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Ed Webb

The Biggest Social Media Operation You've Never Heard Of Is Run Out of Cyprus by Russia... - 0 views

  • The vast majority of the company’s content is apolitical—and that is certainly the way the company portrays itself.
  • But here’s the thing: TheSoul Publishing also posts history videos with a strong political tinge. Many of these videos are overtly pro-Russian. One video posted on Feb. 17, 2019, on the channel Smart Banana, which typically posts listicles and history videos, claims that Ukraine is part of Russia
  • the video gives a heavily sanitized version of Josef Stalin’s time in power and, bizarrely, suggests that Alaska was given to the United States by Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev
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  • The video ends by displaying a future vision of Russian expansion that includes most of Europe (notably not Turkey), the Middle East and Asia
  • According to Nox Influencer, Bright Side alone is earning between $314,010 and 971,950 monthly, and 5-Minute Crafts is earning between $576,640 and $1,780,000 monthly through YouTube partner earning estimates. As a privately held company, TheSoul Publishing doesn’t have to disclose its earnings. But all the Cypriot-managed company has to do to earn money from YouTube is meet viewing thresholds and have an AdSense account. AdSense, a Google product, just requires that a company have a bank account, an email address and a phone number. To monetize to this magnitude of revenue, YouTube may have also collected tax information, if TheSoul Publishing organization is conducting what it defines as “U.S. activities.” It’s also possible that YouTube verified a physical address by sending a pin mailer.
  • According to publicly available information from the YouTube channels themselves—information provided to YouTube by the people who set up and operate the channels at TheSoul Publishing—as of August 2019, 21 of the 35 channels connected to TheSoul Publishing claim to be based in the U.S. Ten of the channels had no country listed. Zodiac Maniac was registered in the U.K, though TheSoul Publishing emphasizes that all of its operations are run out of Cyprus.
  •  Now I’ve Seen Everything was the only channel registered in the Russian Federation. That channel has more than 400 million views, which, according to the analytics tool Nox Influencer, come from a range of countries, including Russia and Eastern European and Central Asian countries—despite being an English-language channel
  • In another video on Smart Banana, which has more than 1 million views, the titular banana speculates on “12 Countries That May Not Survive the Next 20 Years”—including the United States, which the video argues may collapse because of political infighting and diverse political viewpoints
  • Facebook pages are not a direct way to increase profit unless a company is actively marketing merchandise or sales, which TheSoul Publishing does not appear to do. The pages coordinate posting, so one post will often appear on a number of different pages. To a digital advertiser, this makes perfect sense as a way to increase relevance and visibility, but it’s far from obvious what TheSoul Publishing might be advertising. Likewise, there’s no obvious financial benefit to posting original videos within Facebook. The company did not meaningfully clarify its Facebook strategy in response to questions on the subject.
  • Facebook forbids what it describes as “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” as its head of cybersecurity describes in this video. While TheSoul’s Publishing’s behavior is clearly coordinated, it is unclear that any of its behavior is inauthentic based on information I have reviewed.
  • One thing that TheSoul is definitely doing on Facebook, however, is buying ads—and, at least sometimes, it’s doing so in rubles on issues of national importance, targeting audiences in the United States. The page Bright Side has 44 million followers and currently lists no account administrators located in the United States, but as of Aug. 8, 2019, it had them in Cyprus, Russia, the United Kingdom, El Salvador, India, Ukraine and in locations “Not Available.” It used Facebook to post six political advertisements paid for in the Russian currency.
  • the point here is not that the ad buy is significant in and of itself. The point, rather, is that the company has developed a massive social media following and has a history of at least experimenting with distributing both pro-Russian and paid political content to that following
  • TheSoul’s political ads included the one below. The advertisement pushes viewers to an article about how “wonderful [it is] that Donald Trump earns less in a year than you do in a month.” The advertisement reached men, women, and people of unknown genders over the ages of 18, and began running on May 15, 2018. TheSoul Publishing spent less than a dollar on this advertisement, raising the question: why bother advertising at all?
Ed Webb

At age 13, I joined the alt-right, aided by Reddit and Google - 0 views

  • Now, I’m 16, and I’ve been able to reflect on how I got sucked into that void—and how others do, too. My brief infatuation with the alt-right has helped me understand the ways big tech companies and their algorithms are contributing to the problem of radicalization—and why it’s so important to be skeptical of what you read online.
  • while a quick burst of radiation probably won’t give you cancer, prolonged exposure is far more dangerous. The same is true for the alt-right. I knew that the messages I was seeing were wrong, but the more I saw them, the more curious I became. I was unfamiliar with most of the popular discussion topics on Reddit. And when you want to know more about something, what do you do? You probably don’t think to go to the library and check out a book on that subject, and then fact check and cross reference what you find. If you just google what you want to know, you can get the information you want within seconds.
  • I started googling things like “Illegal immigration,” “Sandy Hook actors,” and “Black crime rate.” And I found exactly what I was looking for.
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  • The articles and videos I first found all backed up what I was seeing on Reddit—posts that asserted a skewed version of actual reality, using carefully selected, out-of-context, and dubiously sourced statistics that propped up a hateful world view. On top of that, my online results were heavily influenced by something called an algorithm. I understand algorithms to be secretive bits of code that a website like YouTube will use to prioritize content that you are more likely to click on first. Because all of the content I was reading or watching was from far-right sources, all of the links that the algorithms dangled on my screen for me to click were from far-right perspectives.
  • I spent months isolated in my room, hunched over my computer, removing and approving memes on Reddit and watching conservative “comedians” that YouTube served up to me.
  • The inflammatory language and radical viewpoints used by the alt-right worked to YouTube and Google’s favor—the more videos and links I clicked on, the more ads I saw, and in turn, the more ad revenue they generated.
  • the biggest step in my recovery came when I attended a pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C., in September 2017, about a month after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia
  • The difference between the online persona of someone who identifies as alt-right and the real thing is so extreme that you would think they are different people. Online, they have the power of fake and biased news to form their arguments. They sound confident and usually deliver their standard messages strongly. When I met them in person at the rally, they were awkward and struggled to back up their statements. They tripped over their own words, and when they were called out by any counter protestors in the crowd, they would immediately use a stock response such as “You’re just triggered.”
  • Seeing for myself that the people I was talking to online were weak, confused, and backwards was the turning point for me.
  • we’re too far gone to reverse the damage that the alt-right has done to the internet and to naive adolescents who don’t know any better—children like the 13-year-old boy I was. It’s convenient for a massive internet company like Google to deliberately ignore why people like me get misinformed in the first place, as their profit-oriented algorithms continue to steer ignorant, malleable people into the jaws of the far-right
  • Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who murdered nine people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015, was radicalized by far-right groups that spread misinformation with the aid of Google’s algorithms.
  • Over the past couple months, I’ve been getting anti-immigration YouTube ads that feature an incident presented as a “news” story, about two immigrants who raped an American girl. The ad offers no context or sources, and uses heated language to denounce immigration and call for our county to allow ICE to seek out illegal immigrants within our area. I wasn’t watching a video about immigration or even politics when those ads came on; I was watching the old Monty Python “Cheese Shop” sketch. How does British satire, circa 1972, relate to America’s current immigration debate? It doesn’t.
  • tech companies need to be held accountable for the radicalization that results from their systems and standards.
  • anyone can be manipulated like I was. It’s so easy to find information online that we collectively forget that so much of the content the internet offers us is biased
weismans95

We Are Already Cyborgs - YouTube - 2 views

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    Technology+evolution?
Ed Webb

YouTube - An Open Letter to Educators - 0 views

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    Does this resonate? Is he right? Bloggable material!
Ed Webb

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Ballard Predicts the Rise of Social Media (1977) | Open Culture - 0 views

  • Ballard was a brilliant futurist and his dystopian novels and short stories anticipated the 80s cyberpunk of William Gibson, exploring with a twisted sense of humor what Jean Lyotard famously dubbed in 1979 The Postmodern Condition: a state of ideological, scientific, personal, and social disintegration under the reign of a technocratic, hypercapitalist, “computerized society.” Ballard had his own term for it: “media landscape,” and his dark visions of the future often correspond to the virtual world we inhabit today.
  • Ballard made several disturbingly accurate predictions in interviews he gave over the decades (collected in a book titled Extreme Metaphors)
  • he gave an interview to I-D magazine in which he predicted the internet as “invisible streams of data pulsing down lines to produce an invisible loom of world commerce and information.” This may not seem especially prescient (see, for example, E.M. Forster’s 1909 “The Machine Stops” for a chilling futuristic scenario much further ahead of its time). But Ballard went on to describe in detail the rise of the Youtube celebrity: Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We'll all be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will become their own TV programmes.
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  • ten years earlier, in an essay for Vogue, he described in detail the spread of social media and its totalizing effects on our lives. In the technological future, he wrote, “each of us will be both star and supporting player.” Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate supporting role.
  • this description almost perfectly captures the behavior of the average user of Facebook, Instagram, etc.
  • Ballard wrote a 1977 short story called “The Intensive Care Unit,” in which—writes the site Ballardian---“ordinances are in place to prevent people from meeting in person. All interaction is mediated through personal cameras and TV screens.”
  • “Now everybody can document themselves in a way that was inconceivable 30, 40, 50 years ago,” Ballard notes, “I think this reflects a tremendous hunger among people for ‘reality’—for ordinary reality. It’s very difficult to find the ‘real,’ because the environment is totally manufactured.” Like Jean Baudrillard, another prescient theorist of postmodernity, Ballard saw this loss of the "real" coming many decades ago. As he told I-D in 1987, “in the media landscape it’s almost impossible to separate fact from fiction.”
Ed Webb

How white male victimhood got monetised | The Independent - 0 views

  • I also learned a metric crap-tonne about how online communities of angry young nerd dudes function. Which is, to put it simply, around principles of pure toxicity. And now that toxicity has bled into wider society.
  • In a twist on the "1,000 true fans" principle worthy of Black Mirror, any alt-right demagogue who can gather 1,000 whining, bitter, angry men with zero self-awareness now has a self-sustaining full time job as an online sh*tposter.
  • Social media has been assailed by one toxic "movement" after another, from Gamergate to Incel terrorism. But the "leaders" of these movements, a ragtag band of demagogues, profiteers and charlatans, seem less interested in political change than in racking up Patreon backers.
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  • Making a buck from the alt-right is quite simple. Get a blog or a YouTube channel. Then under the guise of political dialogue or pseudo-science, start spouting hate speech. You'll soon find followers flocking to your banner.
  • Publish a crappy ebook explaining why SJWs Always Lie. Or teach your followers how to “think like a silverback gorilla” (surely an arena where the far right already triumph?) via a pricey seminar. Launch a Kickstarter for a badly drawn comic packed with anti-diversity propaganda. They'll sell by the bucketload to followers eager to virtue-signal their membership in the rank and file of the alt-right
  • the seemingly bottomless reservoirs of white male victimhood
  • nowhere is there a better supply of the credulous than among the angry white men who flock to the far right. Embittered by their own life failures, the alt-right follower is eager to believe they have a genetically superior IQ and are simply the victim of a libtard conspiracy to keep them down
  • We're barely in the foothills of the mountains of madness that the internet and social media are unleashing into our political process. If you think petty demagogues like Jordan Peterson are good at milking cash from the crowd, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Because he was just the beginning – and his ideology of the white male victim is rapidly spiralling into something that even he can no longer control
Ed Webb

The fight against toxic gamer culture has moved to the classroom - The Verge - 0 views

  • If there were any lessons to be learned from Gamergate — from how to recognize bad faith actors or steps on how to protect yourself, to failings in law enforcement or therapy focused on the internet — the education system doesn’t seem to have fully grasped these concepts.
  • It’s a problem that goes beyond just topics specific to the gaming industry, extending to topics like feminism, politics, or philosophy. “Suddenly everyone who watches Jordan Peterson videos thinks they know what postmodernism is,” says Emma Vossen, a post doctoral fellow with a PhD in gender and games. These problems with students are not about disagreements or debates. It’s not even about kids acting out, but rather harassers in the classroom who have tapped into social media as a powerful weapon. Many educators can’t grasp that, says Vossen. “This is about students who could potentially access this hate movement that’s circling around you and use it against you,” she says. “This is about being afraid to give bad marks to students because they might go to their favorite YouTuber with a little bit of personal information about you that could be used to dox you.” Every word you say can be taken out of context, twisted, and used against you. “Education has no idea how to deal with this problem,” Vossen says. “And I think it’s only going to get worse.
  • An educator’s job is no longer just about teaching, but helping students unlearn false or even harmful information they’ve picked up from the internet.
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  • “If we started teaching students the basics of feminism at a very young age,” Wilcox says, “they would have a far better appreciation for how different perspectives will lead to different outcomes, and how the distribution of power and privilege in society can influence who gets to speak in the first place.”
Ed Webb

Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall of the Downfall Parodies - Mark Dery - Doom Patrol:... - 1 views

  • Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall of the Downfall Parodies
  • Hitler left an inexhaustible fund of unforgettable images; Riefenstahl’sTriumph of the Will alone is enough to make him a household deity of the TV age.
  • The Third Reich was the first thoroughly modern totalitarian horror, scripted by Hitler and mass-marketed by Goebbels, a tour de force of media spectacle and opinion management that America’s hidden persuaders—admen, P.R. flacks, political campaign managers—studied assiduously.  A Mad Man in both senses, Hitler sold the German volk on a racially cleansed utopia, a thousand-year empire whose kitschy grandeur was strictly Forest Lawn Parthenon.
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  • Hitler, unlike Stalin or Mao, was an intuitive master of media stagecraft. David Bowie’s too-clever quip that Hitler was the first rock star, for which Bowie was widely reviled at the time, was spot-on.
  • the media like Hitler because Hitler liked the media
  • Perhaps that’s why he continues to mesmerize us: because he flickers, irresolvably, between the seemingly inhuman and the all too human.
  • His psychopathology is a queasy funhouse reflection, straight out of Nightmare Alley, of the instrumental rationality of the machine age. The genocidal assembly lines of Hitler’s death camps are a grotesque parody of Fordist mechanization, just as the Nazis’ fastidious recycling of every remnant of their victims but their smoke—their gold fillings melted down for bullion, their hair woven into socks for U-boat crewmen—is a depraved caricature of the Taylorist mania for workplace efficiency.
  • there’s something perversely comforting about Hitler’s unchallenged status as the metaphysical gravitational center of all our attempts at philosophizing evil
  • he prefigured postmodernity: the annexation of politics by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, the rise of the celebrity as a secular icon, the confusion of image and reality in a Matrix world. He regarded existence “as a kind of permanent parade before a gigantic audience” (Fest), calculating the visual impact of every histrionic pose, every propaganda tagline, every monumental building
  • By denying everyone’s capability, at least in theory, for Hitlerian evil, we let ourselves off the hook
  • Yet Hitler, paradoxically, is also a shriveled untermensch, the protypical nonentity; a face in the crowd in an age of crowds, instantly forgettable despite his calculated efforts to brand himself (the toothbrush mustache of the military man coupled with the flopping forelock of the art-school bohemian)
  • there was always a comic distance between the public image of the world-bestriding, godlike Fuhrer and his Inner Adolf, a nail-biting nebbish tormented by flatulence. Knowingly or not, the Downfall parodies dance in the gap between the two. More immediately, they rely on the tried-and-true gimmick of bathos. What makes the Downfall parodies so consistently hilarious is the incongruity of whatever viral topic is making the Fuhrer go ballistic and the outsized scale of his gotterdammerung-strength tirade
  • The Downfall meme dramatizes the cultural logic of our remixed, mashed-up times, when digital technology allows us to loot recorded history, prying loose any signifier that catches our magpie eyes and repurposing it to any end. The near-instantaneous speed with which parodists use these viral videos to respond to current events underscores the extent to which the social Web, unlike the media ecologies of Hitler’s day, is a many-to-many phenomenon, more collective cacophony than one-way rant. As well, the furor (forgive pun) over YouTube’s decision to capitulate to the movie studio’s takedown demand, rather than standing fast in defense of Fair Use (a provision in copyright law that protects the re-use of a work for purposes of parody), indicates the extent to which ordinary people feel that commercial culture is somehow theirs, to misread or misuse as the spirit moves them.
  • the closest thing we have to a folk culture, the connective tissue that binds us as a society
  • SPIEGEL: Can you also get your revenge on him by using comedy? Brooks: Yes, absolutely. Of course it is impossible to take revenge for 6 million murdered Jews. But by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths. [...] We take away from him the holy seriousness that always surrounded him and protected him like a cordon.”
  • risking the noose, some Germans laughed off their fears and mocked the Orwellian boot stamping on the human face, giving vent to covert opposition through flüsterwitze (“whispered jokes”). Incredibly, even Jews joked about their plight, drawing on the absurdist humor that is quintessentially Jewish to mock the Nazis even as they lightened the intolerable burden of Jewish life in the shadow of the swastika. Rapaport offers a sample of Jewish humor in Hitler’s Germany: “A Jew is arrested during the war, having been denounced for killing a Nazi at 10 P.M. and even eating the brain of his victim. This is his defense: In the first place, a Nazi hasn’t got any brain. Secondly, a Jew doesn’t eat anything that comes from a pig. And thirdly, he could not have killed the Nazi at 10 P.M. because at that time everybody listens to the BBC broadcast.”
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    Brilliant
Ed Webb

Chez Pazienza: The Death of Privacy and the Death of Tyler Clementi - 0 views

  • digital age technology, which now allows for the psychological torment that used to be confined only to school to be relentless and omnipresent
  • They felt like they could do it because everybody does it. A good portion of our media culture is now based on prurient voyeurism and a constant invasion of privacy. The public disclosure of a person's most intimate secrets and moments is no longer considered shameful or condemnable -- it's just called entertainment. Why wouldn't a couple of college kids turn their classmate into an unwitting reality TV star? It's basically the same toxic horseshit they grew up watching on MTV, VH1 and E! For all they knew, maybe Tyler Clementi would've loved the mainline of notoriety. If the dipshits on Jersey Shore don't have a problem mining their most repugnant traits in the name of 15 minutes of fame -- if anyone can go to YouTube and post video of a guy complaining about how there are rapists in his neighborhood and suddenly turn that guy into a viral sensation and his complaints into a catch phrase -- why the hell can't two Rutgers freshmen live-stream a roommate in bed with a man? This is the age of the unauthorized sex tape. This is Bentham's Panopticon come to fruition on a global scale. You're always being watched. You're always on camera. You have no expectation of privacy. Clementi should have known that, right?!
  • anyone he personally feels deserves it and he and his website are at the forefront of America's culture of shameless voyeurism and a constant, irrepressible invasion of privacy. It's because someone like Perez Hilton has spent the past few years making himself rich by indiscriminately circulating images of Miley Cyrus's crotch to the world that the two teenagers who tortured Tyler Clementi likely didn't think that what they were doing was a big deal.
weismans95

Ex Machina move trailer - 1 views

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    Yet another take on the cyborg/robot/AI story
Ed Webb

Hayabusa2 and the unfolding future of space exploration | Bryan Alexander - 0 views

  • What might this tell us about the future?  Let’s consider Ryugu as a datapoint or story for where space exploration might head next.
  • There isn’t a lot of press coverage beyond Japan (ah, once again I wish I read Japanese), if I go by Google News headlines.  There’s nothing on the CNN.com homepage now, other than typical spatters of dread and celebrity; the closest I can find is a link to a story about Musk’s space tourism project, which a Japanese billionaire will ride.  Nothing on Fox News or MSNBC’s main pages.  BBC News at least has a link halfway down its main page.
  • Hayabusa is a Japanese project, not an American one, and national interest counts for a lot.  No humans were involved, so human interest and story are absent.  Perhaps the whole project looks too science-y for a culture that spins into post-truthiness, contains some serious anti-science and anti-technology strands, or just finds science stories too dry.  Or maybe the American media outlets think Americans just aren’t that into space in particular in 2018.
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  • Hayabusa2 reminds us that space exploration is more multinational and more disaggregated than ever.  Besides JAXA there are space programs being build up by China and India, including robot craft, astronauts (taikonauts, for China, vyomanauts, for India), and space stations.  The Indian Mars Orbiter still circles the fourth planet. The European Space Agency continues to develop satellites and launch rockets, like the JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer).  Russia is doing some mixture of commercial spaceflight, ISS maintenance, exploration, and geopoliticking.  For these nations space exploration holds out a mixture of prestige, scientific and engineering development, and possible commercial return.
  • Bezos, Musk, and others live out a Robert Heinlein story by building up their own personal space efforts.  This is, among other things, a sign of how far American wealth has grown, and how much of the elite are connected to technical skills (as opposed to inherited wealth).  It’s an effect of plutocracy, as I’ve said before.  Yuri Milner might lead the first interstellar mission with his Breakthrough Starshot plan.
  • Privatization of space seems likely to continue.
  • Uneven development is also likely, as different programs struggle to master different stations in the space path.  China may assemble a space station while Japan bypasses orbital platforms for the moon, private cubesats head into the deep solar system and private companies keep honing their Earth orbital launch skills.
  • Surely the challenges of getting humans and robots further into space will elicit interesting projects that can be used Earthside.  Think about health breakthroughs needed to keep humans alive in environments scoured by radiation, or AI to guide robots through complex situations.
  • robots continue to be cheap, far easier to operate, capable of enduring awful stresses, and happy to send gorgeous data back our way
  • Japan seems committed to creating a lunar colony.  Musk and Bezos burn with the old science fiction and NASA hunger for shipping humans into the great dark.  The lure of Mars seems to be a powerful one, and a multinational, private versus public race could seize the popular imagination.  Older people may experience a rush of nostalgia for the glorious space race of their youth.
  • This competition could turn malign, of course.  Recall that the 20th century’s space races grew out of warfare, and included many plans for combat and destruction. Nayef Al-Rodhan hints at possible strains in international cooperation: The possible fragmentation of outer space research activities in the post-ISS period would constitute a break-up of an international alliance that has fostered unprecedented cooperation between engineers and scientists from rival geopolitical powers – aside from China. The ISS represents perhaps the pinnacle of post-Cold War cooperation and has allowed for the sharing and streamlining of work methods and differing norms. In a current period of tense relations, it is worrying that the US and Russia may be ending an important phase of cooperation.
  • Space could easily become the ground for geopolitical struggles once more, and possibly a flashpoint as well.  Nationalism, neonationalism, nativism could power such stresses
  • Enough of an off-Earth settlement could lead to further forays, once we bypass the terrible problem of getting off the planet’s surface, and if we can develop new ways to fuel and sustain craft in space.  The desire to connect with that domain might help spur the kind of space elevator which will ease Earth-to-orbit challenges.
  • The 1960s space race saw the emergence of a kind of astronaut cult.  The Soviet space program’s Russian roots included a mystical tradition.  We could see a combination of nostalgia from older folks and can-do optimism from younger people, along with further growth in STEM careers and interest.  Dialectically we should expect the opposite.  A look back at the US-USSR space race shows criticism and opposition ranging from the arts (Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon”, Jello Biafra’s “Why I’m Glad the Space Shuttle Blew Up”) to opinion polls (in the US NASA only won real support for the year around Apollo 11, apparently).  We can imagine all kinds of political opposition to a 21st century space race, from people repeating the old Earth versus space spending canard to nationalistic statements (“Let Japan land on Deimos.  We have enough to worry about here in Chicago”) to environmental concerns to religious ones.  Concerns about vast wealth and inequality could well target space.
  • How will we respond when, say, twenty space tourists crash into a lunar crater and die, in agony, on YouTube?
  • That’s a lot to hang on one Japanese probe landing two tiny ‘bots on an asteroid in 2018, I know.  But Hayabusa2 is such a signal event that it becomes a fine story to think through.
Ed Webb

Where is the boundary between your phone and your mind? | US news | The Guardian - 1 views

  • Here’s a thought experiment: where do you end? Not your body, but you, the nebulous identity you think of as your “self”. Does it end at the limits of your physical form? Or does it include your voice, which can now be heard as far as outer space; your personal and behavioral data, which is spread out across the impossibly broad plane known as digital space; and your active online personas, which probably encompass dozens of different social media networks, text message conversations, and email exchanges? This is a question with no clear answer, and, as the smartphone grows ever more essential to our daily lives, that border’s only getting blurrier.
  • our minds have become even more radically extended than ever before
  • one of the essential differences between a smartphone and a piece of paper, which is that our relationship with our phones is reciprocal: we not only put information into the device, we also receive information from it, and, in that sense, it shapes our lives far more actively than would, say, a shopping list. The shopping list isn’t suggesting to us, based on algorithmic responses to our past and current shopping behavior, what we should buy; the phone is
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  • American consumers spent five hours per day on their mobile devices, and showed a dizzying 69% year-over-year increase in time spent in apps like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The prevalence of apps represents a concrete example of the movement away from the old notion of accessing the Internet through a browser and the new reality of the connected world and its myriad elements – news, social media, entertainment – being with us all the time
  • “In the 90s and even through the early 2000s, for many people, there was this way of thinking about cyberspace as a space that was somewhere else: it was in your computer. You went to your desktop to get there,” Weigel says. “One of the biggest shifts that’s happened and that will continue to happen is the undoing of a border that we used to perceive between the virtual and the physical world.”
  • While many of us think of the smartphone as a portal for accessing the outside world, the reciprocity of the device, as well as the larger pattern of our behavior online, means the portal goes the other way as well: it’s a means for others to access us
  • Weigel sees the unfettered access to our data, through our smartphone and browser use, of what she calls the big five tech companies – Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon – as a legitimate problem for notions of democracy
  • an unfathomable amount of wealth, power, and direct influence on the consumer in the hands of just a few individuals – individuals who can affect billions of lives with a tweak in the code of their products
  • “This is where the fundamental democracy deficit comes from: you have this incredibly concentrated private power with zero transparency or democratic oversight or accountability, and then they have this unprecedented wealth of data about their users to work with,”
  • the rhetoric around the Internet was that the crowd would prevent the spread of misinformation, filtering it out like a great big hive mind; it would also help to prevent the spread of things like hate speech. Obviously, this has not been the case, and even the relatively successful experiments in this, such as Wikipedia, have a great deal of human governance that allows them to function properly
  • We should know and be aware of how these companies work, how they track our behavior, and how they make recommendations to us based on our behavior and that of others. Essentially, we need to understand the fundamental difference between our behavior IRL and in the digital sphere – a difference that, despite the erosion of boundaries, still stands
  • “Whether we know it or not, the connections that we make on the Internet are being used to cultivate an identity for us – an identity that is then sold to us afterward,” Lynch says. “Google tells you what questions to ask, and then it gives you the answers to those questions.”
  • It isn’t enough that the apps in our phone flatten all of the different categories of relationships we have into one broad group: friends, followers, connections. They go one step further than that. “You’re being told who you are all the time by Facebook and social media because which posts are coming up from your friends are due to an algorithm that is trying to get you to pay more attention to Facebook,” Lynch says. “That’s affecting our identity, because it affects who you think your friends are, because they’re the ones who are popping up higher on your feed.”
Ed Webb

How ethical is it for advertisers to target your mood? | Emily Bell | Opinion | The Gua... - 0 views

  • The effectiveness of psychographic targeting is one bet being made by an increasing number of media companies when it comes to interrupting your viewing experience with advertising messages.
  • “Across the board, articles that were in top emotional categories, such as love, sadness and fear, performed significantly better than articles that were not.”
  • ESPN and USA Today are also using psychographic rather than demographic targeting to sell to advertisers, including in ESPN’s case, the decision to not show you advertising at all if your team is losing.
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  • Media companies using this technology claim it is now possible for the “mood” of the reader or viewer to be tracked in real time and the content of the advertising to be changed accordingly
  • ads targeted at readers based on their predicted moods rather than their previous behaviour improved the click-through rate by 40%.
  • Given that the average click through rate (the number of times anyone actually clicks on an ad) is about 0.4%, this number (in gross terms) is probably less impressive than it sounds.
  • Cambridge Analytica, the company that misused Facebook data and, according to its own claims, helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, used psychographic segmentation.
  • For many years “contextual” ads served by not very intelligent algorithms were the bane of digital editors’ lives. Improvements in machine learning should help eradicate the horrible business of showing insurance advertising to readers in the middle of an article about a devastating fire.
  • The words “brand safety” are increasingly used by publishers when demonstrating products such as Project Feels. It is a way publishers can compete on micro-targeting with platforms such as Facebook and YouTube by pointing out that their targeting will not land you next to a conspiracy theory video about the dangers of chemtrails.
  • the exploitation of psychographics is not limited to the responsible and transparent scientists at the NYT. While publishers were showing these shiny new tools to advertisers, Amazon was advertising for a managing editor for its surveillance doorbell, Ring, which contacts your device when someone is at your door. An editor for a doorbell, how is that going to work? In all kinds of perplexing ways according to the ad. It’s “an exciting new opportunity within Ring to manage a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbours. This position is best suited for a candidate with experience and passion for journalism, crime reporting, and people management.” So if instead of thinking about crime articles inspiring fear and advertising doorbells in the middle of them, what if you took the fear that the surveillance-device-cum-doorbell inspires and layered a crime reporting newsroom on top of it to make sure the fear is properly engaging?
  • The media has arguably already played an outsized role in making sure that people are irrationally scared, and now that practice is being strapped to the considerably more powerful engine of an Amazon product.
  • This will not be the last surveillance-based newsroom we see. Almost any product that produces large data feeds can also produce its own “news”. Imagine the Fitbit newsroom or the managing editor for traffic reports from dashboard cams – anything that has a live data feed emanating from it, in the age of the Internet of Things, can produce news.
Ed Webb

What we still haven't learned from Gamergate - Vox - 0 views

  • Harassment and misogyny had been problems in the community for years before this; the deep resentment and anger toward women that powered Gamergate percolated for years on internet forums. Robert Evans, a journalist who specializes in extremist communities and the host of the Behind the Bastards podcast, described Gamergate to me as partly organic and partly born out of decades-long campaigns by white supremacists and extremists to recruit heavily from online forums. “Part of why Gamergate happened in the first place was because you had these people online preaching to these groups of disaffected young men,” he said. But what Gamergate had that those previous movements didn’t was an organized strategy, made public, cloaking itself as a political movement with a flimsy philosophical stance, its goals and targets amplified by the power of Twitter and a hashtag.
  • The hate campaign, we would later learn, was the moment when our ability to repress toxic communities and write them off as just “trolls” began to crumble. Gamergate ultimately gave way to something deeper, more violent, and more uncontrollable.
  • Police have to learn how to keep the rest of us safe from internet mobs
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  • the justice system continues to be slow to understand the link between online harassment and real-life violence
  • In order to increase public safety this decade, it is imperative that police — and everyone else — become more familiar with the kinds of communities that engender toxic, militant systems of harassment, and the online and offline spaces where these communities exist. Increasingly, that means understanding social media’s dark corners, and the types of extremism they can foster.
  • Businesses have to learn when online outrage is manufactured
  • There’s a difference between organic outrage that arises because an employee actually does something outrageous, and invented outrage that’s an excuse to harass someone whom a group has already decided to target for unrelated reasons — for instance, because an employee is a feminist. A responsible business would ideally figure out which type of outrage is occurring before it punished a client or employee who was just doing their job.
  • Social media platforms didn’t learn how to shut down disingenuous conversations over ethics and free speech before they started to tear their cultures apart
  • Dedication to free speech over the appearance of bias is especially important within tech culture, where a commitment to protecting free speech is both a banner and an excuse for large corporations to justify their approach to content moderation — or lack thereof.
  • Reddit’s free-speech-friendly moderation stance resulted in the platform tacitly supporting pro-Gamergate subforums like r/KotakuInAction, which became a major contributor to Reddit’s growing alt-right community. Twitter rolled out a litany of moderation tools in the wake of Gamergate, intended to allow harassment targets to perpetually block, mute, and police their own harassers — without actually effectively making the site unwelcome for the harassers themselves. And YouTube and Facebook, with their algorithmic amplification of hateful and extreme content, made no effort to recognize the violence and misogyny behind pro-Gamergate content, or police them accordingly.
  • All of these platforms are wrestling with problems that seem to have grown beyond their control; it’s arguable that if they had reacted more swiftly to slow the growth of the internet’s most toxic and misogynistic communities back when those communities, particularly Gamergate, were still nascent, they could have prevented headaches in the long run — and set an early standard for how to deal with ever-broadening issues of extremist content online.
  • Violence against women is a predictor of other kinds of violence. We need to acknowledge it.
  • Somehow, the idea that all of that sexism and anti-feminist anger could be recruited, harnessed, and channeled into a broader white supremacist movement failed to generate any real alarm, even well into 2016
  • many of the perpetrators of real-world violence are radicalized online first
  • It remains difficult for many to accept the throughline from online abuse to real-world violence against women, much less the fact that violence against women, online and off, is a predictor of other kinds of real-world violence
  • Politicians and the media must take online “ironic” racism and misogyny seriously
  • Gamergate masked its misogyny in a coating of shrill yelling that had most journalists in 2014 writing off the whole incident as “satirical” and immature “trolling,” and very few correctly predicting that Gamergate’s trolling was the future of politics
  • Gamergate was all about disguising a sincere wish for violence and upheaval by dressing it up in hyperbole and irony in order to confuse outsiders and make it all seem less serious.
  • Gamergate simultaneously masqueraded as legitimate concern about ethics that demanded audiences take it seriously, and as total trolling that demanded audiences dismiss it entirely. Both these claims served to obfuscate its real aim — misogyny, and, increasingly, racist white supremacy
  • The public’s failure to understand and accept that the alt-right’s misogyny, racism, and violent rhetoric is serious goes hand in hand with its failure to understand and accept that such rhetoric is identical to that of President Trump
  • deploying offensive behavior behind a guise of mock outrage, irony, trolling, and outright misrepresentation, in order to mask the sincere extremism behind the message.
  • many members of the media, politicians, and members of the public still struggle to accept that Trump’s rhetoric is having violent consequences, despite all evidence to the contrary.
  • The movement’s insistence that it was about one thing (ethics in journalism) when it was about something else (harassing women) provided a case study for how extremists would proceed to drive ideological fissures through the foundations of democracy: by building a toxic campaign of hate beneath a veneer of denial.
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