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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4/17 AGE OF TRUMP</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see fake news, conspiracy, AI bots</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">online privacy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">do w need Big 4 node?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">NEW</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><article data-id="115673" class="clearfix placed analysis published">

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      <h2><a href="https://theconversation.com/in-india-whatsapp-is-a-weapon-of-antisocial-hatred-115673">In India, WhatsApp is a weapon of antisocial&nbsp;hatred</a></h2>

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          <span><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/rohit-chopra-721389">Rohit Chopra</a>, Santa Clara University</span>
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      <span>India's parliamentary elections, now underway, will show how social media is affecting Indian society and government.</span>
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://yyytheguardian.com/news/2018/may/03/why-silicon-valley-cant-fix-itself-tech-humanism</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The long read</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">/Guardian </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tech insiders have finally started admitting their mistakes – but the solutions they are offering could just help the big players get even more powerful. By Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thu 3 May 2018 01.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 1 Jun 2018 07.00 EDT</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Big Tech is sorry. After decades of rarely apologising for anything, Silicon Valley suddenly seems to be apologising for everything. They are sorry about the trolls. They are sorry about the bots. They are sorry about the fake news and the Russians, and the cartoons that are terrifying your kids on YouTube. But they are especially sorry about our brains.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook – who was played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network – has publicly lamented the “unintended consequences” of the platform he helped create: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” Justin Rosenstein, an engineer who helped build Facebook’s “like” button and Gchat, regrets having contributed to technology that he now considers psychologically damaging, too. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ever since the internet became widely used by the public in the 1990s, users have heard warnings that it is bad for us. In the early years, many commentators described cyberspace as a parallel universe that could swallow enthusiasts whole. The media fretted about kids talking to strangers and finding porn. A prominent 1998 study from Carnegie Mellon University claimed that spending time online made you lonely, depressed and antisocial.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself – podcast]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the mid-2000s, as the internet moved on to mobile devices, physical and virtual life began to merge. Bullish pundits celebrated the “cognitive surplus” unlocked by crowdsourcing and the tech-savvy campaigns of Barack Obama, the “internet president”. But, alongside these optimistic voices, darker warnings persisted. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (2010) argued that search engines were making people stupid, while Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble (2011) claimed algorithms made us insular by showing us only what we wanted to see. In Alone, Together (2011) and Reclaiming Conversation (2015), Sherry Turkle warned that constant connectivity was making meaningful interaction impossible.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Still, inside the industry, techno-utopianism prevailed.</b> Silicon Valley seemed to assume that the tools they were building were always forces for good – and that anyone who questioned them was a crank or a luddite. In the face of an anti-tech backlash that has surged since the 2016 election, however, this faith appears to be faltering. Prominent people in the industry are beginning to acknowledge that their products may have harmful effects.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Internet anxiety isn’t new. But never before have so many notable figures within the industry seemed so anxious about the world they have made. Parker, Rosenstein and the other insiders now talking about the harms of smartphones and social media belong to an informal yet influential current of tech critics emerging within Silicon Valley. You could call them the “tech humanists”. Amid rising public concern about the power of the industry, they argue that the primary problem with its products is that they threaten our health and our humanity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is clear that these products are designed to be maximally addictive, in order to harvest as much of our attention as they can. Tech humanists say this business model is both unhealthy and inhumane – that it damages our psychological well-being and conditions us to behave in ways that diminish our humanity. The main solution that they propose is better design. By redesigning technology to be less addictive and less manipulative, they believe we can make it healthier – we can realign technology with our humanity and build products that don’t “hijack” our minds.</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The hub of the new tech humanism is the Center for Humane Technology in San Francisco. </b>Founded earlier this year, the nonprofit has assembled an impressive roster of advisers, including investor Roger McNamee, Lyft president John Zimmer, and Rosenstein. But its most prominent spokesman is executive director Tristan Harris, a former “design ethicist” at Google who has been hailed by the Atlantic magazine as “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”. Harris has spent years trying to persuade the industry of the dangers of tech addiction. In February, Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, launched a related initiative: the Tech and Society Solutions Lab, which aims to “maximise the tech industry’s contributions to a healthy society”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As suspicion of Silicon Valley grows, the tech humanists are making a bid to become tech’s loyal opposition. They are using their insider credentials to promote a particular diagnosis of where tech went wrong and of how to get it back on track. For this, they have been getting a lot of attention. As the backlash against tech has grown, so too has the appeal of techies repenting for their sins. The Center for Humane Technology has been profiled – and praised by – the New York Times, the Atlantic, Wired and others.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But tech humanism’s influence cannot be measured solely by the positive media coverage it has received. The real reason tech humanism matters is because some of the most powerful people in the industry are starting to speak its idiom. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has warned about social media’s role in encouraging “mindless scrambles for friends or unworthy distractions”, and Twitter boss Jack Dorsey recently claimed he wants to improve the platform’s “conversational health”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</b></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Even Mark Zuckerberg, famous for encouraging his engineers to “move fast and break things”, seems to be taking a tech humanist turn.</b> In January, he announced that Facebook had a new priority: maximising “time well spent” on the platform, rather than total time spent. By “time well spent”, Zuckerberg means time spent interacting with “friends” rather than businesses, brands or media sources. He said the News Feed algorithm was already prioritising these “more meaningful” activities.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Zuckerberg’s choice of words is significant: Time Well Spent is the name of the advocacy group that Harris led before co-founding the Center for Humane Technology. In April, Zuckerberg brought the phrase to Capitol Hill. When a photographer snapped a picture of the notes Zuckerberg used while testifying before the Senate, they included a discussion of Facebook’s new emphasis on “time well spent”, under the heading “wellbeing”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This new concern for “wellbeing” may strike some observers as a welcome development. After years of ignoring their critics, industry leaders are finally acknowledging that problems exist. Tech humanists deserve credit for drawing attention to one of those problems – the manipulative design decisions made by Silicon Valley.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But these decisions are only symptoms of a larger issue: the fact that the digital infrastructures that increasingly shape our personal, social and civic lives are owned and controlled by a few billionaires. </b>Because it ignores the question of power, the tech-humanist diagnosis is incomplete – and could even help the industry evade meaningful reform. Taken up by leaders such as Zuckerberg, tech humanism is likely to result in only superficial changes. These changes may soothe some of the popular anger directed towards the tech industry, but they will not address the origin of that anger. If anything, they will make Silicon Valley even more powerful.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Center for Humane Technology argues that technology must be “aligned” with humanity – and that the best way to accomplish this is through better design. Their website features a section entitled The Way Forward. A familiar evolutionary image shows the silhouettes of several simians, rising from their crouches to become a man, who then turns back to contemplate his history.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“In the future, we will look back at today as a turning point towards humane design,” the header reads. To the litany of problems caused by “technology that <b><i>extracts</i></b> attention and erodes society”, the text asserts that “humane design is the solution”.</span> Drawing on the rhetoric of the “design thinking” philosophy that has long suffused Silicon Valley, the website explains that humane design “starts by understanding our most vulnerable human instincts so we can design compassionately”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is a good reason why the language of tech humanism is penetrating the upper echelons of the tech industry so easily: this language is not foreign to Silicon Valley. On the contrary, “humanising” technology has long been its central ambition and the source of its power. It was precisely by developing a “humanised” form of computing that entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs brought computing into millions of users’ everyday lives. Their success turned the Bay Area tech industry into a global powerhouse – and produced the digitised world that today’s tech humanists now lament.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The story begins in the 1960s, when Silicon Valley </b>was still a handful of electronics firms clustered among fruit orchards. Computers came in the form of mainframes then. These machines were big, expensive and difficult to use. Only corporations, universities and government agencies could afford them, and they were reserved for specialised tasks, such as calculating missile trajectories or credit scores.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Computing was industrial, in other words, not personal, and Silicon Valley remained dependent on a small number of big institutional clients. The practical danger that this dependency posed became clear in the early 1960s, when the US Department of Defense, by far the single biggest buyer of digital components, began cutting back on its purchases. But the fall in military procurement wasn’t the only mid-century crisis around computing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Computers also had an image problem. The inaccessibility of mainframes made them easy to demonise. In these whirring hulks of digital machinery, many observers saw something inhuman, even evil. To antiwar activists, computers were weapons of the war machine that was killing thousands in Vietnam. To highbrow commentators such as the social critic Lewis Mumford, computers were instruments of a creeping technocracy that threatened to extinguish personal freedom.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But during the course of the 1960s and 70s, a series of experiments in northern California helped solve both problems. These experiments yielded breakthrough innovations like the graphical user interface, the mouse and the microprocessor. Computers became smaller, more usable and more interactive, reducing Silicon Valley’s reliance on a few large customers while giving digital technology a friendlier face.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Apple founder Steve Jobs ‘got the notion of tools for human use’. [mac w. a $ sign?!]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Facebook Twitter Pinterest  Apple founder Steve Jobs ‘got the notion of tools for human use’. Photograph: Ted Thai/Polaris / eyevine]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">The pioneers who led this transformation believed they were making computing more human. They drew deeply from the counterculture of the period, and its fixation on developing “human” modes of living. They wanted their machines to be “extensions of man”, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, and to unlock “human potential” rather than repress it. At the centre of this ecosystem of hobbyists, hackers, hippies and professional engineers was Stewart Brand, famed entrepreneur of the counterculture and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. In a famous 1972 article for Rolling Stone, <b>Brand called for a new model of computing that “served human interest, not machine</b>”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Brand’s disciples answered this call by developing the technical innovations that transformed computers into the form we recognise today. They also promoted a new way of thinking about computers – not as impersonal slabs of machinery, but as tools for unleashing “human potential”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>No single figure contributed more to this transformation of computing than Steve Jobs, who was a fan of Brand and a reader of the Whole Earth Catalog.</b> Jobs fulfilled Brand’s vision on a global scale, launching the mass personal computing era with the Macintosh in the mid-80s, and the mass smartphone era with the iPhone two decades later. Brand later acknowledged that Jobs embodied the Whole Earth Catalog ethos. “He got the notion of tools for human use,” Brand told Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Building those “tools for human use” turned out to be great for business. The impulse to humanise computing enabled Silicon Valley to enter every crevice of our lives. From phones to tablets to laptops, we are surrounded by devices that have fulfilled the demands of the counterculture for digital connectivity, interactivity and self-expression. Your iPhone responds to the slightest touch; you can look at photos of anyone you have ever known, and broadcast anything you want to all of them, at any moment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In short, the effort to humanise computing produced the very situation that the tech humanists now consider dehumanising: a wilderness of screens where digital devices chase every last instant of our attention. To guide us out of that wilderness, tech humanists say we need more humanising. They believe we can use better design to make technology serve human nature rather than exploit and corrupt it. But this idea is drawn from the same tradition that created the world that tech humanists believe is distracting and damaging us.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> humanists say they want to align humanity and technology. But this project is based on a deep misunderstanding of the relationship between humanity and technology: namely, the fantasy that these two entities could ever exist in separation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is difficult to imagine human beings without technology. The story of our species began when we began to make tools. Homo habilis, the first members of our genus, left sharpened stones scattered across Africa. Their successors hit rocks against each other to make sparks, and thus fire. With fire you could cook meat and clear land for planting; with ash you could fertilise the soil; with smoke you could make signals. In flickering light, our ancestors painted animals on cave walls. The ancient tragedian Aeschylus recalled this era mythically: Prometheus, in stealing fire from the gods, “founded all the arts of men.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">All of which is to say: humanity and technology are not only entangled, they constantly change together. This is not just a metaphor. Recent research suggests that the human hand evolved to manipulate the stone tools that our ancestors used. The evolutionary scientist Mary Marzke shows that we developed “a unique pattern of muscle architecture and joint surface form and functions” for this purpose.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ways our bodies and brains change in conjunction with the tools we make have long inspired anxieties that “we” are losing some essential qualities. For millennia, people have feared that new media were eroding the very powers that they promised to extend. In The Phaedrus, Socrates warned that writing on wax tablets would make people forgetful. If you could jot something down, you wouldn’t have to remember it. In the late middle ages, as a culture of copying manuscripts gave way to printed books, teachers warned that pupils would become careless, since they no longer had to transcribe what their teachers said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet as we lose certain capacities, we gain new ones. People who used to navigate the seas by following stars can now program computers to steer container ships from afar. Your grandmother probably has better handwriting than you do – but you probably type faster.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The nature of human nature is that it changes. It can not, therefore, serve as a stable basis for evaluating the impact of technology. Yet the assumption that it doesn’t change serves a useful purpose. Treating human nature as something static, pure and essential elevates the speaker into a position of power. Claiming to tell us who we are, they tell us how we should be.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Intentionally or not, this is what tech humanists are doing when they talk about technology as threatening human nature – as if human nature had stayed the same from the paleolithic era until the rollout of the iPhone. Holding humanity and technology separate clears the way for a small group of humans to determine the proper alignment between them. And while the tech humanists may believe they are acting in the common good, they themselves acknowledge they are doing so from above, as elites. “We have a moral responsibility to steer people’s thoughts ethically,” Tristan Harris has declared.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Harris and his fellow tech humanists also frequently invoke the language of public health. </b>The Center for Humane Technology’s Roger McNamee has gone so far as to call public health “the root of the whole thing”, and Harris has compared using Snapchat to smoking cigarettes. The public-health framing casts the tech humanists in a paternalistic role.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Resolving a public health crisis requires public health expertise. It also precludes the possibility of democratic debate. You don’t put the question of how to treat a disease up for a vote – you call a doctor.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This paternalism produces a central irony of tech humanism: the language that they use to describe users is often dehumanising. “</b>Facebook appeals to your lizard brain – primarily fear and anger,” says McNamee. Harris echoes this sentiment: “Imagine you had an input cable,” he has said. “You’re trying to jack it into a human being. Do you want to jack it into their reptilian brain, or do you want to jack it into their more reflective self?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Center for Humane Technology’s website offers tips on how to build a more reflective and less reptilian relationship to your smartphone: “going greyscale” by setting your screen to black-and-white, turning off app notifications and charging your device outside your bedroom. It has also announced two major initiatives: a national campaign to raise awareness about technology’s harmful effects on young people’s “digital health and well-being”; and a “Ledger of Harms” – a website that will compile information about the health effects of different technologies in order to guide engineers in building “healthier” products.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These initiatives may help some people reduce their smartphone use – a reasonable personal goal. But there are some humans who may not share this goal, and there need not be anything unhealthy about that. Many people rely on the internet for solace and solidarity, especially those who feel marginalised. The kid with autism may stare at his screen when surrounded by people, because it lets him tolerate being surrounded by people. For him, constant use of technology may not be destructive at all, but in fact life-saving.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Pathologising certain potentially beneficial behaviours as “sick” isn’t the only problem with the Center for Humane Technology’s proposals. They also remain confined to the <b>personal level, aiming to redesign how the individual user interacts with technology rather than tackling the industry’s structural failures</b></span><b>.</b> Tech humanism fails to address the root cause of the tech backlash: the fact that a small handful of corporations own our digital lives and strip-mine them for profit. This is a fundamentally political and collective issue. But by framing the problem in terms of health and humanity, and the solution in terms of design, the tech humanists personalise and depoliticise it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This may be why their approach is so appealing to the tech industry. There is no reason to doubt the good intentions of tech humanists, who may genuinely want to address the problems fuelling the tech backlash. But they are handing the firms that caused those problems a valuable weapon. Far from challenging Silicon Valley, tech humanism offers Silicon Valley a useful way to pacify public concerns without surrendering any of its enormous wealth and power. By channelling popular anger at Big Tech into concerns about health and humanity, tech humanism gives corporate giants such as Facebook a way to avoid real democratic control. In a moment of danger, it may even help them protect their profits.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One can easily imagine a version of Facebook that embraces the principles of tech humanism while remaining a profitable and powerful monopoly. In fact, these principles could make Facebook even more profitable and powerful, by opening up new business opportunities. That seems to be exactly what Facebook has planned.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would prioritise “time well spent” over total time spent, it came a couple weeks before the company released their 2017 Q4 earnings. These reported that total time spent on the platform had dropped by around 5%, or about 50m hours per day. But, Zuckerberg said, this was by design: in particular, it was in response to tweaks to the News Feed that prioritised “meaningful” interactions with “friends” rather than consuming “public content” like video and news. This would ensure that “Facebook isn’t just fun, but also good for people’s well-being”.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Zuckerberg said he expected those changes would continue to decrease total time spent – but “the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable”. This may describe what users find valuable – but it also refers to what Facebook finds valuable. In a recent interview, he said: “Over the long term, even if time spent goes down, if people are spending more time on Facebook actually building relationships with people they care about, then that’s going to build a stronger community and build a stronger business, regardless of what Wall Street thinks about it in the near term.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sheryl Sandberg has also stressed that the shift will create “more monetisation opportunities”. How? Everyone knows data is the lifeblood of Facebook – but not all data is created equal. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One of the most valuable sources of data to Facebook is used to inform a metric called “coefficient”. This measures the strength of a connection between two users – Zuckerberg once called it “an index for each relationship”. Facebook records every interaction you have with another user – from liking a friend’s post or viewing their profile, to sending them a message. These activities provide Facebook with a sense of how close you are to another person, and different activities are weighted differently. Messaging, for instance, is considered the strongest signal. It’s reasonable to assume that you’re closer to somebody you exchange messages with than somebody whose post you once liked.</span></font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why is coefficient so valuable? Because Facebook uses it to create a Facebook they think you will like: it guides algorithmic decisions about what content you see and the order in which you see it. It also helps improve ad targeting, by showing you ads for things liked by friends with whom you often interact. <b>Advertisers can target the closest friends of the users who already like a product</b>, on the assumption that close friends tend to like the same things.</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So when Zuckerberg talks about wanting to increase “meaningful” interactions and building relationships, he is not succumbing to pressure to take better care of his users. Rather, emphasising time well spent means creating a Facebook that prioritises data-rich personal interactions that Facebook can use to make a more engaging platform. Rather than spending a lot of time doing things that Facebook doesn’t find valuable – such as watching viral videos – you can spend a bit less time, but spend it doing things that Facebook does find valuable.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In other words, “time well spent” means Facebook can monetise more efficiently. It can prioritise the intensity of data extraction over its extensiveness. This is a wise business move, disguised as a concession to critics. Shifting to this model not only sidesteps concerns about tech addiction – it also acknowledges certain basic limits to Facebook’s current growth model. There are only so many hours in the day. Facebook can’t keep prioritising total time spent – it has to extract more value from less time.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In many ways, this process recalls an earlier stage in the evolution of capitalism. In the 19th century, factory owners in England discovered they could only make so much money by extending the length of the working day. At some point, workers would die of exhaustion, or they would revolt, or they would push parliament to pass laws that limited their working hours. So industrialists had to find ways to make the time of the worker more valuable – to extract more money from each moment rather than adding more moments. They did this by making industrial production more efficient: developing new technologies and techniques that squeezed more value out of the worker and stretched that value further than ever before.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A similar situation confronts Facebook today. They have to make the attention of the user more valuable – and the language and concepts of tech humanism can help them do it. So far, it seems to be working. Despite the reported drop in total time spent, Facebook recently announced huge 2018 Q1 earnings of $11.97bn (£8.7bn), smashing Wall Street estimates by nearly $600m.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today’s tech humanists come from a tradition with deep roots in Silicon Valley. Like their predecessors, they believe that technology and humanity are distinct, but can be harmonised. This belief guided the generations who built the “humanised” machines that became the basis for the industry’s enormous power. Today it may provide Silicon Valley with a way to protect that power from a growing public backlash – and even deepen it by uncovering new opportunities for profit-making.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fortunately, there is another way of thinking about how to live with technology – one that is both truer to the history of our species and useful for building a more democratic future. This tradition does not address “humanity” in the abstract, but as distinct human beings, whose capacities are shaped by the tools they use. It sees us as hybrids of animal and machine – as “cyborgs”, to quote the biologist and philosopher of science Donna Haraway.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To say that we’re all cyborgs is not to say that all technologies are good for us, or that we should embrace every new invention. But it does suggest that living well with technology can’t be a matter of making technology more “human”. This goal isn’t just impossible – it’s also dangerous, because it puts us at the mercy of experts who tell us how to be human. It cedes control of our technological future to those who believe they know what’s best for us because they understand the essential truths about our species.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The cyborg way of thinking, by contrast, tells us that our species is essentially technological. We change as we change our tools, and our tools change us. But even though our continuous co-evolution with our machines is inevitable, the way it unfolds is not. Rather, it is determined by who owns and runs those machines. It is a question of power.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today, that power is wielded by corporations, which own our technology and run it for profit. The various scandals that have stoked the tech backlash all share a single source. Surveillance, fake news and the miserable working conditions in Amazon’s warehouses are profitable. If they were not, they would not exist. They are symptoms of a profound democratic deficit inflicted by a system that prioritises the wealth of the few over the needs and desires of the many.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is an alternative. If being technological is a feature of being human, then the power to shape how we live with technology should be a fundamental human right. The decisions that most affect our technological lives are far too important to be left to Mark Zuckerberg, rich investors or a handful of “humane designers”. They should be made by everyone, together.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Rather than trying to humanise technology, then, we should be trying to democratise it.</b> We should be demanding that society as a whole gets to decide how we live with technology – rather than the small group of people who have captured society’s wealth.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>What does this mean in practice? First, it requires limiting and eroding Silicon Valley’s power. Antitrust laws and tax policy offer useful ways to claw back the fortunes Big Tech has built on common resources</b>. After all, Silicon Valley wouldn’t exist without billions of dollars of public funding, not to mention the vast quantities of information that we all provide for free. Facebook’s market capitalisation is $500bn with 2.2 billion users – do the math to estimate how much the time you spend on Facebook is worth. You could apply the same logic to Google. There is no escape: whether or not you have an account, both platforms track you around the internet.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In addition to taxing and shrinking tech firms, democratic governments should be making rules about how those firms are allowed to behave – rules that restrict how they can collect and use our personal data, for instance, like the General Data Protection Regulation coming into effect in the European Union later this month. But more robust regulation of Silicon Valley isn’t enough. We also need to pry the ownership of our digital infrastructure away from private firms.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This means developing publicly and co-operatively owned alternatives that empower workers, users and citizens to determine how they are run.</b> These democratic digital structures can focus on serving personal and social needs rather than piling up profits for investors. One inspiring example is municipal broadband: a successful experiment in Chattanooga, Tennessee, has shown that publicly owned internet service providers can supply better service at lower cost than private firms. Other models of digital democracy might include a worker-owned Uber, a user-owned Facebook or a socially owned “smart city” of the kind being developed in Barcelona. Alternatively, we might demand that tech firms pay for the privilege of extracting our data, so that we can collectively benefit from a resource we collectively create.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More experimentation is needed, but democracy should be our guiding principle. The stakes are high. Never before have so many people been thinking about the problems produced by the tech industry and how to solve them. The tech backlash is an enormous opportunity – and one that may not come again for a long time.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The old techno-utopianism is crumbling. What will replace it? Silicon Valley says it wants to make the world a better place. Fulfilling this promise may require a new kind of disruption.</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://points.datasociety.net/media-manipulation-strategic-amplification-and-responsible-journalism-95f4d611f462</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no many</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">linx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://points.datasociety.net/media-manipulation-strategic-amplification-and-responsible-journalism-95f4d611f462</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Go to the profile of danah boyd</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">danah boyd</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">researcher of technology & society | Microsoft Research, Data & Society, NYU | zephoria@zephoria.org</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sep 14</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Media Manipulation, Strategic Amplification, and Responsible Journalism</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is a crib of a talk that Data & Society Founder and President danah boyd gave at the Online News Association conference in Austin, Texas on September 13, 2018. For a video of the talk, click here.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In early September 2018, Facebook and Twitter were accused during a Congressional hearing of having anti-conservative bias. This should sound familiar to many of you in this room as you too have been accused for political purposes of being the "liberal media." The core of this narrative is a stunt, architected by media manipulators, designed to trigger outrage among conservatives and pressure news and social media to react.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It works. Over the last two years, both social media and news media organizations have desperately tried to prove that they aren't biased. What's at stake is not whether these organizations are restricting discussions concerning free-market economics or failing to allow conservative perspectives to be heard. What's at stake is how fringe groups can pervert the logics of media to spread conspiratorial and hateful messages under their false flag of conservatism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Accusations of anti-conservative bias are not evaluated through evidence because reality doesn't matter to them. This is what makes this stunt so effective. News organizations and tech companies have no way to "prove" their innocence. What makes conspiratorial messages work is how they pervert evidence. The simplest technique is to conflate correlation and causation. Conspiracy makers point to the data that suggests that both journalists and Silicon Valley engineers are more likely to vote for candidates from the Democratic party. Or that they have higher levels of education than the average American and are more likely to live in Blue states.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As my colleague Francesca Tripodi points out, accusing tech of anti-conservative bias also leverages and reinforces a misunderstanding of how search engines and social media work. As she notes, "People believe Google is weighing facts instead of rank-ordering results that match the entered keywords." When the goal is to drive a wedge among the public, it's not hard to encourage people to see bias.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Contemporary extremism is designed to increase polarization. One tactic is to twist frames. For example, "ideological diversity" has been deployed to suggest that people who hold conservative viewpoints experience a loss of opportunity similar to those who have faced systemic racism and sexism. But this isn't about the history of economic inequality in the US. It's a dogwhistle. It's about using nominal conservatism as a cloak to promote toxic masculinity and white supremacy. It's about extremists using conservatives. And it's about intentionally twisting historical pressure to diversify newsrooms and Silicon Valley to open the Overton Window. Fundamentally, it's a technique to grab power by gaslighting the public and making reality seem fuzzy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Don't get me wrong. Journalism has historically played a central role in shaping public discourse. Through editorial processes, news organizations have served as gatekeepers and chosen what to amplify. And many critics have challenged the media's power to do so over the years. Ideally, newsrooms reflect the norms of society, but that doesn't mean that this has worked perfectly in the past. Furthermore, this process has gotten a lot more complicated in the last 25 years as new tools for amplification have emerged.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As we sit here today, both news organizations and tech companies are struggling to figure out their role in the distribution and promotion of different kinds of speech. Like universities and think tanks, they are being pushed into a corner that they don't understand. In response, and out of fear of being accused of anti-conservative bias, conference promoters are inviting speakers to the stage to share messages of toxic masculinity and white supremacy under the rubric of hearing "both sides." News organizations are profiling extremists as legitimate voices to perform a version of neutrality that is rooted in false equivalency. And social media companies are hesitant to ban people who flagrantly and hatefully violate their terms of service out of fear of being painted as censors.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How did we get here? The stark reality is that we all got played. And we're continuing to get played.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Freedom of Speech</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the United States, the First Amendment of the Constitution is sacrosanct. So let's remind ourselves of precisely what is said:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Congress shall not pass laws curtailing the freedom of speech. Congress shall not pass laws curbing the freedom of the press.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of course, in the public imaginary, the First Amendment has turned into the colloquial notion that no one?-?not news media, not social media, not teachers, not conference organizers, not universities?-?should engage in any act that in any way limits someone else's ability to speak. As a result, it's common for someone to accuse someone else for violating their first amendment, even though that's absurd. No one person is Congress.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This misinterpretation of the First Amendment becomes unoperationizable fast. A conference like this one only has so many speaking slots. Not every voice?-?or every perspective?-?can possibly be represented. The same is true for the front page of a newspaper. Editors must make curatorial decisions. Choosing what to amplify is not the same as curtailing someone's ability to speak.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Choosing what to amplify is not the same as curtailing someone's ability to speak.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The dot com bubble's obsession with e-commerce obfuscated the Silicon Valley obsession with building tools for online community, communication, and information access. The commitment to free speech in tech goes way back. In the 1970s and 80s, geeks built Usenet and BBSes to amplify their voices among each other without having to rely on a printing press. They (problematically) imaged themselves as extending the American frontier, not being new governors. After the bust, social media and search engines took center stage. While we can now look back at an esoteric passage of the 1996 regulation known as the Communication Decency Act (CDA-230) as the key to enabling platforms to be platforms without fear of legal prosecution, the stark reality is that no one who was building early blogging software or social network sites imagined they were doing anything other than giving people at platform to speak. They saw these tools as a gift, designed to allow people to connect in new ways, a natural extension of zines and pirate radio.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">My peers built blogging tools so that they could share their perspective on the issues of the day, even as esteemed journalists dismissed us as "web diarists." Recognizing a long history of ethnic media challenges to mainstream news media, my peers worked hard to open up the range of voices that could be heard. Tools like Slashdot, Global Voices, and reddit were all designed to increase the range of voices that people could hear. We realized that niche communities could propagate online, even if they couldn't build large enough audiences to deserve mainstream media coverage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Never in their wildest imaginations did the creators of major social media realize that their tools of amplification would be weaponized to radicalize people towards extremism, gaslight publics, or serve as vehicles of cruel harassment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Over the last 25 years, the tech industry has held steadfast to its commitment to creating new pathways for people who historically have not had access to the tools of scaled communication. Yet, at this very moment, those who built these tools and imagined letting a thousand flowers bloom are stepping back and wondering: what hath we wrought? Like the ACLU and other staunch free speech advocates, we all recognized that we would need to accept a certain amount of ugly speech. But never in their wildest imaginations did the creators of major social media realize that their tools of amplification would be weaponized to radicalize people towards extremism, gaslight publics, or serve as vehicles of cruel harassment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aiming for Search</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In early August, major technology platforms finally accepted that they needed to ban a well-known conspiracy theorist who was strategically, intentionally, and flagrantly violating their terms of service. Apple, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube removed numerous podcast and video channels he operated. These sites had previously given him warnings for violating community guidelines, but he didn't care. What worried the tech companies the most was that blocking him would feed into his agenda. They had watched it happen before.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Image: Getty?-?From Francesca Tripodi's Medium post "No, Big Tech Isn't Silencing Conservatism."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the summer of 2016, Twitter had finally blocked a different provocateur after he flaunted his violations of their Terms of Service and engaged in a sustained racist harassment campaign. He knew how to turn any effort to call him out for his harmful behaviors on its head in order to imply that it was actually him who was being oppressed. So, when he was banned from Twitter, he cried victim, arguing that he was banned for having conservative beliefs. News outlets struggled to respond to his claims, but gave him tremendous air time and ink. In the process, they made him famous. During the 2016 RNC Convention, he publicly thanked Twitter for helping him become a celebrity. Even after losing a book deal, being banned by major platforms, blocked from speaking, and being publicly shamed for his own words, this provocateur is still far more powerful in shaping views than he was before he was banned from Twitter.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After the conspiracy theorist was kicked off of major platforms in the thick of August, a frenzy of news stories emerged, reporting on the removal, dissecting the decision, challenging other technology platforms to remove his content, analyzing the responses of tech leaders, and more broadly debating the politics of free speech and the internet. TV newscasters spent hours bringing in experts to analyze the situation. With each news article, the conspiracy theorist and his channel were named. Not surprisingly, this gush of free advertising benefited the conspiracy theorist. Curious to learn more, thousands of people downloaded his App, found his website, and otherwise sought out his messages to see what he was all about. News outlets have been quick to highlight that the ban cost him significant revenue, which is true. But that wasn't his priority. His goal is to produce stunts that motivate people to see the media as a tool of censorship. He wants to cultivate a network of people who will engage in self-investigation. In other words, his goal is to convince people to look.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Media manipulators have developed a strategy with three parts that rely on how the current media ecosystem is structure:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1. Create spectacle, using social media to get news media coverage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2. Frame the spectacle through phrases that drive new audiences to find your frames through search engines.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3. Become a "digital martyr" to help radicalize others.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These steps rely on the relationship between social media, news media, and search engines. Let's dive into this through an example.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Proselytizing Conspiracy Theories</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It's not clear who first asked whether or not the massacre at Sandy Hook was a hoax, but that notion was circulating on talk radio among well-established conspiracy theorists within days of the mass shooting. The conspiracy connected multiple well-trodden frames, most notably the presence of a deep state that wanted to limit access to guns and the idea that the news media was operating on behalf of the Obama administration. As conspiratorial thinkers and other digital actors obsessed over the story, they devised a term to dismiss the people who appeared on TV. They called these people "crisis actors."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This concept is linked to an earlier phenomenon that Whitney Phillips documented: RIP trolling. In various message boards, people lamented what they called "grief tourism," referring to the tendency of well-meaning people to post messages on someone's page after they died even when they didn't know that person. In response, trolls used cruel commentary, sick jokes, and harassment to attack anyone who added to the media spectacle surrounding a person's death. RIP trolling was a form of harassment, but it was also a way of mocking how social media and news media created spectacle around death.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By labeling those who had witnessed terroristic gun violence "crisis actors," conspiracy theorists didn't simply seek to undermine those who were sharing their stories. They wanted to troll the news media. Some had a political agenda; others simply wanted to mock the media for its "grief tourism." But collectively, they wanted to seed doubt in the public about the honesty of the media's reporting.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Phrases like "crisis actor" don't spread naturally through word-of-mouth networks, even on social media. To get them into the public lexicon, media manipulators must convince major media amplifiers to work on their behalf. Over the last six years, networks of online antagonists have jumped on every mass tragedy to manipulate the media and propel this term into the mainstream. They use fake accounts on social media to talk with journalists, to ask journalists if there is any truth to the idea that witnesses are really crisis actors. They deface Wikipedia entries. They try to manipulate trending topics and autocomplete on search. But algorithmic systems aren't their target. Journalists are the real target of their digital shenanigans.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Manipulators aren't trying to get journalists to say that witnesses to gun violence and terrorism are actually crisis actors. Their goal is to get the news media to negate that frame?-?and negate the conspirators who are propagating that frame. This may be counter-intuitive, but when news media negates a conspiratorial frame, the people who are most open to such a conspiracy will want to self-investigate precisely because they don't trust the news media. As a result, negation enables a boomerang effect.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Algorithmic systems aren't their target. Journalists are the real target of their digital shenanigans.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Propelling the term into public lexicon is only the first step. Sure, it's fun to celebrate an effort to manipulate major newscasters. But a secondary goal is to get people to search for a term that they've never considered before. Once news media starts negating the concept of a crisis actor, searches for that term spiked. What did they find when they did that search? For example, in the first days after Parkland, they found blog posts and online conversations staged to mock the news media and gaslight the public.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For example, a video from the aforementioned conspiracy theorist focused on crisis actors opens with: "Are we saying the shooting didn't happen? Are we saying they're all actors and that they're faking that something happened? No. The media is saying that. What we're saying is [that] 'School Shooting Survivor Turned Activist dad, Hogg's Father in FBI appears to have been coached.'" This particular video then continues on to imply Anderson Cooper is a well-known CIA operative and describes how CNN fakes things… all to build the case that David Hogg is fundamentally a Democratic Party operative. Viewers may not believe everything, but they are initiated into frames that they've never considered. And that's the point of triggering people to search.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Using search to your advantage relies on what Michael Golebiewski at Bing calls a "data void." When people search for a phrase that does not have natural informative results, it's easy for manipulators to control the results. Take, for example, "did the Holocaust exist?" If no one produces content to combat that frame, what people get when they search for that phrase is conspiratorial. Media manipulators design and exploit data voids. They galvanize around phrases, create digital content around that phrase, and then work to push those phrases into the mainstream lexicon by using news media's instinct to cover something new. When it came to "crisis actors," they knew what search results would appear at the top, especially on YouTube.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Google and Bing rely heavily on legitimate news content to cover up data voids about breaking topics. But YouTube is a disaster. First, there's a lot less content on YouTube, which means that problematic content surfaces to the top faster. Second, YouTube isn't simply a search engine; it's also a recommendation engine that encourages people to view more videos and go on a journey. This is great for music discovery, but not so great when manipulators game the recommendation system to create pathways to extremist content. Third, while newsrooms and text creators have gotten smart about SEO on Google and Bing, they're weak with YouTube, even though it's the primary search engine for the under-25s.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">My colleague Becca Lewis is about to release a report that shows how media manipulators have leveraged data voids, recommendation processes of YouTube, and potential recruits' interest in self-investigation to walk people from quasi-mainstream debates to extremism. Through the use of comments, linking, and strategic cross-participation, those who are curious to self-investigate follow breadcrumbs that were designed to promote conspiracy and hate. Unfortunately, most media making organizations don't think about the networked nature of video or the importance of creating high quality, easily findable content on YouTube.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Data & Society Researcher Rebecca Lewis's upcoming report, to be published Tuesday, September 18. Illustration: Jim Cooke</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In addition to playing with algorithmic systems, media manipulators exploit a psychological process known as "apophenia." By creating connections between random ideas, manipulators warp the cultural imaginary. By inviting people to see artificial patterns, they engage potential recruits to see reality in their terms. As part of the indoctrination process, they want those who are self-investigating to start to see media manipulators as being persecuted for revealing a reality that others seek to suppress.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Digital Martyrdom</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Martyrdom exists in most ancient religions. People have died violently and symbolically for their faith so that others could pursue the religious ideals that the martyr believed. In modern times, martyrdom has become more complicated. On one hand, there has been a rise of what can be understood as political martyrdom, as people have taken their lives to raise public awareness to a cause. On the other, we've seen the proliferation of mass murder to terrorize be committed under the false pretenses of religious martyrdom.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When we speak of martyrdom, we speak of death or the end of mortality. Given the grave nature of these acts, it's hard to draw on this concept metaphorically. But given the perversion of martyrdom in the last 20 years to maximize fear within society, I feel it is only appropriate to also speak of the kinds of digital martyrdom that we are seeing emerge.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most social media users who are given Terms of Service violation warnings quickly change their behavior. This is not the case for media manipulators. They know the rules, intend to flaunt them, and actively dare platforms to mess with them. They believe that being digitally crucified is to their cause's long-term advantage, especially if media outlets will cover their digital execution. So they push and they push, they hurt other people and refuse to respond appropriately to restrictions. They bend the rules, leverage irony to their advantage, and engage in rhetorical games so that it's hard to pin them to the wall. They know what they're doing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">They've learned that the key to their success is to become newsworthy in your minds.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Their practices remind me a lot of what a hateful homophobic Kansas minister used to do when he protested the funerals of LGBT people and picketed gay pride events. He knew the law, but he also knew how to trick those who opposed him into violating the law. Just as lawmakers struggled to devise laws that would stop his hateful actions, tech companies struggle to find policies that will prevent toxic abuse. Media manipulators know how to exploit the edges. And they know to argue that tech companies aren't supporting free speech when they do get banned. More importantly, they've learned that the key to their success is to become newsworthy in your minds.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Journalistic Idealism</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I've never met a journalist who entered the profession for nefarious reasons. Hell, I've never met a journalist who entered the field to make money either. Like educators, most journalists are passionate about giving people access to information. Most espouse the ideals of journalism in a democracy. And let's be honest, that idealism is essential for surviving the constant flood of attacks.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Journalistic idealism is very familiar to me. It's easy now to lambast major tech companies and accuse engineers of doing evil things for money, but the tech industry that I entered in the 1990s was full of idealism. Full of a belief in changing the world for the better.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The downside to embracing idealism is that it's hard to be reflexive, hear criticism, or be challenged. This is why accusing journalists and engineers of anti-conservative bias is so effective?-?neither want to see themselves as biased. So they twist themselves in knots to challenge such a critique. As a result, I recognize that it's hard not to get defensive when someone like me suggests that you might be part of the problem, whether you're a journalist or engineer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Understanding the vulnerabilities in news media that manipulators see can help you strengthen your approach.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I was wary in preparing this speech of being too critical of a profession under fire. But I'm hoping that you can hear what I'm saying. Because our democracy depends on you recognizing that you are being manipulated. Understanding the vulnerabilities in news media that manipulators see can help you strengthen your approach.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Illustration: Jim Cooke</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ROI Capitalism and Journalism</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Given this, we need to talk about capitalism. In this country, we are socialized into a narrative of capitalism that no longer exists. The capitalism of yore emphasizes how efficient markets can enable innovation and growth, while yielding all sorts of social benefits. Capitalism always required people to take financial risks, but over the last 40 years, we've seen the rise of a new set of financial instruments that are divorced from the services and products that are being produced. The finance sector has become an increasingly extractive instrument enabling a new genre of capitalism that emphasizes short term return on investment. This version of capitalism is corrosive and, without proper checks and balances, it has shaped every sector in society.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To complicate matters, it's not just financiers that depend on the system that has been set up. We all do. University endowments, pension funds, and 401Ks are wedded to this financial system. We all want the stock market to keep going up. But quick return-on-investment style capitalism has costs. It means that every public company is under pressure to make more money quarter after quarter. Consider a company like Facebook under this model. Sure, Zuckerberg might have a controlling share of the company, but his ability to keep engineering talent is dependent on increasing the stock price. To do so, Facebook has three options. They either need to find more users, make more money per user, or diversify their portfolio of money making services. Only so much of that can be doing without tripping over the edge into exploitation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But it's not just Facebook that's beholden to this form of capitalism. The news industry has also been undermined by the financial sector. When you ask most folks about why journalism is currently struggling, they quickly point to the tech industry. There's no doubt that Craigslist and Google altered the advertising industry or that the internet and mobile phones changed how people consumed information. But the financial precarity of the news industry began long before these changes. Hedge funds and private equity started taking over newsrooms in the 1980s. They weren't interested in the news business. They wanted your precious real estate. It wasn't in their interest to shut you down right away, but they aren't committed to your sustainability either.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most Americans do not trust journalism. But this isn't because of your reporting. It's because you're an abstraction. It's because of the loss of local journalism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many newsrooms twisted themselves in knots to appease financiers?-?cutting costs, ending pensions, reducing staff, etc. But it was never enough, was it? Publicly traded companies in the United States are not valued for having a double bottom line. If you're not making more each quarter, you will eventually collapse in this financial context. Trying to appease, the industry doubled down on advertising, failing to recognize how the water was starting to boil. So when sweeping changes to advertising happened, it was easy to blame teach for the downfall of journalism. But it wasn't tech. It wasn't simply your financial model. It was the entire financial infrastructure that financialized capitalism enabled. While there are ways in which newsrooms can be financially sustainable, the healthy practice of investigative journalism is not compatible with the ROI that the Street expects.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I don't know if the private equity and hedge fund firms that exploited local news organizations recognized how much society would pay for the loss of local journalism. But I know that we're feeling that pain right now. Most Americans do not trust journalism. But this isn't because of your reporting. It's because you're an abstraction. It's because of the loss of local journalism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While he attended all of the sessions of the Constitutional Convention, George Washington did not participate in any of the debates that took place. Except one. After an early draft of the Constitution suggested that members of the House of Representatives should each represent 40,000 people, he argued that the number should be reduced to 30,000. He knew that the delicate American democracy depended on people knowing their representatives and felt that any number greater than 30,000 would create an elite governance class and trigger distrust in the public. Today, each member of the House represents more than 700,000 people. And most Americans do not trust our federal government.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trust is rooted in networks. If you don't know a journalist?-?or know someone who knows a journalist?-?why should you trust the profession? Thirty years ago, most people knew someone in their community that worked for a newspaper. That is not true today.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why did TV news develop such great gravitas in the middle of the 20th century? Many Americans felt like they knew Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite. TV anchors came directly into your living room. Psychologists refer to this as parasocial interaction, where the audience feels as though they know someone as real people. That's a great trick for working around actual social networks. It's the reason for news commentators' success. It's also why all sorts of pundits, conspiracy theorists, and toxic commentators have created regular podcasts and YouTube channels.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You won't be able to earn the trust of the American public by doubling down on your rigorous reporting. Or by focusing on the brand of your organizations. Or by trying desperately to appease those who accuse you of "anti-conservative bias." You will only earn the trust of the American public when you once again become a part of the American fabric. When people in communities around this country know you. When they understand your practices because you are part of their communities. When you are a part of their everyday lives.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You will only earn the trust of the American public when you once again become a part of the American fabric.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In short, you must actively seek to understand the social graph of the American public and build a relational campaign of direct engagement that isn't that different than what innovative politicians are trying to do. Or what my colleague Nancy Baym highlights has been necessary for musicians. In order to be effective journalists, you need to find a way to be a part of the social fabric of America and you need to knit that fabric together through your connections. That's the innovation that's most critical?-?and most unfamiliar?-?to those in the news business.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Strategic Amplification</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the meantime, you face another challenge. If manipulators are trying to use you to help polarize American society, how do you not take the bait? How do you not allow the trust problem to worsen?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">First, recognize that the rubric with which you decide what to devote time to is not neutral. I don't mean this in a condescending or pejorative sense. I mean: own the fact that what makes something newsworthy is subjective. It depends on the power of the actors involved. It depends on the norms of your audience. It depends on the implications for specific communities or countries. Many of you have honed muscles to focus on some stories and not others. Yet, you must also find a hook to make a newsworthy story relevant to your readers. You must navigate business interests alongside the recognition that an exhausted public might prefer junk food. Furthermore, because your organizations are rooted in an industry and culture of competition, you're under pressure to be attentive to what others have deemed newsworthy. There be dragons everywhere. But like a yogi or jedi, your challenge is to constantly improve your awareness of the pressures and adversaries you face and evolve your strategy for navigating them.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Next, recognize that, in a networked era, every organizational and communicative process is exploitable. When journalism was the primary information gatekeeper in society, it was hard for a story to "break" without journalists being involved. But now, just as algorithmic manipulators have learned to engage in search engine optimization and game Twitter's trending topics, media manipulators have figured out how to trick you into telling their story. Accept this and outsmart them.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Illustration: Jim Cooke</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Case studies are often valuable for seeing traps. So let's look at one. In 2010, an extremist anti-Islam pastor named Terry Jones began using social media to publicly threaten to burn the Qu'ran in order to draw attention to his belief that "Islam is of the Devil." His goal was to attract the attention of mainstream news media who, by and large, initially ignored him. Bloggers and smaller news venues did not. He leveraged the coverage of lesser-known bloggers, along with the algorithmic systems underpinning Yahoo! News to put pressure on journalists to cover the story as newsworthy. Eventually, it worked. As this escalated, the media then covered Secretary Clinton stating, "It's regrettable that a pastor in Gainesville, Florida with a church of no more than fifty people can make this outrageous and distressful, disgraceful plan and get, you know, the world's attention." By this point, religious and political leaders were publicly asking him to cancel his plans. He vowed not to burn a Qu'ran, but then the media coverage faded. So, in March 2011, he oversaw the burning of the Qu'ran, which was of course covered by every news outlet who were primed to give him attention. Violent protests broke out in Afghanistan, resulting in the deaths of at least 12 people, including at least 7 United Nations workers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not all media are created equal. Yes, a blog post can go viral. But when a major news outlet chooses to cover a story that had only received oxygen from bloggers, they amplify the message to wider audience. Mainstream news decisions matter. Even in a world of social media. What you choose to amplify has significant ramifications in what people discuss, share, and self-investigate. In her brilliant report "The Oxygen of Amplification," my colleague Whitney Phillips used journalists' own words and experiences to detail how news media has been hijacked to amplify the messages of hate groups using the exact same techniques that both marketing firms and the hateful pastor used.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As Joan Donovan and I struggled to offer advice to journalists in light of media manipulation, we pulled on threads of history. She uncovered details about how newsrooms learned to respond to their recognition that when they covered the KKK in the mid-20th century, they served the goals of hate rally organizers. I was more obsessed with the history of the Werther Effect, which makes it very clear that how a news outlet covers a death by suicide can affect the likelihood of copycats. (Side note: as a board member of Crisis Text Line, I'm very frustrated by how Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain's deaths were covered.) The scholarly literature describes the technique journalists can use to minimize harm as "strategic silence." So we used this term. Yet, no matter how much we emphasized the strategic component of this practice, those in the news business consistently reacted with outrage that we were arguing that they should be silent.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Case in point. When I broached this topic with the publisher of an esteemed newspaper, he told me that the Pentagon is regularly telling him not to publish things and that it's his responsibility to make sure that the public hears what it needs to hear. I completely agree with him. But when the Pentagon is breathing down his neck, I can promise you that his lawyers have been called and that he and his editorial team have dotted every i and crossed every t. They're careful because they've made a very hard call and they get the cost of doing it wrong. They've made a very strategic call. And they want the public to hear a message clearly.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In other words, news organizations already engage in strategic amplification. You regularly choose to cover stories that are too critical, too newsworthy to ignore. And you've thought long and hard about how to tell that story because you don't want any slip-up to undermine your goal of conveying crucial information to the public. My wish is not to silence stories, but for you to recognize that it's as important to be sensitive to frames that benefit media manipulators as it is to be attentive to the ones that upset governments or corporations that might sue you.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You're in the business of strategic amplification. There are all sorts of things that are effectively silenced in the process. Some aren't deemed newsworthy. Cats sitting on people's laps. But there are also newsworthy stories that don't get covered because it's hard to convince the public that it matters. All of you covering Syria know that what's unfolding in Idlib is a disaster in the making, but finding the angle to make this front page news is bloody hard. If you can recognize your agency and power in choosing what to amplify, what's the value in amplifying messages designed to polarize, radicalize, or bolster those peddling hate?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How you tell a story also matters. I would argue that you can effectively cover stories without serving the agenda of extremists if you understand what they're trying to do. Let me give you a concrete example.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When a 25-year-old struck terror on the streets of Toronto by driving a van over people, the incident was unquestionably newsworthy. Journalists scrambled for clues. Soon after, an angry Facebook post emerged, suggesting a connection to an earlier shooting in California. What connected these two young men appeared to be a shared misogynistic attitude. They both seemed to have participated in online forums full of angry men who feel as though someone else is to be blamed for their loneliness. They typically blame feminists, arguing that they should have a right to "a woman" and that feminists have taken that away from them. They advocate for enforced monogamy and reject the idea that rape is a bad thing. Their hateful views are supported in toned down forms by more legitimate figures, including a university professor at the University of Toronto, across town from where the act of vehicular terrorism took place. They are also connected through a term, a term that journalists latched onto and amplified to magnify the seriousness of the terroristic act. A term that most of the public had not known prior to the media coverage. A term that invited your readers to go searching and find a world of deep toxicity that only grew after Toronto.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I understand that the term "incel" was provocative and would excite your readers to learn more, but were those of you who propagated this term intending to open a portal to hell? What made amplifying this term newsworthy? You could've conveyed the same information without giving people a search term that served as a recruiting vehicle for those propagating toxic masculinity. Choosing not to amplify hateful recruiting terms is not censorship. You wouldn't give your readers a phone number to join the KKK, so why give them a digital calling card?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Illustration: Data & Society</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In my mind, this is about smart reporting. You don't need to send people to data voids or offer free advertising to hate groups to tell the story of a terroristic act rooted in toxic masculinity. I get that you feel that it's important to cover "both sides" of a story. But since when is intolerance and hate a legitimate "side"? By focusing on bystanders and those who are victimized by hate, you can tell the story without reinforcing the violence. Extremists have learned how to use irony and slippery rhetoric to mask themselves as conservatives and argue that they are victims. Ignore their attention games and focus your reporting on the wide range of non-hateful political views in this country that aren't screaming loudly to get your attention. There is no need to give oxygen to fringe groups who acting like the bully in the 3rd grade classroom. Inform the public without helping extremists recruit. This isn't about newsworthiness. And it's unethical to self-justify that others are using the term. Or that people could've found this information on social media or search engines. Your business is in amplifying what's important. So don't throw in the towel.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Theory of Power</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 1927, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously argued that the remedy to bad speech is more speech, not enforced silence. At the time, there was widespread agreement that speech can and must be curbed when it presented a "clear and present danger." In Whitney v. California, Brandeis argued that it was unjust to prosecute a woman who was accused of helping the Communist Labor Party promote a violent overthrow of the government. He felt that political speech?-?even dangerous speech?-?was essential to democracy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Because of cases like this, Brandeis became known as one of the greatest advocates for free speech. But while Brandeis believed that anyone had the right to express their views, he did not believe that anyone had the right to be amplified.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More importantly, he didn't believe that anyone who had the means to shove a message down someone's throat had the right to do so. In a 1932 case known as Packer Corporation v. Utah, Brandeis argued that Utah had the right to place restrictions on billboard advertisements by the tobacco industry. He argued that billboards must be treated differently than magazines because the former had "captive audiences." In other words, people could choose whether or not to view a magazine, but to avoid a billboard, they'd have to intentionally divert their eyes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The media landscape has changed significantly over the last 86 years, but the nuance in Brandeis' arguments lives on. Brandeis recognized that the key to sustaining a commitment to free speech is to have a rich understanding of how people can abuse their power or manipulate the system to control what others hear. He also recognized that as the media landscape changed, so must our approach in enabling the First Amendment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, more than ever, we need a press driven by ideals determined to amplify what is most important for enabling an informed citizenry.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This country was premised on the necessity of a free press. Journalism is an essential part of our democracy, not because of its financial power, but because of its ability to inform the public to enable self-governance. The press' unique role in our country is rooted in its historically unique capacity to amplify information. Yet, just because the news media is no longer the only gatekeeper does not mean that its responsibilities to democratic governance can be ignored. Now, more than ever, we need a press driven by ideals determined to amplify what is most important for enabling an informed citizenry. Not what will get clicks or appease hedge fund masters. We need voices who are information stalwarts, determined to explain complex issues to the public.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I'm not suggesting that you ignore where the public is. To the contrary, start with their questions. Create explainer videos. Help people connect the dots between Syria and climate change by strategically linking content together so that people can follow the paths through compelling evidence-based content and learn more about hard topics.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many of you have thoughtfully critiqued the tech industry for amplifying disinformation while claiming that its platforms are neutral actors in the information landscape. There is indeed nothing neutral about an algorithmic system. Algorithmic systems fundamentally function by creating networks and enabling others to do so. And the moment that an algorithmic system affects what information people access, someone will work to manipulate that system to achieve their information goals.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You are not algorithms. But you are also not neutral. And because you have the power to amplify messages, people also want to manipulate you. That's just par for the course. And in today's day and age, it's not just corporations, governments, and PR shops that have your number. Just as the US military needed to change tactics to grapple with a tribal, networked, and distributed adversary, so must you. Focus on networks?-?help connect people to information. Build networks across information and across people. Be an embedded part of the social fabric of this country.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Democracy depends on you.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This talk builds on the amazing work of many people at Data & Society, including and especially the Media Manipulation team. Data & Society would also like to thank the News Integrity Initiative, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for supporting our work in this area.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mma</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Right-wing “journalist” Laura Loomer was de-verified on Twitter in 2017 after she exploded in an unhinged anti-Muslim meltdown, which prompted her to compare the site to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler. Today, she joined other conspiracy theorists—including Alex Jones—on Capitol Hill and made her presence felt at hearings featuring Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Allegations that Twitter and other major social media platforms have discriminated in the enforcement of their terms of service to target conservatives have for the past year been bubbling out of the conspiracy theory fever swamps of the internet—where right-wing activists have been subject to suspensions and bans as platforms move to combat misinformation—into the GOP mainline, where they have inspired Congressional hearings. Aside from a handful of anecdotal stories about terms of enforcement errors, no tangible evidence exists to prove that tech companies are actually doing what the conspiracy theorists—and now GOP members of Congress—have claimed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today, representatives from Facebook and Twitter were called to testify before the House and Senate about misinformation on the platform and the way enforcement is carried out. The hearings attracted a swarm of right-wing media figures who work in the conspiracy theory media market, including Infowars’ Jones, One America News’ Jack Posobiec, alt-right troll Chuck Johnson, and Gateway Pundit’s Cassandra Fairbanks. These conspiracy theorists did not go quietly.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jones spent a brief moment lambasting CNN’s Oliver Darcy, whose reporting on Infowars’ de-platforming has led Jones and his colleagues to target him with a smear campaign alleging that Darcy is anti-American and working on behalf of the communist Chinese government. [pix twit]When Twitter’s Dorsey exited the Capitol after the morning meeting, he faced a scrum of reporters intermingled with conspiracy theorists. As Dorsey entered his vehicle, Loomer yelled at him: “You unverified me and called me a white supremacist! I’m Jewish! You violated my First Amendment right.” Jones rambled about something to do with CIA and Barack Obama.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Dorsey returned in the afternoon, he headed to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce for a personal grilling from Republicans based on the unsubstantiated claim that his website is systemically censoring conservative voices. While Dorsey repeatedly denied that his site discriminates against conservatives, he received a second dose of Loomer’s antics.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">About an hour after the afternoon session began, Loomer interrupted the House hearing by bellowing that President Trump must “help us before it’s too late because Jack Dorsey is trying to influence the election, to sway the election so that Democrats can steal the election.” Rep. Billy Long of Missouri began rattling off like an auctioneer while Capitol Police escorted Loomer out of the chamber[pix]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Twitter Ads info and privacy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But as HuffPost’s Ashley Feinberg rightfully pointed out, while Rep. Long and his GOP colleagues may have enjoyed ridiculing Loomer, the conspiracy theories pushed by Loomer and her ilk are the basis of today’s largely pointless meetings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tags: Alex JonesCassandra FairbanksCharles JohnsonJack PosobiecLaura Loomerconspiracy theoriesMediatech companiesGateway PunditInfoWarsOne America News</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">aha post jones de-platform:  --> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cohn Syndrome: interpret all as attack?] deny everything, counter-attack --> amplify?  tolerance/addiction --> constant escalation?  in echo bubble, no balancing info/ fdbk FB social media algorithm amplifies the sensational (eg hothouse v stabilized Earth)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">addiction is systemic, amplifying feedback, but also symptomatic of system degredation, eg opioids</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/7/headlines/social_media_platforms_remove_alex_jones_citing_hate_speech</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Apple, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Spotify have removed Alex Jones and his Infowars website from their platforms. Apple removed five of Jones’ six podcasts, saying, “Apple does not tolerate hate speech.” Facebook said it removed Jones’s pages because he was “glorifying violence” and “using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants.” Alex Jones regularly spreads far-right-wing conspiracy theories. He’s being sued by the parents of the elementary school children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting for claiming the massacre was a hoax staged by gun control advocates.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-our-brains-are-best-defense-against-foreign-election-interference</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...However, I believe this isn’t a new form of war at all: Rather, it is the same old strategies taking advantage of the latest available technologies. Just as online marketing companies use sponsored content and search engine manipulation to distribute biased information to the public, governments are using internet-based tools to pursue their agendas. In other words, they’re hacking a different kind of system through social engineering on a grand scale. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Old goals, new techniques</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More than 2,400 years ago, the Chinese military strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu made it an axiom of war that it’s best to “subdue the enemy without fighting.” Using information – or disinformation, or propaganda – as a weapon can be one way to destabilize a population and disable the target country. In 1984 a former KGB agent who defected to the West discussed this as a long-term process and more or less predicted what’s happening in the U.S. now.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Russians created false social media accounts to simulate political activists – such as @TEN_GOP, which purported to be associated with the Tennessee Republican Party. Just that one account attracted more than 100,000 followers. The goal was to distribute propaganda, such as captioned photos, posters or short animated graphics, purposely designed to enrage and engage these accounts’ followers. Those people would then pass the information along through their own personal social networks.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Starting from seeds planted by Russian fakers, including some who claimed to be U.S. citizens, those ideas grew and flourished through amplification by real people. Unfortunately, whether originating from Russia or elsewhere, fake information and conspiracy theories can form the basis for discussion at major partisan media outlets.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As ideas with niche online beginnings moved into the traditional mass media landscape, they serve to keep controversies alive by sustaining divisive arguments on both sides. For instance, one Russian troll factory had its online personas host rallies both for and against each of the major candidates in the 2016 presidential election. Though the rallies never took place, the online buzz about them helped inflame divisions in society.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The trolls also set up Twitter accounts purportedly representing local news organizations – including defunct ones – to take advantage of Americans’ greater trust of local news sources than national ones. These accounts operated for several years – one for the Chicago Daily News, closed since 1978, was created in May 2014 and collected 20,000 followers – passing along legitimate local news stories, likely seeking to win followers’ trust ahead of future disinformation campaigns. Shut down before they could fulfill that end, these accounts cleverly aimed to exploit the fact that many Americans’ political views cloud their ability to separate fact from opinion in the news.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These sorts of activities are functions of traditional espionage: Foment discord and then sit back while the target population becomes distracted arguing among themselves.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fighting digital disinformation is hard</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Analyzing, let alone countering, this type of provocative behavior can be difficult. Russia isn’t alone, either: The U.S. tries to influence foreign audiences and global opinions, including through Voice of America online and radio services and intelligence services’ activities. And it’s not just governments that get involved. Companies, advocacy groups and others also can conduct disinformation campaigns.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unfortunately, laws and regulations are ineffective remedies. Further, social media companies have been fairly slow to respond to this phenomenon. Twitter reportedly suspended more than 70 million fake accounts earlier this summer. That included nearly 50 social media accounts like the fake Chicago Daily News one.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Facebook, too, says it is working to reduce the spread of “fake news” on its platform. Yet both companies make their money from users’ activity on their sites – so they are conflicted, trying to stifle misleading content while also boosting users’ involvement.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Real defense happens in the brain</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The best protection against threats to the cognitive dimension of cyberspace depends on users’ own actions and knowledge. Objectively educated, rational citizens should serve as the foundation of a strong democratic society. But that defense fails if people don’t have the skills – or worse, don’t use them – to think critically about what they’re seeing and examine claims of fact before accepting them as true.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">American voters expect ongoing Russian interference in U.S. elections. In fact, it appears to have already begun. To help combat that influence, the U.S. Justice Department plans to alert the public when its investigations discover foreign espionage, hacking and disinformation relating to the upcoming 2018 midterm elections. And the National Security Agency has created a task force to counter Russian hacking of election systems and major political parties’ computer networks.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ConversationThese efforts are a good start, but the real solution will begin when people start realizing they’re being subjected to this sort of cognitive attack and that it’s not all just a hoax.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Richard Forno, Senior Lecturer, Cybersecurity & Internet Researcher, University of Maryland, Baltimore County</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/how-trump-used-facebook-2016-and-why-thats-coming-every-important-race-year</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Parscale do for Trump in 2016 that is setting the standard for 2018?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If I had to characterize what the Trump campaign did, they automated Facebook’s best [advertising] practices at a very large scale. I think that statewide campaigns will try to do the same kind of thing in 2018,” said Colin Delany, founder of Epolitics. “I’m wondering if any new technology is going to come out of the resistance. It’s possible. I think a lot of what you are seeing is training and capacity building.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In other words, Democrats are playing catchup to Republicans, compared to 2016, when their presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee—under a series of chairwomen—were more focused on older media platforms like TV, rather than new platforms like social media.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To begin to understand how Parscale, an online advertising specialist, went from building websites for Trump products, to running Trump’s online messaging and fundraising in 2016, to assisting the RNC with small donor outreach in 2018, to being named Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, you have to examine how Parscale used Facebook.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Consultants like Delany are quick to say they can’t tell you how the Trump campaign’s messaging specifically affected voters when they cast ballots. But they can say how Parscale used Facebook, which revolutionized how national campaigns targeted and messaged likely voters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Trump campaign took voter files from the Republican Party, which had people’s electoral histories—age, gender, address, party registration and voting histories. They took more personalized data by Cambridge Analytica, the data-mining firm run by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, which boasted it had psychological profiles of every voter. (On Friday, Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica for not deleting data taken from the social network in 2016 to create its voter profiles. The Guardian reported Cambridge Analytica's data was culled from 50 million to 60 million Facebook user profiles it had stolen before it joined the Trump campaign.)If you roll back the clock to before the internet, a baseline emerges showing how much has changed. When I was press secretary on the 1990 campaign that first elected Bernie Sanders to the House of Representatives, I remember picking up a half-dozen TV ads for the campaign’s final stretch. Bernie looked at the stack of 30-second videos and said his future rested on those tapes. That was a statewide race in a rural state with small media markets, but compare its scale to what Parscale and Facebook did for Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s no secret. An October 2016 in-depth report by Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg for Bloomberg.com laid out the basics. It started with indentifying persuadable voters in swing states, and then sending messaging poking at their biases and personality types. More recent reports, such as this weekend's Guardian report featuring a Trump campaign whistleblower, added more detail showing how powerful Facebook's user profiles were in 2016.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The campaign put all that voter profiling data into Facebook’s advertising supercomputers, which had its own deep profiles of users based on their pages, communications and networks. Facebook provided staffers to every major campaign in 2016 to facilitate this process. From that data merging and data mining, Parscale oversaw an operation that identified 13.5 million Facebook users in 16 states that it deemed were persuadable. It targeted those individuals with the kind of personality-driven content that social media emphasizes—more opinion, belief and bias than facts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Trump campaign didn’t just send out original content, noted Melissa Ryan, who writes the Ctrl Alt Right Delete newsletter. “The Trump campaign put out relatively few ideas of their own,” she explained on Medium.com. “Instead they chose to validate and amplify the conversation happening online. They didn’t need to confirm or deny anything, they simply gave Trump’s army their megaphone… [It] put their supporters one content front and center, taking a backseat in their own campaign.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They were banking that people are more likely to believe something from an unofficial source that seems true rather than to believe something from an official source that actually is true,” Ryan explained. “Once they realized there was no line to cross, they went all in using social media to bully and intimidate others, spread misinformation, and mainstream the language of hate. Those who spoke out were met with a flood of abuse, and that abuse was organized. Their targets had few places to turn as tech companies turned a blind eye, and law enforcement was of little help.”  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By late October, days before former FBI director James Comey announced the FBI was reopening its investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified emails, the Bloomberg reporting team said Parscale’s crew of subcontractors had determined “which social media ads [messages, memes, shares, etc.] were most effective. Those companies test ad variations against one another—the campaign ultimately generated 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content—and then roll out the strongest performers to broader audiences.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Facebook allowed Parscale to build and target what it calls “custom audiences,” as ex-Facebook executive Antonio Garcia-Martinez explained in a Wired piece, “How Trump Conquered Facebook—Without Russian Ads.” Its custom audience consisted of all the impressionable voters—Trump enthusiasts on one hand, Democrats dubious about Clinton on the other—who could be encouraged to vote or encouraged not to.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Then the campaign used another Facebook advertising feature built atop that preliminary customization called “Lookalike Audiences.” It targeted another wider circle of Facebook users in the swing constituencies in swing states. Some of this was to keep Trump’s base engaged. Some was to discourage three key columns of Clinton supporters from voting. As Bloomberg noted, “idealistic white liberal, young women and African Americans” were the targets of Trump’s three voter suppression campaigns.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Garcia-Martinez, the original product manager for "Custom Audiences,” explained how the Trump campaign targeted audiences and then fed it content, often propaganda from other online sources. This explains how Breitbart.com temporarily had more traffic than Fox News in the campaign’s final weeks. But Garcia-Martinez’s explanation also alludes to platform features that are designed to be psychologically engaging and provoke emotional responses. It starts with creating political echo chambers filled with like-minded associates. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We’ve all contributed to this political balkanization by self-sorting (or being sorted by Facebook) into online tribes that get morphed into filter bubbles, which are then studiously colonized by commercial memes planted and spread there by a combination of Custom and Lookalike Audiences,” he wrote. “One of the ways the Trump campaign leveraged Lookalike Audiences was through its voter suppression campaigns among likely Clinton voters. They seeded the Audiences assembly line with content about Clinton that was engaging but dispiriting. This is one of the ways that Trump won the election, by the very tools that were originally built to help companies like Bed Bath & Beyond sell you towels.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Colin Delany, the online media consultant and author on the topic, is quick to point out that it’s impossible to trace how all this messaging affected voters’ behavior when they cast their 2016 ballots. That’s because the thread Parscale could observe—whether messaging recipients liked, commented on or shared his handiwork—was broken as voters put down their devices and picked up ballots.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Delany said there was another metric that confirmed how powerful and engaging Facebook was before 2016’s Election Day. It helped raise a fortune for Trump.  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Now one of the main things with Facebook is this is one of the few operations that I’ve heard of that’s been able to raise a significant amount of money by targeting people on Facebook,” he said. “Now my suspicion is that almost all the money actually got raised by email. But they would identify and recruit the people via Facebook.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If you can get them to respond to the first fundraising pitch and give you $5, then you are in their email program. Or you get them to sign a petition. You get them to do whatever it is that gets them the email address,” Delany said. “The small donor lists that the RNC is using to pretty good effect right now comes out of the work that Parscale did for Trump. If you want to look for results, I think you can look to social media fundraising.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Seen from that metric, there’s no denying the political power of social media. With 10 days to go before Election Day, Bloomberg reported that Parscale’s operation raised $275 million from 2.5 million small donors. That’s more than the nearly $238 million raised by the Sanders presidential campaign from his grassroots base. Think about that: Parscale’s operation outraised Bernie’s operation—but Parscale isn’t bragging about it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Clinton campaign, as many political insiders and former Facebook executives have said, didn’t use Facebook as aggressively. In one intriguing series of recent tweets, these tech and political insiders said that Democrats in general rely more on TV ads than online messaging, partly because political consultants can earn more that way. They also said her campaign was relying on dated internal assessments by Facebook (from 2010) about its affects on voter participation, and that overall, its campaigns discounted—and didn’t sufficiently study—“observational political science,” or how voters responded to social media provocations in focus groups.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These cringe-worthy observations are part and parcel of political campaigns, which are like startups that rapidly pop up and then mostly disappear after Election Day. Political campaigns are perpetually in search of messaging and fundraising infrastructure they can use; just as institutions like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have created infrastructure seeking new users. Garcia-Martinez, reached by email, said he was stunned by how little political professionals—and academics who study politics—know about advertising.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“My recent [Wired] piece tossed me into a few threads with political/election/academic Twitter, and I found it a very strange world,” he wrote. “Very punctiliously following strict experimental protocols and the scientific method, and also not knowing the first fking thing about how to advertise on Facebook (their studies measure what they can as outsiders, which isn't much). It is a leap of faith to just assume Facebook ads work for politics.... but without question, they work for more commercial direct-response advertisers.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">His takeaway: “Parscale is hailed as this genius, but all he did is what any reasonably savvy ecommerce operation would have done, and that set him way beyond Hillary and the supposedly ‘best and brightest.’ Which is why, as Delany and Graves, campaign media consultants and columnists, said, social media will be at the center of 2018’s elections for control of Congress and constitutional offices in swing states.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steven Rosenfeld </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">OMFG RW ju jitsu?!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">privacy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">never connect petit to social media before, aha</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Avaaz worries about the scope of the subpoena, as it would also include the names and email addresses of members who have signed Monsanto petitions. GM Watch noted that one of its petitions calling for a moratorium on glyphosate garnered more than 2 million signatures.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The subpoena was issued as part of a class-action lawsuit against Monsanto in which plaintiffs around the country claim that they or their loved ones developed non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma due to exposure to Roundup.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Avaaz is now fighting back and is raising funds for the defense effort. The group will be represented by the New York firm of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, LLP.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"This is big," Avaaz writes in a new petition. "[Monsanto's] a $50 billion mega-corporation, infamous for legal strong-arm tactics like this. They have unlimited resources. If they get their hands on all our private information, there's no telling what they'll use it for."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Emma Ruby-Sachs, Deputy Director of Avaaz, said Monsanto's demand for internal communications is a "violation" of first amendment rights.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"There are millions of people around the world who have a deep and genuine concern that Monsanto's glyphosate is making us and our environment sick," she added. "That is the sole reason our members have called on governments to regulate it based on independent science. We're not going to let this legal attack slow down that essential work one bit."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Monsanto's Fingerprints All Over Newsweek's Opinion Piece, a Hit ... ›</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Carey Gillam on Monsanto, Cancer and the Corruption of Science ... ›</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Monsanto's Roundup Faces European Politics and U.S. Lawsuits ... ›</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mma 2/18</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Study: Trump supporters spread most of the "junk news"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A new Oxford study shows that most "junk news" on social media is spread by Trump supporters. As Media Matters visiting fellow Melissa Ryan shows, this is a huge structural problem that ends up infecting the entire media ecosystem. Take for example the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag, which research shows was driven both by Russian-linked bots and Trump supporters on social media. That it was trending on social media gave it a push to be covered by mainstream outlets. Nowadays, there often seems to be way too many things for the news to cover; that Trump supporters have figured out a way to game that without the media really understanding how is a huge problem.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/russian-hacking-isnt-biggest-threat-2018s-elections-its-conspiracies-spread-silicon</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Americans who care about democracy and voting should stop jumping to conclusions about Russians hunkered down in Moscow cyber-bunkers, and instead look at what’s happening on these shores as shoddy journalists and Silicon Valley’s content curators are doing Vladimir Putin’s work for him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last week, a mini-drama played out in the world of American elections, Russian interference and vote-hacking conspiracies that was a microcosm of the same online dynamics that tilted and force-fed American voters seven times as much Hillary-hating propaganda on YouTube as comparable anti-Trump content.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This snapshot reveals that little has changed in the misinformation engines driving the attention economy. This is the frail state of American democracy today, where the most powerful content curators, opportunistic partisans, poorly informed journalists—and yes, overseas adversaries—are funneling and amplifying “divisive, sensational and conspiratorial” content, as one authoritative report put it, further undermining already shaky public confidence in voting.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Russia probably realizes, despite what a lot of people in the progressive community and other communities probably think, it’s really hard to change the outcome in a race; to change it [the count] to what they might want to occur,” said a former Justice Department lawyer who now advises state election officials. “That [theft] would require a lot of Americans engaged in an active conspiracy here on the ground; thousands of people.”  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“But for less money and risk, they can get us to do their job for them,” he said. “They can get us to doubt our own election system; to doubt the machinery of American democracy. And they have been enormously successful in that. And I think the NBC piece [this week] is part and parcel of that. When you talk about, hysterically, risks that everyone has known about for nearly a year, and you don’t talk about all the work that’s been done since then, you don’t interview a single election official, you’re basically trying to put people into a state of hysteria about how their vote is not going to count. That’s really damaging. That’s going to undermine our democracy.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Misinformation Engines</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Americans received more bad news about voting this week. But amid all the news—such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson saying that Russia was already interfering in 2018’s elections but giving no details—one sloppy report stood out and ignited a stream of copycat and increasingly conspiratorial posts amplified by the web’s content-pushing algorithms. On Wednesday, NBC News aired an "exclusive” interview with Jeanette Manfra, the Department of Homeland Security cyber security head, who reported that Russia had not targeted, but “penetrated” state voter systems in 2016.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">First, NBC didn’t understand what she said. “NBC chose to interpret that statement to mean ‘several states’ were successfully penetrated. We are still only aware of one state voter registration system that was penetrated and that office made a public statement at the time,” the National Association of Secretaries of State noted on its website. Moreover, Manfra said nothing new. She repeated her testimony to Senate Intelligence Committee from June 2017, even using the same words.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nonetheless, journalists who don’t know how voting works, nor what Russia did and didn’t do in 2016's elections, went wild. They quickly said what’s most alarming and factually unsupported: that Russia all but stole the vote for Trump, or offered slightly less hyperbolic variations of that conspiratorial theme.  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Esquire’s piece ominously opened, “We are inching ever closer to the revelation that the actual vote totals were hacked—some very smart people are already there, by the way—and, once that happens, I don’t know where we go from there.” The Huffington Post began, “The Russian government successfully obtained access to U.S. voter registration databases in multiple states.” Under Reddit’s reposting of the NBC video was a discussion filled with gripes about how dysfunctional our elections are, all escalating and pointing to the conclusion that the system is rigged, surely hacked and democratic hopes are a mirage.  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Esquire offered no proof that the 2016 vote totals were tampered with—because there is none. That’s not what election officials and technical advisors have said. Huffington Post got it wrong because Russian hackers only got inside one state’s voter registration system, not multiple states. And most of the gripes on Reddit were due to political parties running primaries and caucuses in anti-democratic ways, or elected partisans who twist the rules of voting to benefit their base. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What Did Russia Do?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These misinformed reports raced around the internet aided by algorithms that target content for people using sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. That dynamic, an accelerating spiral in which misinformation and fiction outruns and outperforms reality, is what arch partisans—as well as Russia—tapped in 2016 to influence voters. Yes, Russia got inside Illinois’ registration database—a non-competitive blue state in the presidential year. But its hackers didn’t tamper in a way that impeded polling place voting. That’s what Russia achieved on a technical level and what top federal and state officials are trying to prevent again.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Russia also achieved a propaganda coup undermining the public's faith in American elections, which fits Putin’s longstanding scorn for western democracy. But pointing the finger of blame at Russia for other 2016 snafus hasn’t panned out. In North Carolina, some election integrity activists thought the scrambled poll books in Durham County were due to Russian interference. That suspicion came from the fact that the Florida-based contractor programming the voting machines had been identified as a target of another Russian phishing scheme that summer. Yet a deep post-mortem found another explanation: someone failed to delete poll book data from that spring's primary before setting up the machinery for November’s vote. That mistake, in less than a half-dozen precincts, in turn, incorrectly told poll workers that people had already voted.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The problem there wasn’t Russia, but a voting system where too many key features are privatized and managed by contractors protecting those trade secrets: the black box software running voting systems.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But back to the bigger picture. Nobody has found any proof that Russia accessed the separate computing systems that tallied 2016 votes, numerous consultants for state election officials and federal authorities have repeatedly told AlterNet. Yet in 2018 we are living in a world where the spread of misinformation reigns, whether it is coming from media seeking greater audiences and ad revenues because suspense and conspiracy sells, or whether it's amplified by Silicon Valley’s giant content curators that have programmed their algorithms to elevate “edgy and hateful content [because it] is engaging,” as an authoritative investigative report in the Guardian put it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What's clear is who and what is on the losing end of this escalating dynamic: any citizen who believes in the hope of democratic institutions like elections, despite their numerous flaws, from clumsy bureaucratic injuries to partisan betrayals.  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Needless to say, there was other bad voting news this week; news that should have been given top billing by all these writers promoting the fable that Russia could have stolen 2016 for Trump and is back at it in 2018. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Thursday, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School released a report declaring America’s electronic voting machinery is “crumbling.” The report red-flagged 41 states for systems that are more than a decade old, which is beyond the reliable lifespan of most computers, making “our elections more vulnerable to breakdown and malfunction, but to hacking as well.” The Center issued a similar warning in 2015, calling on Congress to allocate several hundred million dollars to update the machinery. But that didn’t happen then and it has not happened since, including in the two-year budget passed this week by Congress. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What Really Matters Now?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In today’s world, beyond raising awareness about the dark side of the attention economy, little is being done to substantively counter the reality that propaganda and paranoia are outrunning the facts, reality checks and better, more nuanced, information. Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Youtube might publicly decry the use of their platforms to spread propaganda and fake news, but they are not changing their targeted advertising systems that target and deliver that content and reap them billions every quarter. Meanwhile, shoddy reporting that uses conspiracy theories to generate viewer traffic isn’t helping. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Whether incomplete reporting (Tillerson’s warning) or distortions presenting nothing new (NBC), or paranoid speculation built on those vapors (Esquire), election officials contacted by AlterNet say these kinds of narratives are eclipsing the steps now being taken to make voting in 2018 more secure and to better audit vote counts. But those granular steps won’t matter if the public doesn’t believe the results and is quicker to trust what flies around cyberspace at the speed of light.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What’s been happening, and what people may start hearing about in coming weeks as 2018’s first primary elections approach in March, is the result of unprecedented cooperation between the Department of Homeland Security and states to protect voting from cyber attacks. What Tillerson was apparently referring to when he said Russia is already trying to interfere in 2018’s elections, was government voting systems—like computers across federal and state governments—are constantly being probed and targeted by overseas adversaries. That may be escalating, but it's not a new trend according to a state election director contacted by AlterNet.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Beyond this new federal-state cooperation, which was launched by the Obama administration, the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) will soon issue new voluntary voting system guidelines, which set higher standards for cyber security and audits to make sure votes are accurately counted. While these standards are voluntary, most states follow some or all of them, and the private sector voting machine vendors typically adopt all of them.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Meanwhile, a handful of states, like Colorado and Rhode Island, are implementing better post-election audits. Other states are moving away from paperless voting, which Virginia did a few years ago. Louisiana is looking at this, dependent on funding, and so is Georgia, in a pilot project. Some of the pressure to do so—echoing what election integrity activists have long argued—is that the Election Assistance Commission push for better audits means using ink-marked paper ballots.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But back to 2018’s elections and Russia. Unlike years past, better security and audits are the predominant focus for top election officials, who next weekend meet in Washington, D.C. The agendas for the National Association of Secretaries of State and National Association of State Election Directors both reflect this priority.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While it remains to be seen how effective these steps will be, it’s a fact that it would be a colossal task to hack the statewide vote totals in a state like Michigan, with more than 1,600 different local and county election jurisdictions, each with separate voting systems, compared to targeting swing voters in swing counties on social media for edgy campaign messaging. (In Wisconsin there are 1,852 election jurisdictions; these are the two states that had the closest Clinton-Trump margins in 2016.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2016, Russia’s biggest impact was through propaganda, spreading messaging that pushed American voters’ hot buttons, not tinkering with the machinery. That’s why this week’s microcosm, in which election hacking conspiracies eclipsed real news was noteworthy. It is a mirror of what’s happening in our political and media culture, and points to the shape of things to come. In a year when midterm elections are poised to rebalance political power in America, undermining confidence in voting is the fastest lane to political chaos and unrest for Republicans to reject those results.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The stakes, as the ex-DOJ attorney said, “is people start doubting our own election system and they do not participate anymore. And it’s what the election officials right now are fighting so hard against. They are working so hard to get the message out that they are on the job. They are working harder than ever. They are coordinating with the feds. They are trying to get the funding they need. So they can make sure that all future elections, even if the threat increases, that they can address it.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That’s why this week’s obsessive, incompetent reporting on Russian hacking—and the way it was amplified and spread online by Silicon Valley algorithms—presents real dangers to America’s already imperfect democracy and system of voting and elections.  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We’re doing Russia’s work for them,” the attorney said. “I don’t think NBC is working for Putin. But because it’s easy clickbait to say Russia’s penetrating our election systems, even though this is literally the same language that [DHS cyber security director] Jeanette [Manfra] used for her testimony back in June. There’s no one happier right now than Vladimir sitting on his throne in Moscow. This is exactly what he was hoping for. It’s working.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's democracy and voting rights. He is the author of several books on elections and the co-author of Who Controls Our Schools: How Billionaire-Sponsored Privatization Is Destroying Democracy and the Charter School Industry (AlterNet eBook, 2016).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/media/what-can-be-done-about-attention-economys-dark-side</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Attention Economy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those outside Silicon Valley’s innermost circles cannot access or evaluate the algorithms powering Facebook’s news feeds and advertising-driven content placement, or YouTube’s engine that recommends other videos individual users might like. However, panelists at the Commission’s Stanford University session were exceptionally articulate and forthcoming about the nature and goals of the algorithms, better described as brain-mimicking artificial intelligence.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One of the most outspoken explainers and critics was Tristan Harris, a former “design ethicist” at Google—his company was acquired by it in 2011—who now runs a non-profit, Time Well Spent, which seeks to improve Big Tech’s impact on society. What this under-40, ex-CEO said was as stunning as what looked like a blasé reaction from his industry colleagues.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Harris said the attention economy, or the media on everyone’s smartphones and computers, is not just the endless marketing we all see. There’s a deeper reason why many established news sources can be supplanted by shadowy propaganda on major platforms, why facts can be outrun by opinions and lies, and why narrower tribal loyalties can usurp democratic institutions.   </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Harris pointed the finger of blame at the heart and circulatory system of Silicon Valley. Its artificial intelligence algorithms are designed to trigger brain responses and be addictive, he said. They power a business model loosely called online advertising, but that is a superstructure that cashes in by targeting and provoking shared interests, via curated content. But it also separates society into disconnected spheres.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“There’s the public rhetoric about what [information] technology ought to do and what the positive intentions are. But then there’s the reality, if you actually go inside the companies, and hear the engineers and designers talk about their daily objectives, everything comes down to what’s going to hook people to staying on the screen,” Harris said. “No matter what the positive intentions are, 2 billion people do wake up in the morning right now and they have one of these things in their pockets, and they do use one of a handful of services. As my colleague Roger McNamee, who is [Facebook founder Mark] Zuckerberg’s mentor likes to say, there’s 2 billion people who use Facebook, that’s more than the number of followers of Christianity; 1.5 billion people use YouTube, that’s about the number of followers of Islam. These products have more influence over our daily thoughts than many religions and certainly more than any government.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When John Lennon said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus in 1966, he created an international uproar. The band received death threats and had to stop touring. But when Harris said Facebook was more popular than Jesus and YouTube served more people than entire continents, these breathtaking assertions barely raised eyebrows. That scale underscores why high tech’s biggest successes are facing a reckoning, from congressional inquiries on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, to new calls to break up tech monopolies under anti-trust laws, to solution-seeking forums like the Knight Commission.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Harris studied how brains make choices at Stanford and went on to create technologies and a company that tapped the “invisible influences that hijack human thinking,” as his bio puts it. But that technology now poses an existential threat to humanity, he said, because it’s growing beyond the ability any one company—or handful of attention economy monopolies—to control.  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We’re a species that…can study our own ability to be manipulated,” he said. “We have to talk about the advertising-based business model, which, paired with artificial intelligence, poses an existential threat. We have to get really serious about this. If you think about where are the most powerful AIs in the world located right now? Arguably, at two companies: Google and Facebook. The most powerful AIs in the world.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Instead of pointing them at a challenge like climate change, and saying, let’s solve that, or pointing it at drug discovery for cancer, and saying, let’s solve that, we have pointed the most powerful AI supercomputers in the world at your brain. And we basically said, play chess against this brain and figure out what will engage it the best. And so every time we open up a news feed, we’re playing chess against a supercomputer that’s designed to see 50 million steps ahead on the chessboard of your mind, and figure out what will perfectly engage you.”  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The results are not always pretty, he said, a remark others echoed.  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“When you think about the global consequences of this—the fact that this supercomputer is doing this in languages, and in countries, the engineers and the companies don’t even speak [or live in], which is how you get the Rohingya genocide in Burma. And how you get some fake news pod creating certain deaths in India, in South Sudan. The engineers can’t put this thing back in the bag. We have created exponential impact without exponential sensitivity.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s even worse than that, explained panelist Gina Bianchini, the founder and CEO of Mighty Networks, which specializes in niche social networks. She repeatedly said that there is a race in Silicon Valley to break Facebook and Google’s information monopolies that involve algorithms teaching—programming—themselves to execute a range of tasks, including bringing content to people who will be hubs in their own information networks. (Silicon Valley calls this "machine learning.")</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While she lauded the virtues of more competition, she and others described artificial intelligence as being at a threshold where the ability to get the biggest players in a room to agree to solutions would not be possible. That’s because artificial intelligence is becoming so decentralized that the ethical problems highlighted by Harris will be beyond anyone’s ability to rein in—because Silicon Valley and Big Tech isn’t a monolithic entity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“There’s actually a scarier thing happening, which is today you can talk to two companies. Somebody shows up from Google. Somebody shows up from Facebook and wants to have the conversation, because they have the monopoly over attention today and over the advertising revenue,” she said. “The natural progression of software and where technology goes is it bends toward decentralization. It bends toward distributed technologies. Who do you talk to at that point?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bianchini gave an example that underscored why traditional anti-trust laws and government regulation are hopelessly outdated and ill-equipped to deal with the attention economy’s dark side. She cited Napster, which allowed music lovers to share audio files, so the recording industry sued and shut it down.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We were able to shut down Napster and the next thing that happened was Bit Torrent [software], where there was nothing to shut down. That is where the world is going.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What Would George Orwell Do</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">....</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now comes the Republican campaign to justify the killing of net neutrality by the FCC. Rep. Marsh Blackburn (R-Tenn.) has introduced legislation that allegedly “aims to ultimately end the heated debate around so-called 'net neutrality' regulations.” </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As Breitbart News explained in its “exclusive interview” with Blackburn:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The FCC’s Obama-era net neutrality regulations controlled the Internet as a public monopoly, which conservatives argued diminished the freedom of the Internet and led to rampant censorship of conservative and alternative voices by content providers such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The notion of “net neutrality” as a thwarted liberal conspiracy doesn’t have anything to do with Mueller and bears little relation to reality. But it nicely corroborates the master narrative that Trump is protecting the country from demonic liberals, from Silicon Valley to Washington, who won’t let America be America....</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">overview</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/social-media-not-good-democracy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=  </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/tinders-data-more-treasure-trove-selfies</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">left right not mirror/symmetrical</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">social media bots</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/media/democrats-unsolvable-media-problem</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As  we learn more about how Russia used social media as part of its campaign to help elect Donald Trump, what stands out is how easy it was. Spend $100,000 on Facebook ads, create a bunch of Twitter bots, and before you know it you've whipped up a fog of disinformation that gives Trump just the boost he needs to get over the finish line. Even if it's almost impossible to quantify how many votes it might have swayed, it was one of the many factors contributing to the atmosphere of chaos and confusion that helped Trump get elected.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As new as it might seem, this is just the latest manifestation of a broader problem that goes back a long way, one of the degradation of truth, a conservative electorate taught to disbelieve what's real and accept whatever lunatic things their media figures tell them, and liberals who can't figure out how to respond.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the latter, I don't exempt myself. I've been thinking seriously about this problem since the 1990s, when I first went to graduate school to study political communication. And I still don't have the answer to what we ought to do about it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On a recent episode of the podcast "Pod Save America," Hillary Clinton described the problem as she saw it:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The other side has dedicated propaganda channels, that's what I call Fox News. It has outlets like Breitbart, and crazy InfoWars, and things like that. In this particular election, it was aided and abetted by the Russians and the role that Facebook and other platforms played. We are late to that. We did not understand how a reality TV campaign would so dominate the media environment, and I confess, I was trying to do everything I could to build on the success of President Obama's campaign, I had a lot of people you guys know involved in the campaign, we were really proud of it. But boy, it was tough to break through. So I think the Democrats can do a lot, but they are still going to face a very difficult media environment. And we've got to figure out how we're going to break through. Obviously, more podcasts, more other ways of communicating so voices can be heard and real positions can be understood is part of it, but we're still at a disadvantage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">She says liberals were "late" to it and didn't "understand" the kind of collective madness that would overtake the broader media environment, which may be true. But if you could go back in time to two years ago and give them advice, what would you tell them to do? Would calling attention to the Russian manipulation have mattered? What would you advise them to do about a news media possessed by the idea that Clinton's email management practices were the most important issue of the campaign? How would you tell them to respond to the fact that the GOP candidate was perfectly willing to tell dozens of lies every day and repeat them over and over no matter how many times he had been fact-checked?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the heart of the problem is that when it came to what conservatives were willing to believe and act on, 2016 was simply an exaggerated version of what had come before. This is where Clinton is right that even if liberals come up with "more other ways of communicating so voices can be heard," it won't be enough.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That's because liberals have plenty of ways of communicating. There are huge numbers of liberal websites, and magazines (Like this one! Subscribe today!) and even radio and television shows out there where their perspective can be heard. But the effect they have on their audiences is of a profoundly different character than what conservative media achieve.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There's a doctrinal basis to conservative media that makes it fundamentally different from liberal media, that makes Rush Limbaugh most definitely not the mirror image of a liberal radio host and Sean Hannity not the mirror image of Rachel Maddow. It's not merely about the conservatives' and liberals' respective adherence to truth or penchant for ugly demonization of their opponents, though they differ in that too. It's that an argument about the larger media world is the foundation of conservative media. Conservative hosts and writers tell their audiences over and over again that nothing they read in the mainstream media can be accepted, that it's all twisted by a liberal agenda, and therefore they can only believe what conservatives tell them. It's the driving backbeat to every episode, every story, and every rant.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Liberals complain about media coverage of one story or another all the time. What they don't do is tell their audiences that any news source that is not explicitly and exclusively devoted to their ideological agenda cannot be trusted. But conservatives do.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hearing that message thousands of times over the last couple of decades has left them not only uniquely vulnerable to fabricated stories and ludicrous conspiracy theories, but with an immunity to the kinds of sober refutation of those lies that mainstream media, with the noblest of intentions, attempt to carry out. Who cares if The Washington Post's Fact Checker or PolitiFact says that the story my aunt just put up on Facebook about Hillary Clinton is completely bogus? They're just liberal media! As the Russians discovered, those stories can be injected into the electorate from anywhere and they spread like a malignant virus, eventually infecting even some  who aren't already devoted to the right-wing cause.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not long after the election, NPR spoke to a man in Los Angeles who had hit upon a money-making scheme in which he'd create bogus stories under official-sounding but nonexistent publications like the "Denver Guardian." Stories aimed at ginning up conservative outrage—people are buying pot in Colorado with food stamps! An FBI agent investigating Hillary Clinton was murdered!—quickly went viral, spreading to thousands or even millions of unsuspecting eyeballs. But he couldn't duplicate his success with the other side. "We've tried to do similar things to liberals," he said. "It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out." And now conservatives have a president who feeds their gullibility and contempt for anyone who tries to distinguish between what's true and what isn't.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The optimistic take on all this would be to say that it only matters at the margins. After all, despite the best efforts of the conservative propaganda machine and his own relentless fabulism, Donald Trump's approval ratings are in the 30s. Your uncle may tune in to Fox and watch Sean Hannity tell him that Trump had the biggest inauguration crowd in history and criminal immigrants are killing and raping all our white women, but he was never going to vote for a Democrat anyway.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And as media change, disinformation will change with it. Twenty years ago it was Jerry Falwell sending out hundreds of thousands of copies of a videotape called "The Clinton Chronicles," which accused Bill and Hillary of running drugs and having their enemies murdered. Today it's Russians spreading bogus stories on Facebook about Hillary Clinton having Parkinson's disease. Twenty years from now it will be computer generated holo-fabrications of a Democratic nominee kicking a puppy placed into our VR brainstreams. A certain number of conservatives will believe it all, and liberals will still be asking themselves how they can fight back. And we still won't have the answer.The trouble is that even if it matters only at the margins, sometimes the margins matter a great deal. Like they did in 2016, where the candidate who got nearly three million more votes lost the electoral vote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Paul Waldman</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">left right not mirror/symmetrical</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">social media bots</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/media/democrats-unsolvable-media-problem</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-september-18-2017/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">we think our friends curate FB but lots of it, so FB filters it (invisibly picks winners; aim is to keep you clicking)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-september-18-2017/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ralph spends the whole hour with journalist Franklin Foer, author of World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, about how the Big Four, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are attempting to dominate every aspect of our lives and minds.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">fake news, info bubbles</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">escalator fake news</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/susan-rice-and-pro-trump-propaganda-machine</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Alt-Right Assault on Susan Rice: A Perfect Case Study of the Pro-Trump Propaganda Machine</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Alex Kaplan [1] / Media Matters [2]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">April 6, 2017</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For most of the last decade, the flow of misinformation was often easy to track in media, with right-wing media often forcing mainstream outlets to follow the stories and tone they favored. Now, a couple of months into President Donald Trump’s administration, this pattern has changed and new players have entered the ecosystem. Groups that used to be contained to their own bubble have been able to insert themselves into the food chain and been able to spread not just misleading, but patently false information to right-wing outlets and sometimes even in turn to mainstream media. A new dubious allegation regarding Susan Rice, former national security adviser to President Barack Obama, illustrates how this new pattern can spread pro-Trump misinformation and propaganda from fringe sources into mainstream media outlets.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Recently, fake news and the white nationalist “alt-right” movement [3] have become two of the country’s biggest problems in terms of fighting misinformation. Both government officials [4] and websites like Facebook [5] and Google [6] are trying to lessen the harmful impact as websites that share fake news continue to mislead [7] news consumers. And the “alt-right” is growing in prominence thanks in part to President Donald Trump’s choice of Stephen Bannon, the former chairman of “alt-right” website [8] Breitbart News, as his chief strategist. Fringe “alt-right” forums, on sites like Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, exercise influence by pushing conspiracy theories [9] and leading [10] harassment campaigns [11].</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These different groups do not operate in a vacuum. Repeatedly, they have come together to spread and amplify their misinformation and claims. Often, a claim will start on a fringe outlet or forum, and other such sites will amplify the misinformation, then fake news purveyors will push it, and then the claim will jump into more traditional right-wing media before sometimes spreading into mainstream media. Trump aides and other people connected to Trump have even promoted some of those stories, crucially helping them break through at times.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And that brings us to Rice.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On April 2, Mike Cernovich, a self-described [12] member of the “alt-right,” claimed in a post on Medium [13] that the “White House Counsel’s office identified Rice as the person responsible for the unmasking” of Trump officials caught in surveillance of foreign officials “after examining Rice’s document log requests.” The claim then spread among fringe outlets such as The Gateway Pundit [14] -- which said the unmasking “was purely for political purposes” -- and Infowars [15], and spread via posts on 4chan [16] and Reddit [17].</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">img</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the claim started getting pickup on Twitter [18], Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, promoted [12]Cernovich with a tweet linking to the main page of his Medium blog (the next day, Donald Trump. Jr praised Cernovich [19] for “breaking the #SusanRice story”).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">e claim was then echoed by Bloomberg’s Eli Lake [20], who added a layer of credibility to the attempted smear, writing that Rice “requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign.” Meanwhile, multiple fake news purveyors [21] hyped [22]the [23] allegations [24], dubiously claiming that Rice “could be headed to jail” for “absolute treason.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[imgs]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lake conceded in his piece, however, that Rice’s requests “were likely within the law.” Legal and national security experts echoed that conclusion [25], saying Rice’s actions weren’t “odd or wrong,” did not indicate “anything improper whatsoever,” and were “within the scope of the job of a national security advisor like Rice.” Lake's caveats did not prevent him from going on both Sean Hannity's radio [26] and Fox News show [27], where the right-wing host described the story as "worse than Watergate."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the claim spread into the mainstream, some in right-wing media criticized mainstream outlets for not giving the story enough attention [28] or for not presenting it [29] the way they would. Although some [30] mainstream figures have echoed the consensus of experts, others [31] have also suggested [32] that Rice [33] could be guilty of some kind of wrongdoing. Fox News in particular insisted that something must be improper if not illegal about Rice's actions, and in their scramble to claim they may have had the story before Cernovich, likely outed themselves [34]as another outlet that the White House used as a puppet for the Rice leak.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Right-wing criticism of mainstream media’s coverage will likely ramp up, spurring some mainstream outlets to defend their coverage or possibly tweak some of their framing under pressure.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is the new media ecosystem in the Trump era. No longer are these false claims all originating in traditional right-wing media before mainstream outlets give in to pressure to cover them [35]. Now they can start from these fringe pro-Trump propaganda outlets, with right-wing media picking them up. Meanwhile, members of the “alt-right” continue to gain more prominence [36] and acceptance [37] in traditional conservative and conservative media circles. Indeed, radio host Rush Limbaugh, while hyping [38] the Rice story, bragged that mainstream media outlets are “not the arbiters anymore”; whitewashed the original source of the story, Cernovich, as simply a “pro-Trump blogger,” and said CBS’ 60 Minutes “tried to destroy him”; and criticized mainstream outlets for dismissing the story because it was pushed by right-wing media.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is not the first example of misinformation following such a trajectory. In March, after a federal judge in Hawaii placed a hold on Trump’s revised Muslim ban, fringe “alt-right” outlets such as Infowars and Gateway Pundit pushed a conspiracy theory [9] that appeared to have started on Reddit alleging that Obama conspired with the judge. The claim then spread among [9] fake news [39] purveyors [40] and was pushed by [9] Donald Trump Jr. before breaking through to more traditional conservative media figures and outlets like Hannity [41] and the Independent Journal Review [42]. Later that month, in order to back up Trump’s false claim that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, Infowars dubiously claimed[43] it had National Security Agency documents that provided proof. The claim made its way around other “alt-right” outlets and fake news purveyors and wound up being pushed at the top of the Drudge Report [44].</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is the danger that the new media environment presents. The fringe is no longer being siloed; it has actively been raised into the mainstream by pro-Trump forces both known and unknown, and has been repeatedly validated by both mainstream reporters and especially an administration that has no hesitation about lying to the world. It’s crucial that mainstream media outlets understand [45] this new environment and the kind of claims and conspiracy theories it puts forth. It is one thing to share the mainstream with extremist cranks, propagandists, and liars. It's another thing to succumb and do their pro-Trump misinforming for them. </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></div></div>