounts, who had previously “seen steady growth” on Twitter and other mainstream sites, fared in terms of follower counts on alt-tech sites over time. After an initial spurt of growth, the paper found, these accounts mostly petered out.

Among the 47 individuals the Post tracked are anti-vaxxers like Dr. Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Sherri Tenpenny; garden variety right-wing pundits and provocateurs like Dan Bongino, Charlie Kirk, and Steve Bannon’s podcast; conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and Lin Wood; and MAGA media like OAN and Epoch Times. Also making an appearance are Trump and his punching bag of a son, Donald Trump Jr.

Lin Wood, an attorney from Atlanta who promoted Trump’s failed lawsuits to overturn the results of the 2020 elections and has become a QAnon figurehead, got banned from Twitter after urging his followers to “pledge your lives” during the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. On Telegram, the Post analysis found, he quickly racked up 800,000 followers but is now down to 730,000, which the paper pegged at just 60% of his pre-ban following.

Alex Jones joined Gab in 2016 and was able to add roughly 25,000 followers a month in Q1 2021, but since then that average has dropped to 1,000. QAnon accounts have fared similarly poorly on Gab. After benefiting from a surge in followers in September 2020, when Facebook banned QAnon accounts, and the Trump bans a few months later, evangelists like the anonymous redpill78 and Jordan Sather have grown at a rate of just 1% a month.

OAN saw a similar spike on Rumble, according to the Post, growing its following to 750,000 a month after Trump’s ban. Since then, it’s plateaued at around 900,000 followers.

A few of the 47 accounts, like anti-vaxxer Sherri Tenpenny, did see steady growth—the Post found their Telegram account added roughly 10,000 new followers a month.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 20, 2022 22:00:06 GMT LFC said:

The right-wingnut platforms are already seeing peak MAGAt with a few exceptions.

Are people getting bored with this type of talk except for the vaccine related stuff?  No longer relevant or tired of big talk with not much action anymore?  Maybe they won't get wound up again until the 2024 campaign season.

[LFC]

Trump is taking another swing at it. It's going to use "Big Tech" AI censors. [facepalm] I'm sure CEO Devin Nunes will get right on addressing this.

Former President Donald Trump’s yet-to-be-launched social media platform Truth Social is casting itself as an alternative to “Big Tech,” but the platform has enlisted a “Big Tech” firm to aid in the site’s moderation utilizing AI censors. Initially billed as a venture to “stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech,” the platform, Truth Social, will be moderated by precisely what it publicly rails against: “Big Tech.” Fox Business reported Monday that Trump’s platform will be moderated by Hive, which the network describes as “a San Francisco-based Series D start-up that provides automated solutions through cloud-based artificial intelligence for understanding images, videos, and text content.” Hive CEO Kevin Guo told Fox Business the company can detect content including “nudity, drugs, violence, hate speech, spam, and bullying.” Truth Social CEO and former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) added: “We want to be very family-friendly, we want this to be a very safe place.” Far-right social media alternative Gab CEO Andrew Torba on Monday attacked Trump’s venture and called the site “not a free speech platform.” Truth Social didn’t return The Daily Beast’s request for comment on Monday evening.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 25, 2022 15:02:05 GMT LFC said:

Trump is taking another swing at it. It's going to use "Big Tech" AI censors. [facepalm] I'm sure CEO Devin Nunes will get right on addressing this.

Former President Donald Trump’s yet-to-be-launched social media platform Truth Social is casting itself as an alternative to “Big Tech,” but the platform has enlisted a “Big Tech” firm to aid in the site’s moderation utilizing AI censors. Initially billed as a venture to “stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech,” the platform, Truth Social, will be moderated by precisely what it publicly rails against: “Big Tech.” Fox Business reported Monday that Trump’s platform will be moderated by Hive, which the network describes as “a San Francisco-based Series D start-up that provides automated solutions through cloud-based artificial intelligence for understanding images, videos, and text content.” Hive CEO Kevin Guo told Fox Business the company can detect content including “nudity, drugs, violence, hate speech, spam, and bullying.” Truth Social CEO and former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) added: “We want to be very family-friendly, we want this to be a very safe place.” Far-right social media alternative Gab CEO Andrew Torba on Monday attacked Trump’s venture and called the site “not a free speech platform.” Truth Social didn’t return The Daily Beast’s request for comment on Monday evening.

Any Trump operation would have to be big...the biggest! He does nothing small.

[pnwguy]

Jan 25, 2022 16:55:25 GMT goldenvalley said:

Any Trump operation would have to be big...the biggest! He does nothing small.

I hear that Stormy Daniels claims differently...

[LFC]