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Hashtags, a New Way for Tweets - Cultural Studies - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-tweets-cultural-studies.html Twitter Hashtag
shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • hashtags have transcended the 140-characters-or-less microblogging platform, and have become a new cultural shorthand, finding their way into chat windows, e-mail and face-to-face conversations.
  • people began using hashtags to add humor, context and interior monologues to their messages — and everyday conversation. As Susan Orlean wrote in a New Yorker blog post titled “Hash,” the symbol can be “a more sophisticated, verbal version of the dread winking emoticon that tweens use to signify that they’re joking.”
  • “Because you have a hashtag embedded in a short message with real language, it starts exhibiting other characteristics of natural language, which means basically that people start playing with it and manipulating it,” said Jacob Eisenstein, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in computational linguistics. “You’ll see them used as humor, as sort of meta-commentary, where you’ll write a message and maybe you don’t really believe it, and what you really think is in the hashtag.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Hashtags then began popping up outside of Twitter, in e-mails, chat windows and text messages.
  • Using a hashtag is also a way for someone to convey that they’re part of a certain scene.
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Daily Kos: UPDATED: The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All - 0 views

www.dailykos.com/...ail-That-Should-Concern-Us-All Persona Software Fake Online New Media Social Media Ethics Simulation
shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • HB Gary people are talking about creating "personas", what we would call sockpuppets. This is not new. PR firms have been using fake "people" to promote products and other things for a while now, both online and even in bars and coffee houses.
  • But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA -  whose enemies are labor unions, progressive organizations,  journalists, and progressive bloggers,  a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet. According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.
  • Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content.  It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona.  For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona.  This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • all of this is for the purposes of infiltration, data mining, and (here's the one that really worries me) ganging up on bloggers, commenters  and otherwise "real" people to smear enemies and distort the truth.
  • CEO of HB Gary's Federal subsidiary, to several of his colleagues to present to clients: To build this capability we will create a set of personas on twitter,‭ ‬blogs,‭ ‬forums,‭ ‬buzz,‭ ‬and myspace under created names that fit the profile‭ (‬satellitejockey,‭ ‬hack3rman,‭ ‬etc‭)‬.‭  ‬These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds,‭ ‬retweets,‭ ‬and linking together social media commenting between platforms.‭  ‬With a pool of these accounts to choose from,‭ ‬once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name,‭ ‬lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected‭ ‬#‭ ‬of previously created social media accounts,‭ ‬automatically pre-aging the real accounts.
  • one of the team spells out how automation can work so one person can be many personas: Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona.  In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags.  In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example.  There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas
  • It goes far beyond the mere ability for a government stooge, corporation or PR firm to hire people to post on sites like this one. They are talking about creating  the illusion of consensus. And consensus is a powerful persuader. What has more effect, one guy saying BP is not at fault? Or 20 people saying it? For the weak minded, the number can make all the difference.
  • UPDATE: From another email, I found a  government solicitation for this "Persona Management Software". This confirms that in fact, the US Gov. is attempting to use this kind of technology. But it appears from the solicitation it is contracted for use in foreign theaters like Afghanistan and Iraq. I can't imagine why this is posted on an open site. And whenthis was discovered by a couple of HB Gary staffers, they weren't too happy about it either:
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'I Am Spartacus:' Man Convicted For Tweet; Virtual Protest Erupts : The Two-Way : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...r-tweet-virtual-protest-erupts Twitter Freedom of Speech
shared by Weiye Loh on 12 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Earlier this year, Paul Chambers was concerned that he would miss a flight to Belfast. In jest, he tweeted: Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week..otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high. Well, the government came after the 27-year-old accountant and in May convicted him of sending a menacing electronic communication. He appealed the conviction and the 1,000 pound fine but the Guardian reports that, yesterday, he lost.
  • The BBC quotes a civil rights group analyzing the verdict: "The verdict demonstrates that the UK's legal system has little respect for free expression, and has no understanding of how people communicate in the 21st Century," said the [Index on Censorship's] news editor Padraig Reidy.
  • thousands of twitter users all over the world decided to protest virtually by reposting Chambers' exact tweet. They identified the protest with the hashtag #iamspartacus in reference to the scene in the 1960, Stanley Kubrick film Spartacus. In it, one-by-one slaves proclaim that they are Spartacus in order to keep the real Spartacus, a gladiator leading a slave rebellion, from detection. Minutes ago, the #iamspartacus hastag was the second most popular on all of Twitter.
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