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How the Internet Is Like a Dying Star - 0 views

newsletters.theatlantic.com/...al-media-reactionary-doom-loop internet time horizon despair powerlessness culture tech
shared by Javier E on 13 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • We are experiencing the same problems and having the same arguments. It’s all leading to a pervasive feeling, especially among younger people, that our systems in the United States (including our system of government) “are no longer able to meet the challenges our country is facing.”
  • The internet, as a mediator of human interactions, is not a place, it is a time. It is the past. I mean this in a literal sense. The layers of artifice that mediate our online interactions mean that everything that comes to us online comes to us from the past—sometimes the very recent past, but the past nonetheless.
  • Sacasas asks us to revise the notion of real-time communications online, and to instead view our actions as “inscriptions,” or written and visual records. Like stars in the galaxy, our inscriptions seem to twinkle in the present, but their light is actually many years old.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • “Because we live in the past when we are online,” Sacasas suggests, “we will find ourselves fighting over the past.”
  • my hunch is that people feel stuck or move on because online, these events feel like things that have happened, rather than something that is happening.
  • “What we’re focused on is not the particular event or movement before us, but the one right behind us,”
  • “As we layer on these events, it becomes difficult for anything to break through. You’re trying to enter the information environment and the debate, and you find layer upon layer of abstraction over the initial point of conflict. You find yourself talking about what people are saying about the thing, instead of talking about the thing. We’re caking layers of commentary over the event itself and the event fades.” This is, if you ask me, a decent description of the last five years of news cycles.
  • So, what’s changed? Why do we feel more stuck now?
  • “I think it also has to do with the proportion of one’s daily experience to dispatches from the past,” Sacasas said. Pre-internet, “the totality of my day wasn't enclosed by this experience of media artifacts coming to me.”
  • the smartphone-bound, reasonably-but-not-terminally online people—the amount they spend engaged with the recent past has increased considerably, to the point that some are enclosed in this online world and develop a disordered relationship to time.
  • Constantly absorbing and commenting on things that have just happened sounds to me like a recipe for feeling powerless.
  • “That feeling of helplessness comes out of the fact that all our agency is being channeled through these media,” he said. “We have these events that are ponderously large, like climate change or gun control, and to view them only through the lens of what happened or the abstraction of what people are saying strips away the notion of our agency and makes it all feel so futile.”
  • the social-media platforms we live on push us toward contribution, and they make it feel necessary. Yet what is the sum total of these contributions? “If I'm cynical,” Sacasas said, “what I think it generates is something akin to influencer culture. It creates people who will make money off of channeling that attention—for better or for ill. Everyone else is stuck watching the show, feeling like we’re unable to effectively change the channel or change our circumstances.”
  • ubiquitous connectivity and our media environments naturally lend themselves toward an influencer-and-fandom dynamic. If the system is built to inspire more and more layers of commentary, then that system will privilege and reward people who feed it
  • On an internet that democratizes publishing, what this might mean is that all media takes on the meta-commentary characteristics of political or sports talk radio.
  • When the Depp-Heard trial began gaining traction online in April, Internet users around the world recognized a fresh opportunity to seize and monetize the attention. Christopher Orec, a 20-year-old content creator in Los Angeles, has posted a dozen videos about the trial to his more than 1.4 million followers on Instagram across several pages. “Personally, what I’ve gained from it is money as well as exposure from how well the videos do,” he said. You can “go from being a kid in high school and, if you hop on it early, it can basically change your life,” Orec said. “You can use those views and likes and shares that you get from it, to monetize and build your account and make more money from it, meet more people and network.”
  • if you were going to design a nightmare scenario, it might look a bit like what is described in this Washington Post story from last Thursday:
  • Like the Depp-Heard coverage, the forces that Sacasas describes can be deeply cynical and destructive. They’re also almost always exhausting for those of us consuming them
  • Examining and discussing and understanding the past is important, and our technologies are enormously helpful in this respect.
  • Sacasas compared the way our media ecosystem works—and all these feedback loops—to a novelty finger trap. “Almost every action generates more difficult conditions—to struggle is to feed the thing that’s keeping you bogged down.”
  • As politicians—especially those on the far right—transition into full time influencers, they no longer need to govern even reasonably effectively to gain power. They don’t need to show what they’ve done for their constituents. Simply culture warring—posting—is enough. The worse the post, the more attention it gets, and the more power they accrue.
  • There's a reason Marjorie Taylor Greene raised $9 million and Sarah Palin has only raised $600,000. MTG has recognized something Palin used to know. Her job is to say something terrible every day so we do all her viral marketing for her.
  • One outcome of elected officials adopting the influencer model is a politics that is obsessed with, and stuck in, the past. I don’t just mean a focus on making America “great again,” but a politics that is obsessed with relitigating its recent past.
  • we are forever talking about Hillary’s emails or Hunter Biden’s laptop or Merrick Garland’s thwarted Supreme Court seat or the legitimacy of the previous election.
  • How do we break the cycle? Is silence our best weapon to starve the attention? That feels wrong. I don’t have answers, but Sacasas has given me a valuable guiding question: How do we train our attention on our present and future, when so much of our life is spent ensconced in dispatches from the recent past?
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Devoted to Politics, MSNBC Slips on Breaking News - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bc-slips-on-breaking-news.html news television bias
shared by Javier E on 03 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • breaking news is not really what MSNBC does. “We’re not the place for that,” said Phil Griffin, the channel’s president, in reference to covering breaking events as CNN does. “Our brand is not that.”
  • MSNBC began to commit itself to presenting a liberal spin on political coverage in the middle of the last decade, partly because it had not found success in previous models (like trying to be a news channel for younger viewers) and mostly because it had one host, Keith Olbermann, whose ratings were exploding based on his outspoken criticisms of the Bush administration and the conservative voices on Fox News.
  • CNN has never made ideologically impassioned shows the basis of its appeal. Instead, it has thrived when its potent brand identity, the channel for breaking news, has come into play.
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Russian Warships Sail Through English Channel - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ugh-english-channel-1477077173 alliance history
shared by drewmangan1 on 26 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The U.K. Ministry of Defense said two Royal navy ships, the frigate HMS Richmond and destroyer HMS Duncan, were escorting the Russian ships as they sailed in international waters down the U.K.’s eastern seaboard.
  • U.K. Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said Thursday at a defense conference in London that the Russian deployment was, “clearly designed to test the alliance,” adding that the ships would be “marked every step of the way” by British and NATO ships.
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After Trump, conservatives should stop longing for the past - and learn a little humili... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...st-and-learn-a-little-humility conservatism reform history culture crisis interpretation subsidiarity individualism nostalgia
shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • He explains the illusory appeal of nostalgia-driven politics in the United States, the kind that Trump stokes in coarse, simplistic terms.
  • he offers a path forward for the American right after this campaign, whether it is adjusting to life in Trump’s America or coping again with another electoral setback.
  • Levin wants a humbler, more local conservatism, one less concerned with tearing down Washington or promoting hyper-individualism than with creating space for America’s “mediating institutions” of family and community to blossom
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  • This vision involves “a mix of dependence on others and obligations to them,” Levin writes, “and so a connection with specific people with whom you share some meaningful portion of the actual experience of life.”
  • Levin understands the allure of nostalgia; indeed, he believes that almost all contemporary politics is based on it
  • These competing nostalgias, though more sophisticated than Trump’s, are no less misguided, and lead to bad politics and policy.
  • Sure, there is plenty to long for, Levin says. In the early decades of the post-World War II era, the United States enjoyed “relative cultural cohesion, low economic inequality, high confidence in national institutions, and widespread optimism about the nation’s prospects” (especially if you were white and male). But that was a unique pivot point in U.S. history, a time when the country was straddling two opposing forces that would define the American century: consolidation and diffusion.
  • The first half of the 20th century, Levin contends, was an age of consolidation, with a peerless industrial economy, a strong centralized government and a relatively uniform cultural identity shaped by a powerful mass media.
  • In the century’s second half, by contrast, the U.S. economy became more diversified and deregulated, while cultural conformity broke down in favor of individualism and the politics of personal identity.
  • for a fleeting moment at midcentury, it enjoyed the best of both. “The social, political, and economic forms of American life at midcentury made possible a degree of prosperity and cohesion that in turn enabled many Americans to flourish,”
  • “Democrats talk about public policy as though it were always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state will answer our every concern,”
  • Republicans talk as though it were always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution is the cure for what ails us.”
  • This stale — and stalemated — debate leaves people discouraged with politicians who don’t seem engaged with their current struggles. “In the absence of relief from their own resulting frustration, a growing number of voters opt for leaders who simply embody or articulate that frustration,”
  • the nostalgia of the traditional political class is also pernicious and “blinding,” Levin argues, because it keeps us from grappling with the real problems assaulting us in the age of diffusion
  • “In liberating many individuals from oppressive social constraints, we have also estranged many from their families and unmoored them from their communities, work, and faith,”
  • “Rather than decrying the collapse of moral order, we must draw people’s eyes and hearts to the alternative.” Their incessant focus on religious liberty, for example, while important, may be counterproductive, “a fundamentally plaintive and inward-looking minority asking to protect what it has and in essence to be left alone,”
  • In unleashing markets to meet the needs and wants of consumers, we have freed them also to treat workers as dispensable and interchangeable.
  • In pursuing meritocracy, we have magnified inequality.”
  • “In loosening the reins of cultural conformity and national identity we have weakened the roots of mutual trust.
  • he worries that the price of this new freedom has been high. “We have set loose a scourge of loneliness and isolation that we are still afraid to acknowledge as the distinct social dysfunction of our age of individualism, just as crushing conformity was the characteristic scourge of an era of cohesion and national unity,”
  • The answer to all this is the pursuit of what Levin describes as a “modernized politics of subsidiarity — that is, of putting power, authority and significance as close to the level of interpersonal community as reasonably possible.”
  • He is most concerned with the thicket of institutions in the middle — families, schools, religious organizations, all the things usually lumped together as civil society.
  • “we should see it as an effort to open up the space between them — the space where a free society can genuinely thrive.” Our objective should be to “channel power and resources to the mediating institutions of society and allow for bottom-up problem solving that takes a variety of specialized, adapted forms.”
  • It is a very Tocquevillian vision, with a dash of Catholic social teaching thrown in. No doubt, to yearn for the renewal of these traditional institutions is its own kind of nostalgia.
  • So how do we go about strengthening families, religious organizations, schools and all those mediating institutions?
  • He calls for a “mobility agenda,” with economic growth spurred by tax and regulatory reform
  • a more competitive and low-cost health-care system, lower budget deficits — all part of a standard conservative recipe.
  • He proposes education reform that includes more professional certificates, apprenticeships “and other ways of gaining the skills for well-paid employment that do not require a college degree.”
  • Levin’s intention here is less to offer detailed proposals than to shift the locus of policymaking itself — and to infuse it with greater humility. “There is not much that public policy can do,” he admits, “to create communities that do a better job of encouraging constructive behavior: it could, however, do less harm, and it could leave room for such communities to form, and protect the space in which they take root and grow.”
  • The result is a bifurcated America, torn between wealth and poverty, order and disorder. “Increasingly, society consists of individuals and a national state, while the mediating institutions — family, community, church, unions, and others — fade and falter.”
  • Instead, social and religious conservatives should “assert themselves by offering living models of their alternative to the moral culture of our hyper-individualist age.”
  • In other words, less hectoring and lecturing, less trying to remake the culture at large, and more strengthening one’s “near-at-hand community,” Levin writes. He calls this approach “subcultural traditionalism
  • he sees it in “civic groups that channel their energies into making neighborhoods safe and attractive, or into helping the poor, or protecting the vulnerable, or assimilating immigrants, or helping fight addiction
  • in schools that build character and inculcate the values parents think are most important; in religious congregations that mold themselves into living communities of like-minded families, and that turn their faiths into works to improve the lives of others;
  • in the work of teachers and students who are committed to liberal learning and engagement with the deepest questions.”
  • Such a localized focus, Levin maintains, is not “an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so.”
  • I suspect the fulfillment of Levin’s vision would require a party and a movement that grasp the exhaustion of their current approach. A November defeat, especially a landslide, might accomplish that
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Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html russian propaganda fake news disinformation politics
shared by Javier E on 25 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity
  • PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans
  • On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.
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  • Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots” — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts
  • The Russian campaign during this election season, researchers from both groups say, worked by harnessing the online world’s fascination with “buzzy” content that is surprising and emotionally potent, and tracks with popular conspiracy theories about how secret forces dictate world events
  • Some of these stories originated with RT and Sputnik, state-funded Russian information services that mimic the style and tone of independent news organizations yet sometimes include false and misleading stories in their report
  • On other occasions, RT, Sputnik and other Russian sites used social-media accounts to amplify misleading stories already circulating online, causing news algorithms to identify them as “trending” topics that sometimes prompted coverage from mainstream American news organizations.
  • The speed and coordination of these efforts allowed Russian-backed phony news to outcompete traditional news organizations for audience.
  • other misleading stories in August about Clinton’s supposedly troubled health. The Daily Beast debunked a particularly widely read piece in an article that reached 1,700 Facebook accounts and was read online more than 30,000 times
  • But the PropOrNot researchers found that the version supported by Russian propaganda reached 90,000 Facebook accounts and was read more than 8 million times. The researchers said the true Daily Beast story was like “shouting into a hurricane” of false stories supported by the Russians.
  • The final weeks of the campaign featured a heavy dose of stories about supposed election irregularities, allegations of vote-rigging and the potential for Election Day violence should Clinton win
  • The same tactics, researchers said, helped Russia shape international opinions about its 2014 annexation of Crimea and its military intervention in Syria, which started last year. Russian propaganda operations also worked to promote the “Brexit” departure of Britain from the European Union
  • “It was like Russia was running a super PAC for Trump’s campaign. . . . It worked.”
  • A former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael A. McFaul, said he was struck by the overt support that RT and Sputnik expressed for Trump during the campaign, even using the #CrookedHillary hashtag pushed by the candidate.
  • “They don’t try to win the argument,” said McFaul, now director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. “It’s to make everything seem relative. It’s kind of an appeal to cynicism.”
  • “They use our technologies and values against us to sow doubt,” said Robert Orttung, a GWU professor who studies Russia. “It’s starting to undermine our democratic system.
  • “The way that this propaganda apparatus supported Trump was equivalent to some massive amount of a media buy,”
  • “For them, it’s actually a real war, an ideological war, this clash between two systems,” said Sufian Zhemukhov, a former Russian journalist conducting research at GWU. “In their minds, they’re just trying to do what the West does to Russia.”
  • RT broadcasts news reports worldwide in several languages, but the most effective way it reaches U.S. audiences is online. Its English-language flagship YouTube channel, launched in 2007, has 1.85 million subscribers and has had a total of 1.8 billion views, making it more widely viewed than CNN’s YouTube channel
  • Though widely seen as a propaganda organ, the Russian site has gained credibility with some American conservatives. Trump sat for an interview with RT in September. His nominee for national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, traveled to Russia last year for a gala sponsored by the network. He later compared it to CNN.
  • The content from Russian sites has offered ready fodder for U.S.-based websites pushing far-right conservative messages. A former contractor for one, the Next News Network, said he was instructed by the site’s founder, Gary S. Franchi Jr., to weave together reports from traditional sources such as the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times with ones from RT, Sputnik and others that provided articles that often spread explosively online.
  • “The readers are more likely to share the fake stories, and they’re more profitable,” said Dyan Bermeo, who said he helped assemble scripts and book guests for Next News Network before leaving because of a pay dispute and concerns that “fake news” was crowding out real news.
  • In just the past 90 days — a period that has included the closing weeks of the campaign, Election Day and its aftermath — the YouTube audience of Next News Network has jumped from a few hundred thousand views a day to a few million, according to analytics firm Tubular Labs. In October alone, videos from Next News Network were viewed more than 56 million times
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Joseph Stiglitz: The problem with Europe is the euro | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...roblem-with-europe-is-the-euro euro europe econoi economics crisis eu
shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Advocates of the euro rightly argue that it was not just an economic project that sought to improve standards of living by increasing the efficiency of resource allocations, pursuing the principles of comparative advantage, enhancing competition, taking advantage of economies of scale and strengthening economic stability. More importantly, it was a political project; it was supposed to enhance the political integration of Europe, bringing the people and countries closer together and ensuring peaceful coexistence.
  • The euro has failed to achieve either of its two principal goals of prosperity and political integration: these goals are now more distant than they were before the creation of the eurozone. Instead of peace and harmony, European countries now view each other with distrust and anger. Old stereotypes are being revived as northern Europe decries the south as lazy and unreliable, and memories of Germany’s behaviour in the world wars are invoked.
  • A single currency entails a fixed exchange rate among the countries, and a single interest rate. Even if these are set to reflect the circumstances in the majority of member countries, given the economic diversity, there needs to be an array of institutions that can help those nations for which the policies are not well suited. Europe failed to create these institutions.
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  • Market fundamentalists believed, for instance, that if only the government would ensure that inflation was low and stable, markets would ensure growth and prosperity for all. While in most of the world market fundamentalism has been discredited, especially in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, those beliefs survive and flourish within the eurozone’s dominant power, Germany. These beliefs are held with such conviction and certainty, immune to new contrary evidence, that they are rightly described as an ideology.
  • The founders of the euro were guided by a set of ideas and notions about how economies function that were fashionable at the time, but that were simply wrong. They had faith in markets, but lacked an understanding of the limitations of markets and what was required to make them work.
  • It was not simply that the eurozone was not structured to accommodate Europe’s economic diversity; it was that the structure of the eurozone, its rules and regulations, were not designed to promote growth, employment and stability.
  • Germany is talked about as a “success” only by comparison with the other countries of the eurozone.
  • It is perhaps natural that the eurozone’s leaders want to blame the victim – to blame the countries in recession or depression or reeling from a referendum result – for bringing about this state of affairs. They do not want to blame themselves and the great institutions that they have helped create, and which they now head.
  • According to Juncker, Europe is not to be held together because of the benefits that accrue – benefits that far exceed the costs, the economic prosperity, the sense of solidarity, the pride in being a European. No, Europe is to be held together by threats and fear – of what would happen if a country leaves.
  • One of the first lessons of economics is that bygones are bygones. One should always ask: given where we are, what should we do? On both sides of the Channel, politics should be directed at understanding the underlying sources of anger; how, in a democracy, the political establishment could have done so little to address the concerns of so many citizens, and figuring out how to do that now: to create within each country, and through cross-border arrangements, a new, more democratic Europe, which sees its goal as improving the wellbeing of ordinary citizens
  • There are alternatives to the current arrangements that can create a true shared prosperity: the challenge is to learn from the past to create this new economics and politics of the future. The Brexit referendum was a shock. My hope is that the shock will set off waves on both sides of the Channel that will lead to this new, reformed European Union.
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Entertainment - Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg - Why Vimeo Is the Web Video Platform to... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...258450 video creativity social networks
shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 12 - Cached
  • Vimeo continues to be the destination for content creators and viewers looking for cutting-edge videos, beautiful playback, and a remarkably positive community. A world away from cat virals, Vimeo is winning by nurturing the next generation of filmmakers (well, videomakers) and promoting their most innovative work.
  • now videomakers can get started, at least, by making good work and letting the Internet run with it.
  • . Vimeo Staff Picks, curated by Sam Morrill and Jason Sondhi, surfaces new videos of all kinds on a daily basis, and from there, many go viral. Within 24 hours of appearing on the channel, a video can receive tens of thousands views.
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  • Especially in contrast to comments on YouTube, the conversations on Vimeo are unusually positive and constructive. This is thanks, in part, to Vimeo's role as a forum for low-budget filmmaking.
  • Since Canon released its 5D Mark II DSLR, a digital still camera with HD video, in 2008, the proliferation of inexpensive cameras has driven both an explosion in high-quality video content and a cottage industry around working with the cameras. Because DSLRs aren't optimal for video production, videomakers have had to figure out workarounds
  • video equipment is now good enough that it doesn't need to need to take center stage.
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Jon Stewart: why I quit The Daily Show | Media | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...wart-why-i-quit-the-daily-show role model satire media lib liberalism culture politics discourse humor
shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • At 52, Stewart has the bouncy energy of a man half his age and, unlike most in the public eye, has an aversion to compliments. If I tell him I liked something about the film, he will immediately deflect the compliment and insist it was all down to Bahari, or the film’s star Gael García Bernal, or the crew
  • Over time, Stewart has evolved from a satirist to a broadcaster celebrated as the voice of US liberalism, the one who will give the definitive progressive take on a story.
  • It is a delicious irony that in the world of American TV news, one populated by raging egotists and self-aggrandisers, the person who is generally cited as the most influential is Stewart – a man so disinterested in his own celebrity, he often didn’t bother to collect his 18 Emmys, preferring to stay at home with his family.
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  • When George Bush left office in 2008, some worried that Stewart would run out of material. This proved as shortsighted as the hope that Obama would be America’s grand salvation. Stewart, who describes himself as “a leftist”, has always hammered the Democrats with the vigour of a disappointed supporter, and subjected Obama to one of his most damaging interviews during his first term: the president admitted that his 2008 slogan probably should have been “Yes We Can, But...” At the time, Stewart laughed, but today he admits with a shrug, “It was heartbreaking. It’s generally heartbreaking – that’s what the gig is.”
  • His seemingly effortless interview with Tony Blair in 2008 cut through Blair’s crusader mentality in a mere six minutes, as Stewart calmly rejected Blair’s theory that any kind of military action can keep the west safe. As Blair stammered, huffed and shifted in his seat, Stewart concluded that: “19 people flew into the towers. It seems hard for me to imagine that we could go to war enough, to make the world safe enough, that 19 people wouldn’t want to do harm to us. So it seems like we have to rethink a strategy that is less military-based.”
  • it’s also fair to say that some of the interviews, generally those with actors and authors, seem like mere puffery, a point with which Stewart agrees (he embraces criticism as eagerly as he deflects compliments).
  • How often does he really connect with his interviewees? “Have you seen the show? Mostly, I’m not even listening. But I can bullshit anyone for six minutes.”
  • “[If I left the show,] I would do what I’m doing. Whether it’s standup, the show, books or films, I consider all this just different vehicles to continue a conversation about what it means to be a democratic nation, and to have it written into the constitution that all men are created equal – but to live with that for 100 years with slaves. How do those contradictions play themselves out? And how do we honestly assess our failings and move forward with integrity?”
  • “Honestly, it was a combination of the limitations of my brain and a format that is geared towards following an increasingly redundant process, which is our political process. I was just thinking, ‘Are there other ways to skin this cat?’ And, beyond that, it would be nice to be home when my little elves get home from school, occasionally.”
  • Stewart likes to credit “the team”, but given that he has always been deeply involved in the script (unusually for a host), writing and rewriting drafts right up to the last minute, the show will be a pretty different beast without him
  • He can be brutal about the leftwing media, too (CNN has been a frequent target, for being mediocre and too attached to pointless computer graphics). MSNBC, the liberal 24-hour news network, is, Stewart says, “better” than Fox News, “because it’s not steeped in distortion and ignorance as a virtue. But they’re both relentless and built for 9/11. So, in the absence of such a catastrophic event, they take the nothing and amplify it and make it craziness.”
  • Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing,” says Stewart. “I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don’t get turd lung disease.”
  • Now that he is leaving The Daily Show, is there any circumstance in which he would watch Fox News again? He takes a few seconds to ponder the question. “Umm… All right, let’s say that it’s a nuclear winter, and I have been wandering, and there appears to be a flickering light through what appears to be a radioactive cloud and I think that light might be a food source that could help my family. I might glance at it for a moment until I realise, that’s Fox News, and then I shut it off. That’s the circumstance.”
  • Isn’t he being a bit faux modest, I ask, especially when he insists that what he does is comedy and not news? That comes with a certain profile. He thinks about this for a few seconds. “It’s not that I… I mean, it’s satire, so it’s an expression of real feelings. So I don’t mean that in the sense of, ‘I don’t mean this.’ What I mean is, the tools of satire should not be confused with the tools of news. We use hyperbole, but the underlying sentiment has to feel ethically, intentionally correct, otherwise we wouldn’t do it.”
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Inequality And The Right - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...inequality-and-the-right.html income inequality social economic stability justice
shared by Javier E on 08 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Monday, March 7, 2011Monday, March 7, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by The Rise and Fall of John Ensign Chris Good Sarah Palin Feud Watch Tina Dupuy In Wisconsin, the Mood Turns Against Compromise Natasha Vargas-Cooper Business Presented by Credit Card Balances Resume Their Decline Daniel Indiviglio 5 Ways the Value of College Is Growing Derek Thompson America's 401(k)'s Are a Mess, Are Its Pensions? Megan McArdle Culture Presented By 'Spy' Magazine's Digital Afterlife Bill Wyman http://as
  • To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful. But at a time of real sacrifice, it does seem to me important for conservatives not to ignore the dangers of growing and vast inequality - for political, not economic, reasons. And by political, I don't mean partisan. I mean a genuine concern for the effects of an increasingly unequal society.
  • it increasingly seems wrong to me to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice, in the context of their gains in the last three decades, if we are to ask it of everyone else. It's not about fairness. It isn't even really about redistribution, as we once understood that from the hard left. It's about political stability and cohesion and coherence. Without a large and strong middle class, we can easily become more divided, more bitter and more unstable. Concern about that is a legitimate conservative issue. And if someone on the right does not find a way to address it, someone on the left may well be empowered to over-reach.
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The Unemployed Somehow Became Invisible - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-somehow-became-invisible.html unemployment US political effects
shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Today, though, many unemployment offices have closed. Jobless benefits are often handled by phone or online rather than in person. An unemployment call center near Mr. Oursler, for instance, now sits behind two sets of locked doors and frosted windows.
  • To the extent that frustrations are being channeled at all, they are being channeled largely through the Tea Party. But the Tea Party is mostly against devoting government resources to helping the unemployed.
  • Why populist anger over the poor economy is leaning right, rather than left, this time around is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps it is because Democrats, traditional friends of labor, control the White House and the Senate.
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Egypt Detains Journalists It Says Aired 'False News' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...zeera-english-journalists.html
shared by Maria Delzi on 05 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Egyptian authorities detained a team of journalists working for the Al Jazeera English news channel on Sunday, including an Australian correspondent and the channel’s Canadian-Egyptian bureau chief, accusing them of broadcasting illegally and meeting with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that the Egyptian government classified a terrorist organization last week.
  • The arrests appeared intended to further isolate the Brotherhood by deterring journalists from interviewing its members or reporting on its continuing protests.
  • The ministry accused the journalists of broadcasting “false news” to the Qatar-based channel and possessing materials that promoted “incitement,” including information about campus strikes by students who supported the Brotherhood — another topic widely covered in the press.
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  • The government has said it would follow that plan, citing it as evidence of its commitment to democracy.
  • Al Jazeera said the detained journalists included the bureau chief, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, who had worked for CNN and contributed to The New York Times, and Peter Greste, an Australian correspondent for Al Jazeera who won a Peabody Award last year while working for the BBC in Somalia. A cameraman, Mohamed Fawzy, and another producer, Baher Mohamed, were also detained, the network said.
  • Michael Wahid Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation in New York, said the government “seized on the moment and the grotesque nature of the attack” to accomplish several goals. While hard-liners in the security services seek to eradicate the Brotherhood, the terrorist designation gives other officials a “rhetorical” tool to stir interest in the coming elections, Mr. Hanna said. It also gives them a firmer legal basis to detain protesters and further suppress dissent ahead of the vote, he said.
  • On Sunday, a car bomb explosion outside a military intelligence building north of Cairo wounded at least five people, the third such bombing in less than a week.
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Terrorism With a Human Face - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...387163 ISIS Evil crisis politics Middle-East
shared by qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • It’s all in the face, apparently. Just check out that terrifying mug shot of Mohammad Atta, the so-called “ringleader” of the 19 hijackers who staged the 9/11 attacks. His face, wrote the novelist Martin Amis in a short story about Atta, was “gangrenous” and “almost comically malevolent.”
  • The idea that human evil is inscribed into the body and face of the criminal offender has deep rootsThe idea that human evil is inscribed into the body and face of the criminal offender has deep roots, and is in fact the animating throb behind modern scientific criminology and its founding document, Cesare Lombroso’s The Criminal Man, published in 1876
  • It is also an underlying assumption in much of the news coverage of the Kuwaiti-born Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, who was exposed recently as the ISIS executioner “Jihadi John.”
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  • Emwazi challenges the social and moral order. To put it mildly. Far more than, say, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the reportedly Iraqi-born ISIS leader challenges the social and moral order.
  • This is because Emwazi spent most of his life in Britain, in the secular West. Despite his Kuwaiti background and heritage, he was socialized or “acculturated” here, not over there. He went to school here, played football here, went to university here, talked London-street tough here, and wore baseball caps here.
  • Killers, too, can act in decent and humane ways. It is just that we rarely like to admit it—unless of course they kill in defense of the good, as we subjectively define it.
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Donald Trump's Secret? Channelling Andrew Jackson - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hannelling-andrew-jackson.html jackson demagogues populism politics history
shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Trump has done just that by emulating a classic model of American democratic leadership.
  • A clue as to just which leadership model can be found on a map. While Trump fans are spread across the country, they are heavily concentrated in and near the Appalachian states
  • Greater Appalachia has remained culturally distinct for centuries. Migrants from the northern British Isles — Scots, Scots-Irish and others — pushed into these mountains in large numbers from the 1700s onward and did much to create the nation as we know it.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • its electorate represents an older version of America, more rural, white and conservative than elsewher
  • he is a type of leader Appalachia has seen before. Students of history will recognize that Mr. Trump is a Jackson man.
  • the states where Mr. Trump is strongest are the ones that most consistently favored Jackson during his three runs for the White House.
  • What Mr. Trump borrows from Jackson is not an issue, but a way of thinking about the world. Mr. Trump promises to fix his supporters’ problems, no matter who else is hurt. He’s a wealthy celebrity always ready for a fight, a superpatriot who says he will make America great again. He vows to attack government corruption and defend the common man. All this could be said of Jackson.
  • Jackson had a captivating style, and not just because of his wild hair. He did what he wanted, and demanded respect
  • Like Mr. Trump, Jackson made his fortune in real estate. He bought and sold vast tracts of Southern land in concert with wealthy friends. If desirable land was owned by Indians, Jackson bullied or bribed them into selling it cheap.
  • And again like Mr. Trump, a former Democrat and independent, Jackson did not worry about consistency. Having joined the nation’s wealthy elite, he ran for president as an opponent of wealthy elites. He defended liberty while operating a personal empire of cotton plantations using hundreds of enslaved black laborers.
  • Jackson and his Democratic Party enforced a certain idea of America — an America for white people. Jackson was personally cordial to people of other races, but their rights did not concern him.
  • . Jackson’s old coalition no longer dominates the electorate. Nonwhite voters are growing in numbers, and many white voters have told pollsters they would be embarrassed by Mr. Trump as president.
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Drug C.E.O. Martin Shkreli Arrested on Fraud Charges - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...shkreli-fraud-charges.html martin arrested fraud charges new york times US
shared by katyshannon on 18 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • It has been a busy week for Martin Shkreli, the flamboyant businessman at the center of the drug industry’s price-gouging scandals. From Our Advertisers quot;frameC
  • He said he would sharply increase the cost of a drug used to treat a potentially deadly parasitic infection. He called himself “the world’s most eligible bachelor” on Twitter and railed against critics in a live-streaming YouTube video. After reportedly paying $2 million for a rare Wu-Tang Clan album, he goaded a member of the hip-hop group to “show me some respect.”
  • Then, at 6 a.m. Thursday, F.B.I. agents arrested Mr. Shkreli, 32, at his Murray Hill apartment. He was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on securities fraud and wire fraud charges.
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  • In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Shkreli said he was confident that he would be cleared of all charges.
  • Mr. Shkreli has emerged as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed for acquiring a decades-old drug used to treat an infection that can be devastating for babies and people with AIDS and, overnight, raising the price to $750 a pill from $13.50. His only mistake, he later conceded, was not raising the price more.
  • Those price increases combined with Mr. Shkreli’s jeering response to his critics has made him a lightning rod for public outrage and fodder for the presidential campaign. His company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, and others, like Valeant Pharmaceuticals, have come under fire from lawmakers and consumers for profiting from steep price increases for old drugs.
  • But the criminal charges brought against him actually relate to something else entirely — his time as a hedge fund manager and when he ran his first biopharmaceutical company, Retrophin.
  • Still, for many of his critics, Mr. Shkreli’s arrest was a comeuppance for the brash executive who has seemed to enjoy — relish, even — his public notoriety. On Thursday, a satirical New Yorker column by the humorist Andy Borowitz said Mr. Shkreli’s lawyers had informed their client their hourly legal fees had increased by 5,000 percent.
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Why Words Matter - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/why-words-matter words language politics culture corruption
shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Some liberals and progressives replied that the word was irrelevant
  • The scatological vulgarity of this comment from a famous germaphobe was part of its racism.
  • He finds African countries disgusting, and finds people who come from them disgusting, and said so in a way that “poor and unhealthy countries” wouldn’t have captured.
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  • Swear words are swear words for a reason, and the urge to show that one is sophisticated and anti-puritanical sometimes leads to the false conclusion that they’re just words like any other, and don’t communicate anything special. They do, and it did.
  • Just ignore his words.
  • I have a hard time believing that anyone really thinks like this as a general proposition. Certainly conservatives who spent the postwar era reciting the mantra “ideas have consequences” didn’t think the words that carried political ideas were impotent
  • More recently, conservatives over the last ten years seemed to attribute totemic powers to words like “radical Islamic terrorism”—or, for that matter, “Merry Christmas.”
  • With his words threatening to subordinate the collective self-defense commitment of NATO
  • People put up with being ruled, and those who carry out the ruling on others’ behalf put up with taking orders in light of their beliefs about legitimacy and political reasonableness, beliefs that depend on prior speech and persuasion.
  • Norms rest on beliefs which rest on persuasion, and institutions rest on norms.
  • Hannah Arendt treated political speech as the core of her special sense of “action,” the chief way in which we shape and constitute our life together.
  • one particular kind of Trump’s speech, his especially outrageous and transparent lies, are words that have shaped the world: demonstrations of power, attempts to undermine the existence of shared belief in truth and facts.
  • Words are so central to international affairs that they get their own special professional and legal category: diplomacy. We hope that speech, if it does not draw countries closer together, will at least allow clear communication about interests, demands, and the possibility of war.
  • A large part of the population begins with a tribal sense of what team they’re on, which side they support, but relatively little information about the substantive policy views associated with that
  • Trump undermined the most longstanding pillar of American foreign policy.
  • America’s closest allies now have to believe that its treaty commitments are up for grabs in each election, and have to plan accordingly.
  • Coercion is expensive, and the in the postwar West the US has often been able to get its way without violence, as the widely-trusted anchor state in an order with a lot of perceived legitimacy
  • This is true in security, where the US is able to shape the world order to an outsized degree, cheaply, because of its network of alliances.
  • And it’s true in economics; the US benefits from the use of the dollar as a reserve currency, the international willingness to hold US debt, and the global system of trade that it created.
  • They leave because they hear and understand that they’re not wanted.
  • Trump called on Congress to allow Cabinet officials to “remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people,” i.e., to fire civil servants on grounds of political disagreement, ending the century-old rule of a professional and apolitical civil service that stays on as political appointees come and go
  • Trump saying it matters. House Speaker Paul Ryan echoing the call for a “purge” at the FBI matters. Fox News’ constant public delegitimation of the civil service matters
  • Immediate policy outcomes mainly have to do with coercion: who is taxed, regulated, expropriated, imprisoned, deported, conscripted, what wars are fought, who is kept out of the country by force of arms.
  • immigration enforcement is a domain in which there’s a lot of discretion on the ground
  • Trump’s demonization of immigrants and celebration of ICE change policy de facto. Trump’s words have sent the message of “anything goes” to ICE  and “you should be scared” to those who might be vulnerable to ICE. Both messages have been heard. ICE has become so aggressive in its tactics that a federal judge described it as “treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust, regimes where those who have long lived in a country may be taken without notice from streets, home, and work. And sent away.”
  • it also matters more broadly for the character of the American state and bureaucracy. By discouraging professionals and encouraging politicization, Trump is already changing the civil service by his speech.
  • the Republican and conservative rank and file now have an unusually direct, unusually constant source of information about the things that people like us are supposed to believe and support. I think that we can see the effect of this in the rapid and dramatic swings in reported Republican opinion on questions from free trade to Russia policy
  • Trump’s stump speeches and unhinged tweets, and Fox News’ amplification of them, are changing what Republican voters think it means to be a Republican. He doesn’t speak for them; how many of them had a view about “the deep state” two years ago? He speaks to them, and it matters.
  • The delegitimation of the basic enterprise of independent journalism is something else, and something new to the US
  • In their important new book How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point to the delegitimation of the independent press as one of the key warning signs of a genuine would-be autocrat.
  • We don’t know how far Trump will be able to go in his attempts to suppress the media, but we know that he’s persuaded millions of Republicans to let him try.
  • Trump has successfully communicated to his voters that being on their team means not being on the FBI’s team. He’s changed what being a Republican means.
  • And he’s trying to change what being an American means
  • It’s also the power to channel and direct the dangerous but real desire for collective national direction and aspiration. Humans are tribal animals, and our tribal psychology is a political resource that can be directed to a lot of different ends
  • all those presidents put forward a public rhetorical face that was better than their worst acts. This inevitably drives political opponents crazy: they despise the hypocrisy and the halo that good speeches put on undeserving heads. I’ve had that reaction to, well, every previous president in my living memory, at one time or another. But there’s something important and valuable in the fact that they felt the need to talk about loftier ideal than they actually governed by
  • In words, even if not in deeds, they championed a free and fair liberal democratic order, the protection of civil liberties, openness toward the world, rejection of racism at home, and defiance against tyranny abroad. And their words were part of the process of persuading each generation of Americans that those were constitutively American ideals.
  • When he tells us that there are “very fine people on both sides” as between the Klan and their critics, he turns the moral compass of American public discourse upside-down. He channels the desire for collective aspiration into an attempt to make us worse than we are.
  • a norm that was built up through speech, persuasion, and belief can be undermined the same way. Trump’s own racism, his embrace of white nationalist discourse, and his encouragement of the alt-right over the past two years have, through words, made a start on that transformation.
  • Much the same is true of his demonization of political opponents, from “lock her up!” chants on the campaign trail and telling Hillary Clinton that “you’d be in jail
  • In the long term, it tells a large portion of the country that it is patriotic and virtuous to reject political disagreement, to reject the basic legitimacy of the views of the majority of the electorate.
  • The business of prioritizing procedural norms, the rule of law, alternation in power, and electoral fairness is psychologically difficult
  • stating the norms out loud—in the U.S., affirming that they are central to the American system—helps to balance out the authoritarian and populist temptation
  • what populists and authoritarians do is to make a virtue out of the inclination to love our in-group and hate the out-group
  • As with his embrace of white nationalism, Trump’s equation of opposition with crime and treason isn’t just “norm erosion,” a phrase we have seen a lot of in the last year. It’s norm inversion, aligning the aspiration to do right with substantive political wrong
  • “Ignore the tweets, ignore the language, ignore the words” is advice that affects a kind of sophistication: don’t get distracted by the circus, keep your eye on what’s going on behind the curtain. This is faux pragmatism, ignoring what is being communicated to other countries, to actors within the state, and to tens of millions of fellow citizens
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Germany's AfD turns on Greta Thunberg as it embraces climate denial | Environment | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-as-it-embraces-climate-denial germany denial climate change AfD politics
shared by Javier E on 14 May 19 - No Cached
  • While climate change barely got a mention on its social media channels when the AfD was first founded in 2013, it mentioned the topic on its channels about 300 times in 2017-18, and that has tripled over the past year to more than 900, with its main focus on Greta.
  • The party, whose members have been seen handing out climate change denial leaflets at school climate strikes, has ratcheted up its anti-Thunberg rhetoric ahead of the EU parliamentary elections this month. Its candidates have made comparisons between the Swedish teenager and a member of a Nazi youth organisation and called for her to seek treatment for what Maximilian Krah, an AfD candidate for the EU elections, called her “psychosis”.
  • It has also been repeatedly claimed on AfD’s Facebook page that she is the leader of a climate movement cult. Posts on the page make repeated use of terms such as “CO2Kult” (CO2 cult), “Klimawandelpanik” (climate change panic) and “Klimagehirnwäsche” (climate brain washing)
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “The AfD has been denying human-made climate change on its social media pages since 2016, and while it has not shifted its position it is clear that the party decided to communicate it more frequently.
  • “The fact that many mainstream politicians from across the political divide in Germany supported a 16-year-old female activist who was virtually unknown until a few months ago, allowed the party to present belief in climate change as irrational, hysteria, panic, cult-like or even as a replacement religion. Attacking Greta, at times in fairly vicious ways, including mocking her for her autism, became a way to portray the AfD’s political opponents as irrational.”
  • Promotional materials for the event cite Greta as someone placed on the frontline of climate activism “by PR professionals seeking to bedevil the plant-nutrient carbon dioxide” and describe the AfD as “the only party in Germany not willing to back the supposed climate consensus”.
  • “We are experiencing a shift to the right on social media and in society. In a short period of time, the new right has established its own counter-society on climate issues. With troll armies, agitating magazines and the support of climate sceptics like EIKE, it has created its own sphere that is massively underestimated.”
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Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...ting-nikki-haley-1212661827918 trump politics US
shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley
  • President Trump is walking back plans to impose new economic sanctions against Russia announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. The planned sanctions were an attempt to punish Russia for its support of Syrian President Bashar Assad after a chemical weapons attack earlier this month. {"1222314563954":{"mpxId":"1222314563954","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Positive","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","description":"Daughter of former New York Gov. 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  • Amid the historic developments formally ending the Korean War, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has promised to close down a nuclear test site in May. 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  • ...1 more annotation...
  • North Korea to close down nuclear test site in May
52More

'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth | Technology... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...tubes-algorithm-distorts-truth algorithm disinformation russia election 2016 politics crisis
shared by Javier E on 02 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • There are 1.5 billion YouTube users in the world, which is more than the number of households that own televisions. What they watch is shaped by this algorithm, which skims and ranks billions of videos to identify 20 “up next” clips that are both relevant to a previous video and most likely, statistically speaking, to keep a person hooked on their screen.
  • Company insiders tell me the algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth
  • YouTube engineers describe it as one of the “largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence”
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • Lately, it has also become one of the most controversial. The algorithm has been found to be promoting conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas mass shooting and incentivising, through recommendations, a thriving subculture that targets children with disturbing content
  • One YouTube creator who was banned from making advertising revenues from his strange videos – which featured his children receiving flu shots, removing earwax, and crying over dead pets – told a reporter he had only been responding to the demands of Google’s algorithm. “That’s what got us out there and popular,” he said. “We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took to please the algorithm.”
  • academics have speculated that YouTube’s algorithms may have been instrumental in fuelling disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. “YouTube is the most overlooked story of 2016,” Zeynep Tufekci, a widely respected sociologist and technology critic, tweeted back in October. “Its search and recommender algorithms are misinformation engines.”
  • Those are not easy questions to answer. Like all big tech companies, YouTube does not allow us to see the algorithms that shape our lives. They are secret formulas, proprietary software, and only select engineers are entrusted to work on the algorithm
  • Guillaume Chaslot, a 36-year-old French computer programmer with a PhD in artificial intelligence, was one of those engineers.
  • The experience led him to conclude that the priorities YouTube gives its algorithms are dangerously skewed.
  • Chaslot said none of his proposed fixes were taken up by his managers. “There are many ways YouTube can change its algorithms to suppress fake news and improve the quality and diversity of videos people see,” he says. “I tried to change YouTube from the inside but it didn’t work.”
  • Chaslot explains that the algorithm never stays the same. It is constantly changing the weight it gives to different signals: the viewing patterns of a user, for example, or the length of time a video is watched before someone clicks away.
  • The engineers he worked with were responsible for continuously experimenting with new formulas that would increase advertising revenues by extending the amount of time people watched videos. “Watch time was the priority,” he recalls. “Everything else was considered a distraction.”
  • Chaslot was fired by Google in 2013, ostensibly over performance issues. He insists he was let go after agitating for change within the company, using his personal time to team up with like-minded engineers to propose changes that could diversify the content people see.
  • He was especially worried about the distortions that might result from a simplistic focus on showing people videos they found irresistible, creating filter bubbles, for example, that only show people content that reinforces their existing view of the world.
  • “YouTube is something that looks like reality, but it is distorted to make you spend more time online,” he tells me when we meet in Berkeley, California. “The recommendation algorithm is not optimising for what is truthful, or balanced, or healthy for democracy.”
  • YouTube told me that its recommendation system had evolved since Chaslot worked at the company and now “goes beyond optimising for watchtime”.
  • It did not say why Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006, waited over a decade to make those changes
  • Chaslot believes such changes are mostly cosmetic, and have failed to fundamentally alter some disturbing biases that have evolved in the algorithm
  • It finds videos through a word search, selecting a “seed” video to begin with, and recording several layers of videos that YouTube recommends in the “up next” column. It does so with no viewing history, ensuring the videos being detected are YouTube’s generic recommendations, rather than videos personalised to a user. And it repeats the process thousands of times, accumulating layers of data about YouTube recommendations to build up a picture of the algorithm’s preferences.
  • Each study finds something different, but the research suggests YouTube systematically amplifies videos that are divisive, sensational and conspiratorial.
  • When his program found a seed video by searching the query “who is Michelle Obama?” and then followed the chain of “up next” suggestions, for example, most of the recommended videos said she “is a man”
  • He believes one of the most shocking examples was detected by his program in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. As he observed in a short, largely unnoticed blogpost published after Donald Trump was elected, the impact of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was not neutral during the presidential race: it was pushing videos that were, in the main, helpful to Trump and damaging to Hillary Clinton.
  • “It was strange,” he explains to me. “Wherever you started, whether it was from a Trump search or a Clinton search, the recommendation algorithm was much more likely to push you in a pro-Trump direction.”
  • Trump won the electoral college as a result of 80,000 votes spread across three swing states. There were more than 150 million YouTube users in the US. The videos contained in Chaslot’s database of YouTube-recommended election videos were watched, in total, more than 3bn times before the vote in November 2016.
  • “Algorithms that shape the content we see can have a lot of impact, particularly on people who have not made up their mind,”
  • “Gentle, implicit, quiet nudging can over time edge us toward choices we might not have otherwise made.”
  • But what was most compelling was how often Chaslot’s software detected anti-Clinton conspiracy videos appearing “up next” beside other videos.
  • I spent weeks watching, sorting and categorising the trove of videos with Erin McCormick, an investigative reporter and expert in database analysis. From the start, we were stunned by how many extreme and conspiratorial videos had been recommended, and the fact that almost all of them appeared to be directed against Clinton.
  • “This research captured the apparent direction of YouTube’s political ecosystem,” he says. “That has not been done before.”
  • There were too many videos in the database for us to watch them all, so we focused on 1,000 of the top-recommended videos. We sifted through them one by one to determine whether the content was likely to have benefited Trump or Clinton. Just over a third of the videos were either unrelated to the election or contained content that was broadly neutral or even-handed. Of the remaining 643 videos, 551 were videos favouring Trump, while only only 92 favoured the Clinton campaign.
  • The sample we had looked at suggested Chaslot’s conclusion was correct: YouTube was six times more likely to recommend videos that aided Trump than his adversary.
  • The spokesperson added: “Our search and recommendation systems reflect what people search for, the number of videos available, and the videos people choose to watch on YouTube. That’s not a bias towards any particular candidate; that is a reflection of viewer interest.”
  • YouTube seemed to be saying that its algorithm was a neutral mirror of the desires of the people who use it – if we don’t like what it does, we have ourselves to blame. How does YouTube interpret “viewer interest” – and aren’t “the videos people choose to watch” influenced by what the company shows them?
  • Offered the choice, we may instinctively click on a video of a dead man in a Japanese forest, or a fake news clip claiming Bill Clinton raped a 13-year-old. But are those in-the-moment impulses really a reflect of the content we want to be fed?
  • YouTube’s recommendation system has probably figured out that edgy and hateful content is engaging. “This is a bit like an autopilot cafeteria in a school that has figured out children have sweet teeth, and also like fatty and salty foods,” she says. “So you make a line offering such food, automatically loading the next plate as soon as the bag of chips or candy in front of the young person has been consumed.”
  • Once that gets normalised, however, what is fractionally more edgy or bizarre becomes, Tufekci says, novel and interesting. “So the food gets higher and higher in sugar, fat and salt – natural human cravings – while the videos recommended and auto-played by YouTube get more and more bizarre or hateful.”
  • “This is important research because it seems to be the first systematic look into how YouTube may have been manipulated,” he says, raising the possibility that the algorithm was gamed as part of the same propaganda campaigns that flourished on Twitter and Facebook.
  • “We believe that the activity we found was limited because of various safeguards that we had in place in advance of the 2016 election, and the fact that Google’s products didn’t lend themselves to the kind of micro-targeting or viral dissemination that these actors seemed to prefer.”
  • Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, later wrote to the company about the algorithm, which he said seemed “particularly susceptible to foreign influence”. The senator demanded to know what the company was specifically doing to prevent a “malign incursion” of YouTube’s recommendation system. Walker, in his written reply, offered few specifics
  • Tristan Harris, a former Google insider turned tech whistleblower, likes to describe Facebook as a “living, breathing crime scene for what happened in the 2016 election” that federal investigators have no access to. The same might be said of YouTube. About half the videos Chaslot’s program detected being recommended during the election have now vanished from YouTube – many of them taken down by their creators. Chaslot has always thought this suspicious. These were videos with titles such as “Must Watch!! Hillary Clinton tried to ban this video”, watched millions of times before they disappeared. “Why would someone take down a video that has been viewed millions of times?” he asks
  • I shared the entire database of 8,000 YouTube-recommended videos with John Kelly, the chief executive of the commercial analytics firm Graphika, which has been tracking political disinformation campaigns. He ran the list against his own database of Twitter accounts active during the election, and concluded many of the videos appeared to have been pushed by networks of Twitter sock puppets and bots controlled by pro-Trump digital consultants with “a presumably unsolicited assist” from Russia.
  • “I don’t have smoking-gun proof of who logged in to control those accounts,” he says. “But judging from the history of what we’ve seen those accounts doing before, and the characteristics of how they tweet and interconnect, they are assembled and controlled by someone – someone whose job was to elect Trump.”
  • After the Senate’s correspondence with Google over possible Russian interference with YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was made public last week, YouTube sent me a new statement. It emphasised changes it made in 2017 to discourage the recommendation system from promoting some types of problematic content. “We appreciate the Guardian’s work to shine a spotlight on this challenging issue,” it added. “We know there is more to do here and we’re looking forward to making more announcements in the months ahead.”
  • In the months leading up to the election, the Next News Network turned into a factory of anti-Clinton news and opinion, producing dozens of videos a day and reaching an audience comparable to that of MSNBC’s YouTube channel. Chaslot’s research indicated Franchi’s success could largely be credited to YouTube’s algorithms, which consistently amplified his videos to be played “up next”. YouTube had sharply dismissed Chaslot’s research.
  • I contacted Franchi to see who was right. He sent me screen grabs of the private data given to people who upload YouTube videos, including a breakdown of how their audiences found their clips. The largest source of traffic to the Bill Clinton rape video, which was viewed 2.4m times in the month leading up to the election, was YouTube recommendations.
  • The same was true of all but one of the videos Franchi sent me data for. A typical example was a Next News Network video entitled “WHOA! HILLARY THINKS CAMERA’S OFF… SENDS SHOCK MESSAGE TO TRUMP” in which Franchi, pointing to a tiny movement of Clinton’s lips during a TV debate, claims she says “fuck you” to her presidential rival. The data Franchi shared revealed in the month leading up to the election, 73% of the traffic to the video – amounting to 1.2m of its views – was due to YouTube recommendations. External traffic accounted for only 3% of the views.
  • many of the other creators of anti-Clinton videos I spoke to were amateur sleuths or part-time conspiracy theorists. Typically, they might receive a few hundred views on their videos, so they were shocked when their anti-Clinton videos started to receive millions of views, as if they were being pushed by an invisible force.
  • In every case, the largest source of traffic – the invisible force – came from the clips appearing in the “up next” column. William Ramsey, an occult investigator from southern California who made “Irrefutable Proof: Hillary Clinton Has a Seizure Disorder!”, shared screen grabs that showed the recommendation algorithm pushed his video even after YouTube had emailed him to say it violated its guidelines. Ramsey’s data showed the video was watched 2.4m times by US-based users before election day. “For a nobody like me, that’s a lot,” he says. “Enough to sway the election, right?”
  • Daniel Alexander Cannon, a conspiracy theorist from South Carolina, tells me: “Every video I put out about the Clintons, YouTube would push it through the roof.” His best-performing clip was a video titled “Hillary and Bill Clinton ‘The 10 Photos You Must See’”, essentially a slideshow of appalling (and seemingly doctored) images of the Clintons with voiceover in which Cannon speculates on their health. It has been seen 3.7m times on YouTube, and 2.9m of those views, Cannon said, came from “up next” recommendations.
  • his research also does something more important: revealing how thoroughly our lives are now mediated by artificial intelligence.
  • Less than a generation ago, the way voters viewed their politicians was largely shaped by tens of thousands of newspaper editors, journalists and TV executives. Today, the invisible codes behind the big technology platforms have become the new kingmakers.
  • They pluck from obscurity people like Dave Todeschini, a retired IBM engineer who, “let off steam” during the election by recording himself opining on Clinton’s supposed involvement in paedophilia, child sacrifice and cannibalism. “It was crazy, it was nuts,” he said of the avalanche of traffic to his YouTube channel, which by election day had more than 2m views
28More

Good Friends and Brothers? Francis I and Henry VIII | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...thers-francis-i-and-henry-viii Tudor France England Henry VIII Francis I Political
shared by manhefnawi on 20 May 18 - No Cached
  • One was of Henry VIII of England and the other was of Francis I of France. Their symbolic presence at the beginning of an ambitious project designed to link England and France was especially appropriate. Henry VIII is often called a 'Renaissance prince' and is popularly remembered for his ebullience and the extraordinariness of his reign
  • influenced by his relationship with that other 'Renaissance prince', Francis I
  • France and England been so drawn together by some higher ideal or imperative
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • The Angouleme family was a cadet branch of the royal house of Valois. Francis' father, Charles, died on January 1st, 1496, and in 1498, the boy became heir presumptive to the reigning monarch, Louis XII
  • Louis XII died leaving no surviving son and Francis succeeded him as king on January 1st, 1515. Francis's accession was greeted favourably by the French nobility
  • His mother, Louise of Savoy
  • He was determined to avenge the defeats which Louis XII had suffered there and to capture the duchy of Milan which he regarded as his inheritance
  • On September l4th, 1515, at the Battle of Marignano, Francis defeated a large Swiss army allied to the duke of Milan and so regained the duchy. He secured his prize by a concordat with Leo X and, later, by treaties with the Swiss, with Charles of Spain and with the Holy Roman Emperor, Maxmillian
  • In 1533, Francis concluded a marriage alliance with Clement VII which he hoped would detach the pope from his allegiance to Charles V and thus help both him and Henry VIII
  • The young Tudor's great role-model was Henry V and he regarded northern France as his inheritance, rather in the way Francis saw Milan
  • In 1513, Henry had invaded France in alliance with the pope, the emperor and the king of Spain
  • Nevertheless, these victories and the subsequent peace treaty with Louis XII, allowed Henry to feel that controlling France was a great way of demonstrating his own impressive royal power
  • In England, Francis found an ally in the person of Anne Boleyn who virtually replaced Wolsey as the lynch-pin in Anglo-French contacts
  • Like Wolsey before her, Anne encouraged continued exchanges between the two monarchs and she also patronised English scholars in France
  • Henry then allowed himself to believe, incorrectly, that Francis approved of these claims
  • Henry VIII's accession in 1509 had generated the same kind of excitement as witnessed in France in 1515. The two kings did indeed have many personal similarities and rivalry between them was almost inevitable
  • Against this background and despite the difficulties, Anglo-French contacts were maintained and Francis constantly sought Henry's financial and military support against Charles V
  • Francis spent increasing amounts of time in Paris and at Fontainebleau where his steadily expanding artistic collections and library were shown to all important visitors
  • During the 1540s, Henry VIII also insisted, more than ever, that his was an imperial kingship
  • Much of this augmentation work was undertaken by the same John Leland who had witnessed Bude's work for Francis in the 1520s
  • Francis discussed Henry's building ideas with his ambassador, Sir John Wallop, to whom he also gave a guided tour of his private gallery and baths at Fontainebleau.
  • Henry's personal Psalter, in which he is depicted as King David, his second great role-model after Henry V, was produced by Jean Mallard who had been Francis I's court poet in the 1550s
  • In July 1544 thirty-one years after his first invasion, Henry once again crossed the Channel to set about the conquest of France. He managed to capture Boulogne
  • Francis I died on March 51st, 1547, barely two months after Henry VIII's death in January
  • that of the king as the warrior-leader whose greatness lay in military success and the distribution of largesse to his elite companions
  • Henry VIII's concept of his kingship was centred on the same ideal and his efforts to make his monarchy conform to it, partly through competition with France, pre-dated the start of Francis I's reign
  • This sophistication was particularly evident in Francis's artistic and intellectual patronage and it is here that his 'Renaissance' influence on Henry VIII is most apparent
  • On May 6th, 1994, after opening the Channel Tunnel jointly with President Mitterand, the Queen observed that Britain and France, 'for all their ages-long rivalry, complement each other well, perhaps better than we realise'
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How trashy TV made children dumber and enabled a wave of populist leaders - The Washing... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-enabled-wave-populist-leaders italy populism tv effect political culture politics
shared by Javier E on 20 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • more exposure to Mediaset’s vapid programming was followed by an enduring boost in support for populist candidates peddling simple messages and easy answers.
  • the researchers go to great lengths to prove this isn’t just a Berlusconi effect. For starters, the bump extends to his populist competitors, particularly the Five Star Movement. Founded on a comedian’s blog a decade ago, the anti-establishment movement became the biggest single party in Italy’s Parliament after last year’s election.
  • Television’s role in populist success apparently lies in entertainment, not in political messaging.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • The researchers digitized years of old newspaper television listings to show that Mediaset offered almost three times as many hours of movies and entertainment as RAI and avoided almost all news and educational programming.
  • the research added to evidence that “TV that’s not explicitly about politics can have an effect on politics.”
  • greater access to broadcast media corresponded with lower civic participation and lower levels of trust.
  • On an international test conducted in 2012, Italian adults from places where they first would have been exposed to Mediaset under the age of 10 had math and reading scores that were significantly worse than those of their peers. They were also less civically minded and less politically active.
  • They found that lowbrow television’s electoral effect came with a bump of almost 10 percentage points between the two groups that watched it most: those under age 10 and those 55 and older. As they aged, the two groups would both come to support populists
  • Young people who watched Mediaset during their formative years would, Durante said, grow up to be “less cognitively sophisticated and less civically minded” than their peers who only had access to public broadcasting and local stations during that period.
  • Durante describes it as a matter of opportunity cost: Every hour you spend watching TV is an hour you aren’t reading, playing outside or socializing with other kids. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but that may have long-term effects on what kind of person you will become.”
  • On a battery of psychological and cognitive tests administered to military conscripts, young men from areas with more Mediaset exposure were between 8 percent and 25 percent more likely to earn the lowest scores
  • In Italy, the economists also used critics’ reviews, as well as ratings from the Motion Picture Association of America, to show Mediaset’s programming was of lower quality and less suitable for a general audience.
  • these men and women were attracted to Berlusconi and later the Five Star Movement, both of whom were more likely to use simple language in their speeches and platforms, the researchers show.
  • By the time Mediaset offered regular news programming, in the early 90s, many older viewers had been hooked on the channel’s cheap entertainment and were much more likely to watch news offered by Mediaset than by other broadcasters.
  • This result echoes a 2017 analysis in the same academic journal by a separate team that used variation in channel listings to calculate that Fox News gave Republicans a half-point boost in 2000, building up to a six-percentage-point advantage in 2008 compared with a baseline scenario in which the channel didn’t exist.
  • In Italy, it’s not that television made voters more conservative. Instead, Durante said, it seems to have made them more vulnerable to the anti-establishment stances favored by the country’s populist leaders of all persuasions.
  • In the ’90s and early 2000s, Berlusconi was “well positioned to benefit from the decline in cognitive skills and civic engagement,” they write, but by 2013, he was outflanked by the insurgent Five Star Movement, whose strong rhetoric won over the Mediaset-affected voters who had once broken for Berlusconi.
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