Facebook does not exist for your pleasure: Remember that. By Geniusofdespair

 I decided to boost our brand "Eye on Miami" on Facebook  for some unknown reason. I do crazy stuff sometimes. I guess I am trying to get people to join the Eye on Miami Group on Facebook. Don't know what that is about? Neither do I, but look on the Right Side of this page there is a giant Facebook link to the Group. Hit it. Join it.

Well, back to the story, I am paying $2 a day for 3 days to boost the post on the left to see what happens. As you can see the $2 got me an extra 359 people in one day. The problem is, many, many of those people are trolls. I am now getting all this crazy troll stuff on Eye on Miami. And, I am getting Trump crazed gun people. Luckily it hasn't tainted the Group page only the Eye on Miami Facebook page. I didn't  do any boosting on the group page and I have to approve all the people that join.

 It is like when Castro emptied his prisons and mental hospitals during the Mariel Boat lift. Facebook has afforded me all their crazy people in getting me more hits. They must have a looney bin set aside for boosting posts.

So what am I getting at?

Facebook is not here for your pleasure. It is here to make money. It is all about the money, not your Kid's Birthday Party.

And, there are trolls all over Facebook. Get your privacy settings set up. I can see too many people's data. Get your whole date of birth off of facebook. Too much HONEST shit on your page. Make up some stuff.  And, damn it, don't sign in to anything with Facebook. They take your whole FRIENDS list when you do. It might be easy for you but you are selling me out and all your friends.

Good luck with Facebook. You need it. I am glad I sold my stock.

MORE, on the Facebook debacle ... a five-alarm fire in American democracy ... by gimleteye

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are huddled away, trying to figure out their next steps now that the role of Facebook data in promoting the election of Donald Trump and the Alt-R is coming clear. Their shameful disgrace is spreading across Western democracies because elected representatives allowed Moscow Center an open door to exploit the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of human nature; proliferating the scum of nativist fears and anxieties (in parallel, too, with Rupert Murdoch's Fox News empire).

Here are a couple of recent postings worth reading in their entirely. The first, an OPED by Lizzie O'Shea in the UK Guardian (which has bravely lead the disclosures about Cambridge Analytica's exploitation of Facebook data) makes a case for re-working the internet to protect personal data and privacy, as a generalist point of view:

Facebook’s reckless vanity has made the headlines again, with the revelation that data it held on about 50 million users was exploited commercially without their consent, and that when Facebook found out about this, it did pathetically little. We only know this thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower. This is yet another scandal in a troubled period for the company, with a growing sense that it is all profit, no responsibility. But the current malaise goes wider than Facebook. On the internet more widely, the advertising-supported model has demanded its payout, and as a result our experience of the web is getting worse. Like rats scrambling to get back on a sinking ship, senior former-Facebookers are lining up to express regrets. It all feels too little, too late.

The second is by a mathematician whose feed I recently began to follow: Paul-Olivier Dehaye. This post on Medium, in Sept. 2017, is even more astringent today, following the whistleblowers emerging from the Bannon/Trump/Mercer/Cambridge Analytica connections.

Dear Facebook, For the past two years, I have been trying to contribute to the public debate around Facebook’s influence in elections. For instance, I have been credited for research on two influential articles: The Data That Turned the World Upside Down (Das Magazin, Zurich, then translated worldwide) and Robert Mercer: The big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media (The Guardian/The Observer). As part of this wider effort, I have tried for a long time to use my data protection rights to get access to more information about the ad targeting that takes place on your platform. These requests have so far been met with one limited, but encouraging, success.

I’m just a curious FB adopter who blogs from time to time on Facebook, a five-alarm fire in American democracy. I was horrified by FB content that passed on my screen in 2016 (before deleting all the Trump and RUS supporting groups that swamped my FB feed.)

Dehaye has an outline of what Facebook is not telling us about its algorithms. We’ve allowed FB to abuse western democracies and election processes ... long past time for governments to intervene although that runs counter to the Republican narrative; a significant reason for Congress to be returned to Democratic control in Nov. 2018.

The GOP has been as silent on Cambridge Analytica and Trump as it has been on Facebook. It doesn't want to confront the truth that its jihad against government regulation -- of everything from public health to to gun safety -- is criminal negligence. The swamp isn't being drained. America is not being made great again.

Stormy Daniels is fit to end the sonnet ... by gimleteye

UK Guardian Carole Caddwalldr just broke open the story of the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower. Click here, to read the story. This morning, Facebook banned the whistleblower.

Rupert Murdoch set the stage, long ago, with a profit model to extract billions by ginning up base emotions. Under Reagan, the Fairness Doctrine disappeared. Mark Zuckerburg weaponized Murdoch's model and helped put a mobbed-up grifter in the WH. Putin saw the opportunity most clearly, driving straight through social media to infiltrate the US elections. While federales were building TSA check points at airports to prevent another 9/11, Moscow Center copied a few data files, put a few 20 yr old computer nerds to work, and shattered liberal democracy. Stormy Daniels is fit to end the sonnet.

Washington Monthly: How To Fix Facebook ... by gimleteye

A long and excellent read in Washington Monthly that addresses many questions about Facebook and its corrupting influence on democracy that we've raised on this blog.

Before Trump's election, few of us had any inkling that Facebook was being manipulated by Russian intel ops, who had gained significant experience using social media to influence political outcomes in Crimea and in Great Britain, during the Brexit campaign. Russia's long term aim, to de-stablize western democracies, was massively aided by computer scientists whose proof-of-concept would green light the attack on the 2016 presidential election.

The extent of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in messaging through social media platforms will be disclosed, at some point, by the Mueller team -- if GOP politics doesn't monkey-wrench the investigation. What IS in the public record: that Facebook messaging from Russian servers, linked to its government intel ops, neatly meshed with the Trump campaign messaging to its base. More than 123 million Facebook users were exposed to messages originating in Russia, dressed identically to Trump themes.

The consequences were enormous. Today the Trump WH and Republican Congress is driving the sharpest partisan conflict in modern history, exceeding the Nixonian presidency and aftermath of Watergate. (And Mueller has yet to release a word of his investigation!)

Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor, is uniquely positioned to understand and to communicate possible fixes to the nightmare unleashed on American democracy by social media platforms. In one way or another, these require regulation. That's a bogey word to Republicans but consider; business models like Facebook's are set up to make money in ways that harm the republic and the pursuit of liberty.

Thanks to the U.S. government’s laissez-faire approach to regulation, the internet platforms were able to pursue business strategies that would not have been allowed in prior decades. No one stopped them from using free products to centralize the internet and then replace its core functions. No one stopped them from siphoning off the profits of content creators. No one stopped them from gathering data on every aspect of every user’s internet life. No one stopped them from amassing market share not seen since the days of Standard Oil. No one stopped them from running massive social and psychological experiments on their users. No one demanded that they police their platforms. It has been a sweet deal.

That's only one of the pertinent quotes from the McNamee report. We urge you to read the rest here.


Washington Monthly
January/February/March 2018
How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us
An early investor explains why the social media platform’s business model is such a threat—and what to do about it.
by Roger McNamee


In early 2006, I got a call from Chris Kelly, then the chief privacy officer at Facebook, asking if I would be willing to meet with his boss, Mark Zuckerberg. I had been a technology investor for more than two decades, but the meeting was unlike any I had ever had. Mark was only twenty-two. He was facing a difficult decision, Chris said, and wanted advice from an experienced person with no stake in the outcome.

When we met, I began by letting Mark know the perspective I was coming from. Soon, I predicted, he would get a billion-dollar offer to buy Facebook from either Microsoft or Yahoo, and everyone, from the company’s board to the executive staff to Mark’s parents, would advise him to take it. I told Mark that he should turn down any acquisition offer. He had an opportunity to create a uniquely great company if he remained true to his vision. At two years old, Facebook was still years away from its first dollar of profit. It was still mostly limited to students and lacked most of the features we take for granted today. But I was convinced that Mark had created a game-changing platform that would eventually be bigger than Google was at the time. Facebook wasn’t the first social network, but it was the first to combine true identity with scalable technology. I told Mark the market was much bigger than just young people; the real value would come when busy adults, parents and grandparents, joined the network and used it to keep in touch with people they didn’t get to see often.

My little speech only took a few minutes. What ensued was the most painful silence of my professional career. It felt like an hour. Finally, Mark revealed why he had asked to meet with me: Yahoo had made that billion-dollar offer, and everyone was telling him to take it.

From the NY Review of Books: Democracy and the Machinations of Mind Control

The emerging picture of efforts to manipulate the outcomes of the US election and the Brexit referendum leads to an awkward paradox. For the first time in a long time, voters who recognized the rigged nature of the system voted in large enough numbers to overthrow “the swamp” of “politics as usual”; at the same time, the system itself was perhaps more rigged than ever, thanks to the new-fangled methods. While it is vital to expose how these worked, it is even more important also to develop a politics that validates voters’ legitimate repudiation of a corrupt establishment, rather than dismisses them as ignorant and gullible. The risk of exaggerating the effect of novel methods of subversion is that it will only reinforce cynicism about politics and government in general—and that would be a win for billionaires like Robert Mercer, and their friends and helpers like Nigel Farage, and all they stand for.

Democracy and the Machinations of Mind Control

Anthony Barnett
December 14, 2017, 1:46 pm

The British are catching up with an American awareness of the intertwined political influence of the secretive super-rich, social media, and the Kremlin. In America, illicit support for Trump has been investigated by intelligence agencies, Justice Department officials, and major media organizations. Uncovering election interference in Brexit-Britain has been a more freelance business. About a year ago, Carole Cadwalladr, a regular contributor to The Observer newspaper, started researching the “right-wing fake news ecosystem” and its capture of web searches through Google especially. This line of inquiry has also been followed by ByLine, a crowdfunded investigative journalism initiative, which hosts a regular column by J.J. Patrick, who has been mapping the scale and penetration of Russian trolls and bots sowing hatred and division via social media.

Cadwalladr’s reporting led her to uncover the part played by Cambridge Analytica in the Brexit referendum. This company, London-based but US-owned (principally by the hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who was one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors), generated the “220 million” data sets of US voters’ details that underpinned Trump’s Facebook campaign. This employed so-called black ads only seen by targeted voters, a process that bypasses and undermines the shared political community essential for democracy. Cadwalladr found that the firm had also acted on behalf of the Vote Leave campaign in Britain—though Cambridge Analytica denied elements of her reporting.

In a follow-up article, she described how “a website called CNSnews.com… dominated Google’s search algorithm,” flooding it with reports that established media outlets are “fake” and “dead”; this site was backed, too, by Mercer’s foundation. Cadwalladr also met with Andy Wigmore, who had been the director of communications for Nigel Farage, the former head of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and leading Leave campaigner who has subsequently emerged as a Trump acolyte. Cadwalladr learned that Farage was friends with Mercer and, as Wigmore told her, that Mercer had directed Cambridge Analytica to help the Brexit campaign. According to the UK’s election law, all gifts in kind must be declared for their monetary worth and none can come from overseas donors. The UK’s Electoral Commission is now investigating this apparent double breach; Cambridge Analytica, meanwhile, is pursuing legal action against The Observer.

In March, Farage was spotted going into the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taken refuge. As Farage left the embassy, a BuzzFeed News journalist asked what he was doing there. Farage replied that he could not remember. In an overview in May, Cadwalladr pieced together various ties between the Trump campaign, Nigel Farage, and Russian “influence” efforts (including the alleged leaking of hacked information to WikiLeaks). British democracy, she concluded, had been “hijacked”:

There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.

As Cadwalladr was developing her thesis about this new machinery of political subversion, the UK editor of openDemocracy, Adam Ramsay, made a discovery of his own (I was the first editor of openDemocracy but was not involved with this story). With Peter Geoghegan, Ramsay showed how large sums of money were sent to the Vote Leave campaign during the EU referendum via a small, hard-line Loyalist party in Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). (By curious serendipity, Prime Minister Theresa May was forced to form a coalition government with the DUP after her Conservative Party lost its parliamentary majority in the general election of June 2017.) The loophole-ridden regulations governing British elections permit Northern Irish parties the unique privilege of not having to declare the source of their donations. A policy once justified by security concerns during the Troubles was abused by as-yet unidentified Brexit supporters to channel a secret, roughly half-million-dollar donation through the DUP to be spent mostly in mainland Britain.

In September, openDemocracy followed up with further reporting on a story originally broken last year by the satirical and muck-raking magazine Private Eye. A twenty-three-year-old fashion student had set up his own campaign for Brexit, which he called “BeLeave.” During the period immediately before a referendum, such operations must register with the Electoral Commission. They are permitted a maximum expenditure of £700,000 (about $935,000), while the designated lead campaign on each side is permitted up to £7 million ($9.35 million). Vote Leave led for the Brexit side and as it reached its limit, it gave £625,000 ($835,000) to the tiny BeLeave, that apparently paid it to AggregateIQ, a Canadian data analysis company that was assisting Vote Leave. AggregateIQ is, again, linked to Robert Mercer. The protests that followed this openDemocracy report led, at length, to the Electoral Commission’s opening an inquiry into the payment; openDemocracy also published an analysis of the dubious finances of Arron Banks, the major British funder of UKIP and its anti-immigrant call for Brexit. On the basis of Banks’s multimillion-pound funding of Brexit causes, one lawmaker called for the Electoral Commission to investigate whether Russian meddling was involved in the Leave campaign. Banks has dismissed reports of Russian money as “bollocks.”

As Cadwalladr continues to report on the effects of Vote Leave’s “dark campaign” and its funding, she acknowledges others’ arguments that Brexit was also caused by, for example, “rising inequality, frustration with elites, economic uncertainty.” I would add to those factors the resurgence of a particular English nationalism based on the dream of a resurgent “Great Britain,” which was seduced by the pro-Brexit campaign slogan “Take back control.” Nationalist sentiment of this sort will not be undermined by any revelations about Russian trouble-making or covert support from American billionaires—any more than Trump’s base seems likely to abandon the president over what the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller may discover.

In both the US and the UK, investigations into the deployment of these shadowy forces are still in progress. In close contests, every influence counts. There is, therefore, an understandable temptation to emphasize that without secretive billionaires, or the Russians, or Facebook, the outcomes of the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election would have been different. And as elections are likely to carry on being close-run, it is important to track down and expose systemic manipulation. But it does not follow that slush funds, algorithms, and alleged conspiracies were primary causes of the electoral shocks of 2016. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for Trump, although Hillary Clinton outspent him by half a billion dollars. In the UK, 52 percent of voters backed Brexit. A widespread revolt against elite entitlement and genuine resentment against a rigged system are the most important explanations in both cases.

Trump, at least, can be voted out of office in three years’ time. Britain’s referendum decision to quit the European Union will not be so easily reversed. Should the UK leave the EU on schedule at the end of March 2019, impoverishment and humiliation are likely; even a successful Brexit, if such is possible, will pitch the UK into permanent competition with the Continent. Either outcome is repugnant for large majorities of voters in London, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. With the stakes so high, anything that undermines the legitimacy of Brexit fills its Remain-voting opponents with hopes of a reprieve. This could be a dangerous delusion.

The emerging picture of efforts to manipulate the outcomes of the US election and the Brexit referendum leads to an awkward paradox. For the first time in a long time, voters who recognized the rigged nature of the system voted in large enough numbers to overthrow “the swamp” of “politics as usual”; at the same time, the system itself was perhaps more rigged than ever, thanks to the new-fangled methods. While it is vital to expose how these worked, it is even more important also to develop a politics that validates voters’ legitimate repudiation of a corrupt establishment, rather than dismisses them as ignorant and gullible. The risk of exaggerating the effect of novel methods of subversion is that it will only reinforce cynicism about politics and government in general—and that would be a win for billionaires like Robert Mercer, and their friends and helpers like Nigel Farage, and all they stand for.

This is the trap from which democracy in Britain and America must now extricate itself. There will have to be a credible alternative and not a return to the status quo that led to the revolts of 2016. In Britain, the advocates of Brexit captured a wish for self-government with their slogan “take back control”—a desire for democratic accountability that must be freed from the grasp of demagogy, not derided. As for the US, Trump pledged in Pennsylvania that he would speak for “the millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.” By all means, mock his hypocrisy, but the only way to combat his influence effectively will be by a politics that does speak for millions of workers.

It is possible to spring the trap. Behind both Brexit and Trump was a widespread repudiation of entitlement. Part of its energy in Britain has now gathered around a resurgent Labour Party, which made unexpected gains in June’s general election despite vicious attacks from the right-wing press on its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. In the US, the current of opposition and resistance is running through the #MeToo wave of revulsion at sexual harassment and male abuse of power. A groper-in-chief president faces his own public reckoning, as more and more voices—this week, a blistering denunciation from the editorial board of USA Today—call out his presumption of the right to belittle and humiliate. Trump remains in office, and Brexit proceeds, but unearned entitlement is everywhere on the run. The enemies of democracy—from oligarchs to billionaires—have reason to be fearful.

MASSIVE dislocations to democracy through Facebook and social media platforms ... by gimleteye

If Roy Moore wins today in Alabama, the result will have been substantially influenced by social media platforms like Facebook. We know from the results of the 2016 election of Donald Trump that focusing messages to likely voters through social media was enough to deliver an outcome turning "free and fair" elections into a mythic illusion. The effect of these distortions is to create a firestorm, which is exactly what we face today. Read the following from a former top executive at Facebook: he's telling the truth.

From Quartz:

GUILT TALKING: Former Facebook executive has sworn off social media because he doesn’t want to be “programmed”
By Hanna Kozlowska

Life as Laboratory
December 11, 2017

While Facebook’s business is booming and the company continues to expand its tentacles to every corner of the internet, its early employees and investors are growing more and more vocal about the damage it has wrought among its users.

Former Facebook vice president of user growth Chamath Palihapitiya said that social media is “eroding the core foundations of how people behave” and that he feels “tremendous guilt” about creating tools that are “ripping apart the social fabric.”

During a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in November, Palihapitiya echoed the words of other Facebook dissenters who have recently taken their guilt and grievances public. (h/t The Verge)

“You don’t realize it, but you are being programmed … but now you got to decide how much you’re willing to give up, how much of your intellectual independence,” he warned the audience. He said he didn’t want to be programmed himself, emphasizing he “doesn’t use this shit” and his kids are not allowed to use “this shit” either—also recommending that everyone take a “hard break” from social media.

Palihapitiya joined Facebook in 2007, and is now the CEO of venture capital firm Social Capital, which he founded in 2011.
“The things that you rely on, the short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created, are destroying how society works: no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth,” he said.

His fear is that bad actors can manipulate large groups of people, and that as users, we compound the problem in our quest to create an idealized version of ourselves:

We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals—hearts, likes, thumbs up—and we conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth. And instead what it really is is fake, brittle popularity that’s short-term and that leaves you even more—admit it—vacant and empty before you did it, because then it forces you into this vicious cycle where you’re like “What’s the next thing I need to do now because I need it back?”

Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, spoke last month about the way the platform exploits human psychology, much in the same terms, and said the founders of the company “understood consciously” what they were doing.

Palihapitiya agreed that “in the back, deep, deep recesses of our minds” they knew something bad could happen.

Facebook owes the American people to release ALL political and messaging ads bought by Russia ... by gimleteye

The Senate hearings on Russian infiltration of the 2016 election, through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, continue.

It is now clear. Any American who was using social media and interested in politics saw an advertisement bought by Russia: ads that mimicked if not identically copied messages supporting Trump and seeking to suppress Clinton voters.

This isn't FAKE NEWS. It's FACT.

Al Franken shredding FB's top legal counsel is a sight to behold. ❤️pic.twitter.com/gt6sjuoxZ4#ThursdayThoughts

— Holly O'Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) November 2, 2017

Facebook released a minuscule sample of ads bought by Russia. The ads were intended to gin up the right, and to the extent that Trump won 70,000 votes in three states that delivered the electoral college despite losing the popular vote by millions, Russia's strategy worked.

It is fascinating to observe the right instantly rising in objection to the Senate hearings, under the guise of protecting First Amendment privileges. US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas even went on Fox and Friends last night, complaining that some people support limiting ideas and free speech.

Perhaps more Americans will be revolted by the way that Putin's aims are dovetailing with the Koch Brothers'. It is all about the unstated agenda of transactional nationalism: enabling oligarchs to hold the peace. Democracy? Socialism?

No ideology holds in their universe, other than making money. Who knew that in 2017 we are going to have to stand up for the basic principles of democracy, starting with civility and fairness and "do unto others as you would have them do, unto you."

If Americans had the FULL INVENTORY of ads purchased by Russians on Facebook, we would see just how far off course we are.

(Click here to listen to NPR segment: Senator Kamala Harris on Social Media and Russian Propaganda. Be informed! It's YOUR democracy being plowed under.)

Great OPED from NY Times: Congress must act on social media platform disinformation campaigns ... by gimleteye

We've said it too. Here is the money quote: "The Russian efforts to use Facebook, YouTube and other social media to influence American politics should compel Congress to act. Social media has as much impact as broadcasting on elections, yet unlike broadcasting it is unregulated and has proved easy to manipulate. At a minimum, new rules should bar social media companies from accepting money for political advertising by foreign governments or their agents. And more aggressive anti-bot laws are needed to fight impersonation of humans for propaganda purposes."

To read what we have written about Facebook, click here.

Opinion | CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER
New York Times
How Twitter Killed the First Amendment

Tim Wu OCT. 27, 2017

You need not be a media historian to notice that we live in a golden age of press harassment, domestic propaganda and coercive efforts to control political debate. The Trump White House repeatedly seeks to discredit the press, threatens to strip broadcasters of their licenses and calls for the firing of journalists and football players for speaking their minds. A foreign government tries to hack our elections, and journalists and public speakers are regularly attacked by vicious, online troll armies whose aim is to silence opponents.

Who owns your data? Protecting your identity means a robust regulation of Facebook, Google, Twitter and social media ... by gimleteye

The more I read about the "free" flow of social media platforms as unpaid political advertisements, incorporating steady messaging meant to trigger the WORST of human nature, the more angry I am at elected officials who have literally been asleep at the wheel as democracy -- not to mention individual rights -- was hijacked by corporations that only existed in the imagination of a few entrepreneurs a decade ago.

Facebook, Google, Twitter and other social media platforms have created their own ecosystems that wrap us up in a cash money embrace, exclusive of any moral responsibility to fairness and balance in the public square: the world wide web.

Provably, they have invented business models based on your browsing history to target political advertisements with DISASTROUS results. These have mainly accrued to the benefit of a few oligarchs who are, themselves, as transnational as their social media empires. Facebook, Twitter, and Google stand at the top.

You SHOULD be furious.

Congressional committees are "investigating" the role of social media in the 2016 election. Thanks to solid reporting (UK Guardian leads the way), the outlines of the impact on democracy are coming clear. Whether voters and taxpayers are educated enough to navigate the complexity of digital interference in our constitutional rights is very much up in the air.

Don't be distracted by an inconsequential president who cries FAKE NEWS at the drop of a penny. To Trump, FAKE NEWS is anything he disagrees with, subject to change at any time. What Trump represents is an urge to MANIPULATE media to serve any cause that strikes his imagination, at any time.

Donald Trump wants to be a social media platform, a cyborg with enough chips on his shoulder to sink the world.

It is important to recognize the scale of this threat is both vast and particular to your online identity at the same time. Congress needs to tighten the screws down on both the capturing of social media platforms -- by recognizing these are in fact PUBLIC UTILITIES -- and the right of individuals to protect their own data from being harnessed by social media platforms, for sale to the highest bidder.

This is serious business, folks, it is political and needs action now.

Let’s take back control of our data – it’s too precious to leave to the tech giants
Ravi Naik, UK Guardian
Everything we do online leaves a trail. To hold power to account in the digital age, what is required is nothing less than a new civil rights movement

Data-sets feed the opaque algorithms that shape the cyber world we see and interact with. Yet that data concerns the most basic tenets of who we are.’
Tuesday 3 October 2017 10.28 EDTLast modified on Tuesday 3 October 2017 11.15 EDT

“Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us.” Thus, in 1996, John Perry Barlow laid out his manifesto, the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, in which he encapsulated a philosophy flowing through the heart of worldwide web. His was a vision that would come to dominate the internet today, a thread that went from Timothy Leary to Stewart Brand to Steve Jobs to our current tech giants.

Such is the dominance of this philosophy that it has spawned a new creed, “dataism”. The central principle of this dogma is the free flow of data, unrestricted and unregulated. This libertarian view of information uniquely sought to attach freedom to a concept – the flow of information – rather than to a human liberty. It provided the ideological architecture for the internet that we know today – ubiquitous and pervasive, that leaves a data trail in its wake.

AlterNet, Progressive News Outlets Hammered By Facebook and Google: The New Media Oligarchy ... by gimleteye

The following was grabbed from a Twitter feed and reinforces our complaints about Facebook and Google: manipulation of algorithms that drive social media traffic.

A Primer On The Use Of Social Media BOTS To Influence US Politics BY NDN ... by gimleteye

Democracy in the US is marked by allegorical catastrophe. Hurricanes, tornadoes, or earthquakes equally apply.

The illigitimate election of Donald Trump in 2016 was organized to a great extent by Russia operatives who exceeded by leaps and bounds the capacity of US law and intelligence services to protect against intrusions by hostile foreign powers.

In the run-up to the November presidential election, there were plenty of warning signs and alerts -- President Obama was torn by his own responses, acutely sensitive how putting his foot on the gas would be seized by his Republican opponents as interference. His warnings and media reports were largely overwhelmed by successful attacks against Hillary Clinton and her emails; attacks we now understand wove Trump campaign messaging into Russia sourced social media campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. Intentional or not, coordinated or not, are questions being investigated by the Mueller team.

As a political matter, there is enough in the public record to justify House impeachment hearings, now. Screeching calls by the right-wing media machinery would have happened long ago had this been a Democratic president.

Irrespective of political persuasion, Americans should learn how social media BOTS influence what is emerging as the great world war of our time: the Information War.

The NDN offers a well-written, easily digestible explanation how the Information War works. Anyone who uses social media -- whether Facebook, Twitter, Google or other platforms -- is already enlisted as a foot soldier.

It is a crying shame that the United States was literally asleep at the switch, as a hostile foreign power -- Russia -- dug its nails into a highly vulnerable political process (and one in which elected officials responsible for fair and democratic elections were themselves complicit, aiding and abetting the invaders).

Although Congressional hearings are taking up these questions now, based on media reports it is already evident that the complexity and internal clock-spring of vast networks like Facebook and Twitter elude the capacity of Congress to unravel, in order to fix what is clearly damaged.

Congress should proceed on two tracks now: 1) to determine if there is provable collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, including Trump and his associates, and 2) to recruit a top-level independent commission to review and recommend changes to both social media networks and US elections, in order to stop hostile foreign nations like Russia from meddling in domestic elections.

NDN-BOTPAPER by Alan Farago on Scribd

Hamilton 68: Tracking Putin's Propaganda Push and Where That Leads ... by gimleteye

I doubt the website Hamilton 68 will "secure democracy", but it does help to know how Russia's global disinformation campaign is working 24/7.

Russia/Putin's goal is simple: to sow dissent, chaos and suspicion -- supporting Alt-R themes, Donald Trump, and the kinds of conspiracy/homophobic/racist sentiments that propelled a fringe minority into the center of the Republican Party. My GOP friends, don't shake your heads: this happened.

The Russia/Putin disinformation network, as Hamilton 68 points out, doesn't need to create original content to be effective: it uses bots, hackers, and thousands of boiler room employees to weaponize extremist points of view that could originate on Fox & Friends, on Limbaugh, on Breitbart, InfoWars, from Steve Bannon to Roger Stone to President Trump himself.

The return on Putin's investment in social media disinformation campaigns -- merging with stolen US and allies' voter databases -- is at least equal to Al Qada's boxcutters that brought the World Trade Towers down.

The demoralization of the nation, under the most reckless and chaotic president in US history, is more than Putin could ever have hoped for, when he discovered the barn doors of Facebook and Twitter had been left wide open for infiltration. He didn't even need a key. Rupert Murdoch, Limbaugh, Fox et al. did the work for him. It didn't happen all at once, of course. It took time: stretching back to Jimmy Carter, the first president to cast shade on the fossil fuel industry, and Ronald Reagan who dismantled the Fairness Doctrine.

Both political parties should be stung to the point of reform, but the chances seem bleak indeed so long as the GOP control Congress and the executive branch and are hell-bent on protecting Citizens United; the Supreme Court decision that fundamentally deformed US elections.

Hopefully, voters will take care to redress the deep fractures in our political life in 2018 and interim elections, too.


How to Read This Dashboard/ Hamilton 68
The charts and graphs here display hashtags, topics and URLs promoted by Russia-linked influence networks on Twitter. Content is not necessarily produced or created by Russian government operatives, although that is sometimes the case. Instead, the network often opportunistically amplifies content created by third parties not directly linked to Russia. Common themes for amplification include content attacking the U.S. and Europe, conspiracy theories and disinformation. Russian influence operations also frequently promote extremism and divisive politics in Western countries. Just because the Russia-aligned network monitored here tweets something, that doesn’t mean everyone who tweets the same content is aligned with Russia. For a detailed discussion of this dashboard’s methodology, click here.

Facebook: How Transparency Of FB Pages Could Solve The Problem Of Unregulated Political Activities ... by gimleteye

Follow me on Twitter: @gimleteyemiami

The UK Guardian reports this morning:

A tool exposing how voters are targeted with tailored propaganda on Facebookhas been launched in response to what is likely to be the most extensive social media campaign in general election history.

Experts in digital campaigning, including an adviser to Labour in 2015, have designed a program to allow voters to shine a light into what they describe as “a dark, unregulated corner of our political campaigns”.

The free software, called Who Targets Me?, can be added to a Google Chrome browser and will allow voters to track how the main parties insert political messages into their Facebook feeds calibrated to appeal on the basis of personal information they have already made public online. 

This is a terrific advancement, although an independent one. Facebook could incorporate a similar feature to address criticism that it is more than a social media platform: Facebook is an agency for unregulated political activities.

Mapping tools are ubiquitous on the web. They can instantaneously disclose the neural networks of people, of issues, and virtually any fact with a shared theme.

Click here for an interesting example of one map.

Facebook could incorporate such a tool through a hyperlink on every page that is being used as a political gathering and recruiting spot -- including those with purportedly religious themes. The purpose of the tool would be three-fold: 1) to identify the user who created the page, including ISP address, and 2) to provide an instant map of all pages that "shared" the same post and 3) provide a cloud feature showing the network of inter-connected pages, labeled by themes, sources, or other data.

The purpose: full disclosure.

The point: hundreds of millions of Facebook users are recruited to "like" and to "share" pages based on individual preferences. There is nothing wrong with that. Individual preferences are at the heart of free expression.

But when Facebook pages are being organized for patently political purposes, to drive similar messages and to recruit -- ultimately -- voters, the host of those pages, Facebook, has crossed the line into political activity.

Facebook, rather that risking government regulation, should voluntarily undertake to make the sources of political activities as transparent as possible for users. It should provide a mapping feature on each Facebook page involving a meme, a political or religious activity.

With a click or two, users can then be educated about the who, what, and why of political Facebook pages -- drawing their own conclusions should they want to do so.

In the coming days, I will be writing more about Facebook and welcome readers comments.

HOW I CREATED MARCO RUBIO AND WHY I DON'T SUPPORT HIM NOW. By Steve Cody

FACEBOOK:

Since folks are giving their recommendations as to who to vote for, so I'll give you mine. You already know who I support for President. My pick for Senate is Patrick Murphy, even though back in 2002, I helped create Marco Rubio.

How, you're probably asking, did I create Marco Rubio.

Miguel De Grandy and I were hired by Florida House Speaker Tom Feeney to run the redistricting for the Florida House, Florida Senate, and the Florida Congressional Districts. Our plan was to tightly control what was being said during debates. (A lot of voting rights cases had been attacked on the strength of stupid things said by the majority party during debate.) So I started writing a screenplay, a live action art installation, of how the floor debate for the plans should go. Feeney put the word out to his members: If you aren't given a notebook with a script, you don't say anything. The Democrats had no idea of what we were doing. Feeney had a role as Speaker. So did Johnny Byrd, the Reapportionment Chair and upcoming Speaker. There was a speaking part for Mario Diaz-Balart, the chair of the Congressional Districting subcommittee. Bruce Kyle was the chair of Senate District subcommittee and he got a script.

But we wanted to have one of the other Hispanic members of the House play a prominent role. The role required a small challenge to the conventional wisdom and with it, a challenge to Johnnie Byrd. (Byrd was in on it.) Miguel and I approached Gaston Cantens, who was in line to be Speaker after Byrd. We told him what we wanted him to do. He wanted no part of it. Cantens was set to be the first Cuban-American Speaker and thought that reading a script was beneath him. (Byrd was feared by House members, but Cantens was grudgingly respected by them as a future Speaker.) Miguel and I polished the script as the 3 redistricting plans made their way through the Committees and towards the floor.

Without a Hispanic House member, we were afraid that we'd have to redo the play we were writing. Miguel suggested that we sit down with a young guy from West Miami who was the start of his second term, Marco Rubio. We did, and Marco agreed to his role. On the day of the floor debate on second reading, Miguel's associate, Nick Mazzora, went onto the House floor with a stack of black binders. Every player got one and each played his part. Marco was so convincing in the way that he challenged Johnny Byrd that it made an impression on the Republican House members. That one performance by Marco made members reconsider their support for Gasten Cantons. Why make him the first Cuban-American Speaker, the chatter began, when we can support Marco? I overheard members talking about how amazed they were that Marco had the courage to stand up to Johnnie Byrd. Gaston's support evaporated that day and Marco secured enough votes to become Speaker from 2006 to 2008. Without being Speaker, Marco would have gone back to West Miami as a term limited legislator with a small ego wall. Instead, he used it as the launchpad for his Senate campaign and, from there, to his abortive attempt to get the GOP nomination.

Marco wasn't always the staunch conservative he tries to portray himself as now. At one point, he was a fan of my mentor, Rep. Bill Sadowski, who was both a liberal and a progressive. (Those are two different things, by the way.) But Marco hitched his wagon to the Tea Party star to get into the US Senate. And once there, he spent all of his time trying to become President. I have no doubt that, if he gets reelected, he'll be trudging up to Manchester, New Hampshire and Center City, Iowa in 2018 to pick up where he left off.

Steve Cody

Florida needs a full-time Senator, not someone who treats the job, at best, like a hobby and, at worst, like an annoyance. My friend, Bill Sadowski once wrote: "Public office is a public trust, both legally and conceptually. Never violate that trust." (Click the link below to read Bill's last speech when he retired from the Florida House back when I was his legislative aide.) I'm afraid that Marco forgot that the office he sits in was only loaned to him by the people.

I don't regret creating Marco Rubio. I just wished I had more of a chance to teach him what the service part of public service means. He was a fan of the words of Bill Sadowski once, but the meaning of those words was lost on him. For that reason, I'm voting for Patrick Murphy for US Senate.

Don't be an idiot on Facebook. By Geniusofdespair

For some unknown reason stupid young girls post pictures of themselves with their tongues hanging way out on Facebook. I made my niece get rid of all her tongue photos. And, there were a lot of them. I am able to access pictures of all my niece's friends. That is pretty stupid too. They each have hundreds of pictures posted of themselves.

Same goes for boys.

I GUARANTEE you young girls: These photos will come back to haunt you.

Somewhere, someone is collecting these photos and when you go for a job, join the convent or you are marrying a Senator, they will surface. I am sure there is a tongue website somewhere. Yep, there is.

Other recommendations

Do not put your entire birthday on Facebook or your cell phone number. Very stupid.

Do not go on Facebook once a month and then post 5 or 6 things in a row. I take you off of my newsfeed when you do that.

Don't just take photos from certain picture collections. They force us to register to go to the link.

Don't "LIKE" ads for stores, insurance companies etc. They then go on OUR news feed, every few days, posting ads sayinfg you like them and you don't even know it.

I am sure some of you have other suggestions to be smart on Facebook. Don't leave Facebook, I do have stock in it.

SUPREME COURT: Good Doll - Bad Doll. By Geniusofdespair

Facebook Symbol that people are using to voice solidarity that everyone is equal.

The Miami Herald, reported that the swing voter on the Supremes,  Justice Anthony Kennedy said:

In a positive sign for gay marriage supporters, Kennedy voiced strong sympathy for the approximately 40,000 California children who have been adopted by gay couples.

“They want their parents to have full recognition,” Kennedy said, with evident feeling, adding that “the voice of these children is important in this case."

At the Brown vs. Board of Education trial Kenneth and Mamie Clark's doll experiment was used. I believe Kenneth Clark testified. The Supreme Court specifically cited Clark's 1950 paper in the Brown decision.

Good doll - Bad doll experiment:

In the “doll test,” psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark used four plastic, diaper-clad dolls, identical except for color. They showed the dolls to black children between the ages of three and seven and asked them questions to determine racial perception and preference. Almost all of the children readily identified the race of the dolls. However, when asked which they preferred, the majority selected the white doll and attributed positive characteristics to it. The Clarks also gave the children outline drawings of a boy and girl and asked them to color the figures the same color as themselves. Many of the children with dark complexions colored the figures with a white or yellow crayon. The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” caused black children to develop a sense of inferiority and self-hatred.

So here we are over 60 years later, thinking about the children.  Are the children of same sex couples looking at their parents non-marital status, with the help of their peers, as inferior and, thus, feeling inferior themselves?  Maybe we should have conducted another doll experiment prior to this trial. But Justice Kennedy's discussion brings up an interesting point about the children: "They want their parents to have full recognition." And, why not? All children want to fit in and be proud of their parents. They don't want their parents to appear as outcasts from society, different.

Now I have hope for this trial.

Wave of the Future, Facebook for Campaigning? By Geniusofdespair

I was looking around on the Political Action Committee page and took a look at the Committee "Pets' Voice." I would suppose Pets' Voice was garnering support for that ballot question about  animal services programs that was on the November ballot.  The registration form said they were supporting issues related to animal welfare.

When I looked up their expenses, besides $21,125 to Marin and Sons, there were all these payments to Facebook for advertising. Interesting. Never saw this on a campaign report. Keep it up, my Facebook stock needs to double.

Facebook Lolitas. By Geniusofdespair

Remember the 1962 movie Lolita by Stanley Kubrick, book by Vladimir Nabokov, about a seductive 14 year old?

Welcome back.

This post is a facebook warning about your tweens. I easily found these photos on Facebook - I am friends with only one of them. I believe they have an age limit of 13 on Facebook. I know at least one of these kids just turned 12. Mothers of the world, warn your kids about putting suggestive photos on Facebook. I saw lots of bikini clad pre-teen photos. I don't get the tongue thing. Apparently it is important to include it in your photos as I saw dozens of ugly tongues. Pictured below, all claimed to be middle school students and some gave their full name and real birthdate.

This photo below: The orthodontist of one of the little girls is a "friend" to the little girl. Yes a grown man she hardly knows.  In turn, here is one of his friends that I found on the orthodontist's site through the little girl's site:

Did you know that where your kids shop, the store clerks become your kids "Friends"? I saw a married woman from Hollisters on a 12 year old's site. For this reason: Today I say Hollister Co. Sucks and Facebook Sucks. Two Sucks in one post, that is a record. Please parents, go look at what is on your child's page and look at their friends' pages -- nothing is locked in their trusting world.

Is Social Networking Compatible with Privacy? By Geniusofdespair

I think not...

Amusing Advice on My Space and FaceBook. By Geniusofdespair

LOL.