Advertising

===

orphan category? primary 820 on fbk ggl revenue model

uber1<a href="https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-2062">https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-2062</a>

loss of classified ads killed newspaper (jrnlism) but boosted google and facebooksee newspaper ad (belated)

=<div>=</div><div>an 11 21</div><div>
</div><div>click eyeballs even mainstream  media</div><div>
</div><div>In an article published by Mother Jones on Thanksgiving 2021, journalist Monika Bauerlein describes <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/media/2021/11/are-you-part-of-the-exhausted-majority/8" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Americans as feeling mentally "exhausted" because of all the bad news</a> on top of bad news that they are being inundated with. And media outlets, Bauerlein stresses, are creating that climate of exhaustion because it is good for business.Bauerlein, in her Mother Jones article, writes, "Are you part of the exhausted majority?.… So many people are tired of feeling like everything is a disaster, everything is at risk, and we'll never be done fighting with unvaccinated relatives over who gets to come to Thanksgiving. And tired, too, of the news. I'm a journalist who lives and breathes news, and I get tired. So many headlines that want to get your attention. So much to worry about. Democrats in disarray, inflation, the climate — it's all at 11, all the time."Bauerlein acknowledges that "there are a lot of crises out there," but she is quick to add that the world has always had crises. The difference in 2021, she argues, is media outlets have a financial stake in promoting "outrage.""This is obviously not the only time of crisis the world, or America, has ever been through," the journalist explains. "It is, however, the only one in which we have lived in a 24/7 media ecosystem that depends for a significant part of its business on instant reaction and instant outrage. If you've been reading Mother Jones for a little while, you know about the basic problem: Advertising revenue for publishers and broadcasters depends in large part on both quantity — clicks, eyeballs, video views — and engagement: how long you stick around, whether you share, whether you comment. And all of those metrics are juiced when content tugs at your emotions, especially fear and outrage."Bauerlein continues, "That can take the form of sensational headlines about simple news stories, or it can take the form of opinionated hot takes. Even for newsrooms that depend less on advertising than subscriptions, as the New York Times and the Washington Post do, quick-turnaround opinion content is key in getting people to subscribe. That's why you're seeing these prestige outlets add more and more columnists and associated newsletters."</div><div>
</div><div>=</div>=<div>In March, a report by the Climate Investigations Center tallied $1.4 billion worth of public relations, advertising, and communications contracts signed by energy and business trade associations from 2008 to 2017. One organization, the American Petroleum Institute (API), accounted for nearly half of that sum.</div><div>
</div><div>The Evolution of Fossil Fuel Messaging — and Climate Science Denial</div><div>
</div><div>Amid the investigations into their communications on climate change, many fossil fuel companies have been slowly re-tooling their messaging.</div><div>
</div><div>Some have acknowledged a need to transition away from fossil fuels — but at what critics respond would be a very slow pace.</div><div>
</div><div>Others have continued to push natural gas as a climate-friendly fossil fuel, despite the industry’s severe climate-changing methane problems. API, for example, has placed ads claiming natural gas can “help meet the growing global demand for sustainable energy” under the Washington Post’s “branded content platform,” as The Intercept’s Sharon Lerner reported in April.</div><div>
</div><div>Other campaigns ditch mention of climate change and pollution all together, instead focusing on the benefits of products made from fossil fuels.</div><div>
</div><div>During the Super Bowl in 2017, the American Petroleum Institute released an ad campaign called Power Past Impossible, touting the many uses of oil and natural gas and highlighting how dependent modern life is on the byproducts of these fossil fuels.</div><div>
</div><div>“Oil majors are projecting themselves as key players in the energy transition while lobbying to delay, weaken, or oppose meaningful climate policy,” Edward Collins of the UK-based think tank InfluenceMap said in a March statement accompanying a report he authored on public relations campaigns by oil and gas giants. “They advocate gradual implementation of market-based and technological climate solutions, but the latest [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report makes clear that urgent policy action and limitations on fossil fuel use are needed to avoid dangerous climate change.”</div><div>
</div><div>The shift doesn’t spell the end of climate science denial — DeSmog’s database of individuals and organizations that seek to cast doubt on climate science or oppose action to prevent some of the worst effects of warming the world includes roughly 225 organizations — and that list continues to grow....</div><div></div><div><a href="https://heated.world/p/big-oils-first-publicist-advised">https://heated.world/p/big-oils-first-publicist-advised</a></div><div>
</div><div>Lee’s real legacy: The American Petroleum Institute</div><div>
</div><div>Lee’s most controversial legacy may be the advice he gave to the Nazis in the 1930s. But his most lasting legacy is his creation of the oil and gas industry’s first trade group—the American Petroleum Institute—over a decade before, in 1919.“After the war ended, there was an interest in sort of coordinating an industry position for the petroleum industry to represent their interests to the public,” environmental sociologist Robert Brulle tells Westervelt in Season 3, episode 2 of the podcast. “Ivy Lee draws on his experience in the war propaganda board effort to start developing larger institutional public relations efforts. And he works with the head of Standard Oil of New Jersey, which we now know as ExxonMobil, to form the American Petroleum Institute in 1919.”Today, the American Petroleum Institute remains a powerful PR force for fossil fuels in an era of climate emergency. Representing more than 600 corporations, it is the largest U.S. trade group for the oil and gas industry—and its members spend a cumulative billions of dollars a year trying to convincing the public that oil is good, and American, and necessary for progress.In fact, earlier this month, Ivy Lee’s brainchild API announced <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/08/oil-companies-climate-crisis-pr-spending" style="">a new “seven figure” PR campaign and advertising push</a> to convince the public that the oil and gas industry is a good-faith partner in the fight against climate change. The group’s campaign comes after decades of funding climate science denial and climate policy delay.The API has deemed the push “Energy for Progress.” <a href="https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/stories/1062019231">According to the group’s president</a>, Mike Sommers, "What it really is all about is going on offense to tell the story of this industry.”Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.<div><h4 style="margin: 1em 0px 0.625em; line-height: 1.16em;">If you see something, say something</h4>Today, the American Petroleum Institute’s ads run in nearly every respected media outlet. The New York Times; the Washington Post; on Vox and Politico and MSNBC. They also run on buildings; on billboards; on public transit and elsewhere.HEATED is tracking these ads on an Instagram account called @fossilfuelads, to visually demonstrate how the industry’s deceptive messaging infiltrates our daily lives.If you see any fossil fuel ads in your daily life, please send them to <a href="mailto:fossilfuelads@heated.world">fossilfuelads@heated.world</a>....</div><div></div></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/facebook-thrives-on-the-virality-of-hate/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/facebook-thrives-on-the-virality-of-hate/</a></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, “<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Facebook’s Hate-Speech Rules Collide With Indian Politics,</a>” has blown the lid off Facebook’s unholy alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the right-wing ruling party in India.In the August 14 article, WSJ reporters Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz detail how Ankhi Das, Facebook’s high-flying public policy director for India and South and Central Asia, blocked action against the ruling BJP party leaders. Facebook had tagged these leaders internally as promoting “hate speech” and “dangerous” and with the potential to cause, as Purnell and Horwitz write, “real-world violence.” The reason Das reportedly gave for letting these violations of Facebook’s policy go unpunished was that such action would harm Facebook’s business in India.Facebook also has recently invested <a href="https://www.newsclick.in/Foreign-Investments-Reliance-Jio-Security-Concern" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">$5.7 billion in leading Indian telecom company Reliance Jio</a> for 9.99 percent of its shares—one of the <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/21/facebook-reliance-jio/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">largest investments</a> ever by any tech company for a minority stake. The <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/21/facebook-reliance-jio/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">largest</a> number of Facebook and WhatsApp users in the world are from India, with Facebook having more than 300 million and WhatsApp in excess of 400 million users. <a href="https://money.cnn.com/2014/02/19/technology/social/facebook-whatsapp/index.html#:_{:text=In%20a%20play%20to%20dominate,the%20five-year%20old%20company.}" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion</a> in 2014 and has business offerings on this platform, whose <a href="https://www.thebci.org/news/are-whatsapp-and-gdpr-on-a-collision-course.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">rules of engagement are completely opaque</a>. Even more than Facebook, WhatsApp has been the <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/597mwk/modis-trolls-are-ready-to-wreak-havoc-on-indias-marathon-election" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">major social media platform for the BJP</a> and its <a href="https://www.newsclick.in/bjp-troll-sena-exposed" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">troll army</a> to spread disinformation, as it was for <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/30/whatsapp-fake-news-brazil-election-favoured-jair-bolsonaro-analysis-suggests" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil</a>.On August 21, Horwitz and Purnell <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-staff-demand-policy-changes-on-india-hate-speech-11598008322" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">wrote</a> that Facebook has subsequently come under attack internally for its failure to address violations of its hate speech policy in India: “Facebook employees are pressing the company’s leadership to review its handling of hate speech in India, saying [in a letter addressed to ‘FB Leadership’ that] the company has tolerated toxic content by prominent political figures."this is not the first time Facebook’s sheltering of hate speech and divisive right-wing figures has been exposed. In a <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-the-facebook-team-helping-regimes-that-reach-out-and-crack-down" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">2017 article for Bloomberg</a>, Lauren Etter, Vernon Silver, and Sarah Frier wrote that Facebook “actively works with political parties and leaders including those who use the platform to stifle opposition—sometimes with the aid of <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">‘</a><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">troll armies</a>’ that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies.” They also wrote that “a little-known Facebook global government and politics team… led from Washington by Katie Harbath, a former Republican digital strategist who worked on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign,” has helped specific political parties “from India and Brazil to Germany and the U.K.—the unit’s employees have become de facto campaign workers.” In 2018, a <a href="https://www.newsclick.in/Facebook-India-Hate-Speech-BJP-Politics" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">five-</a><a href="https://www.newsclick.in/Facebook-India-Hate-Speech-BJP-Politics" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">article series</a> for Newsclick by Cyril Sam and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta ahead of India’s 2019 general elections investigated the close ties between Facebook executives and the BJP, particularly Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s team, and found that the ties went far beyond Facebook’s relationships with other political parties in India.The August 14 WSJ article <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">identified</a> three prominent BJP figures whose Facebook posts included hate speech: T. Raja Singh, a state legislator from Telangana, had threatened to kill Muslims who ate cows and to shoot Rohingyas, Muslim refugees fleeing Myanmar; Anantkumar Hegde, a member of Parliament from Karnataka, posted cartoons and essays on Muslims spreading “Corona Jihad.” (The WSJ <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">reported</a> that after it asked Facebook about some of Singh’s and Hegde’s posts, “Facebook deleted some of… them” and “said Mr. Singh no longer is permitted to have an official, verified account, designated with a blue check mark badge.” Similarly, “Facebook took no action until the Journal sought comment from the company about… [Hegde’s] ‘Corona Jihad’ posts.”) Kapil Mishra, a former Delhi legislator, played an active role in inciting violent riots earlier this year in New Delhi, for which he has been widely condemned by opposition parties, independent groups, the press, and even (though not by name) Facebook CEO <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Mark Zuckerberg</a>. These three were among BJP figures flagged internally by Facebook’s team implementing its policy on “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” as worthy of a permanent ban, as was done in other countries <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/05/03/719897599/facebook-bans-alex-jones-louis-farrakhan-and-other-dangerous-individuals" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">including the United S</a><a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/05/03/719897599/facebook-bans-alex-jones-louis-farrakhan-and-other-dangerous-individuals" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">tates</a>.The WSJ coverage may make us believe that the problem in Facebook is an individual’s fault, that of Ankhi Das, its policy head for India. The real issue goes far deeper. The power of digital monopolies—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft—is not merely determined by their wealth. The social media platforms—Google and Facebook—have taken over the media space, not only in terms of <a href="https://bestmediainfo.com/2020/02/warc-global-ad-trends-the-alphabet-and-facebook-duopoly-is-now-worth-more-to-advertisers-than-tv/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">advertising revenue, the lifeblood of the media</a> under capitalism, but also in terms of influence. The greater the engagement that you can generate, the greater the likelihood of gaining a significant viewership and following. Purnell and Horwitz <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">reported</a> that “within two months of the video of the speech” by Kapil Mishra—in which he incited physical violence in clearing protesters—“being posted, the engagement for Mr. Mishra’s Facebook page grew from a couple hundred thousand interactions a month to more than 2.5 million.”Earlier, it was widely accepted that the press—what Thomas Carlyle had called the Fourth Estate in a democracy—has a social role and therefore needs to be <a href="https://www.mediareform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/The_Elephant_Next_Door-A_Survey_of_International_Media_Ownership_Regulations.pdf" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">regulated for public good</a>. The Press Council of India, however weak it might be in actual practice, <a href="https://tinyurl.com/yy4bo78p" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">has a code that the press is expected to follow</a>. In the U.S., <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-media/u-s-court-deals-setback-to-fcc-push-to-revamp-media-ownership-rules-idUSKBN1W81YU" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">cross-holdings</a> between <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/books_cross-ownership/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">different kinds of media</a> are regulated.There are two issues we need to recognize. The first is that the media is not just any other business but is important for democracy. And the second is that monopoly by itself is also a danger to democracy. U.S. Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis is widely quoted to have said, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”More than 75 years after Brandeis lived, his words on monopoly <a href="https://theappeal.org/last-weeks-big-tech-antitrust-hearings-sent-an-unmistakable-message-change-is-in-the-air-for-americas-corporate-giants/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">were cited</a> in the <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-amazon-documents-captivated-hearing/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">congressional hearing in July</a> with the CEOs of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. The combined market value of the four companies is <a href="https://seekingalpha.com/article/4365092-gafa-objectively-analyzing-impact-of-antitrust-scrutiny" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">nearly $5 trillion</a>. If we compare this to the GDPs of entire countries, they come out above Germany, and behind only the U.S., China and Japan. It is this market power that gives them the ability to bend, or in the case of weaker economies, twist out of shape, their legal and regulatory structures.Unfortunately, the interests of tech companies with this much capital are less and less often aligning with the interests of society. This is becoming clearest with the case of Facebook, as <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-facebook-fb-make-money.asp" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">98.5</a><a href="https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-facebook-fb-make-money.asp" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;"> percent</a><a href="https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120114/how-does-facebook-fb-make-money.asp" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;"> of its income is from advertisements</a>. Advertisements depend on the number of views, and the virality of posts and engagement are the main drivers of Facebook’s revenue model. Facebook has discovered, as MIT researchers did, that hate and <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories-0308" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">fake news posts drive virality</a>, and therefore it has no incentive to curb such posts. While it has professed lip service for community standards and healthy discourse, the driving force of its business empire comes from its need to have more eyeballs, and therefore it <a href="https://www.adl.org/blog/hateful-and-conspiratorial-groups-on-facebook" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">feeds off hate and fake news</a>. An internal study had found that <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">64</a><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;"> percent</a><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;"> of members who had joined extremist groups</a> did so thanks to Facebook’s recommendation tools.This pathology of social media is not limited to Facebook. <a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/algorithms-of-oppression/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Google’s search engine</a> has shown similar problems, as has its <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/mzhang/2015/07/01/google-photos-tags-two-african-americans-as-gorillas-through-facial-recognition-software/#5cb1b146713d" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">image recognition algorithms</a>. But undoubtedly, Facebook has been the <a href="https://www.theverge.com/interface/2020/8/20/21375381/facebook-qanon-purge-content-policy-tide-pods" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">leader in spreading hate politics</a> and fake news in the world.What Trump, Bolsonaro and Modi have in common, apart from their right-wing politics, is their reliance on Facebook and WhatsApp in their campaigns. Though we have seen the phenomena of troll TV—Fox News in the U.S. and Republic TV in India—penetrating the traditional media space, WhatsApp and Facebook have been the primary playground of trolls, aided by Facebook’s algorithms. While it may seem that the right understands digital platforms better than others, and that is why it has had so much success with them, there is increasing evidence that the support that Facebook provides to various right-wing figures and hate speech is not an accident but a part of its strategy.In the language of new tech, hate speech is not a bug in the systems of social media but a basic feature. The problem of hate speech cannot be solved by politely petitioning the Zuckerbergs of digital monopoly platforms to behave more responsibly. It needs, at the very least, <a href="https://globalreports.columbia.edu/books/the-curse-of-bigness/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">breaking up their monopolies</a> and <a href="https://justnetcoalition.org/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">regulating them as public utilities</a>.<a class="" href="https://independentmediainstitute.org/imi-articles/?author=Prabir+Purkayastha" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Prabir Purkayastha</a> is the founding editor of <a href="https://www.newsclick.in/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Newsclick.in</a>, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.This article was produced in partnership by <a href="https://www.newsclick.in/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Newsclick</a> and <a href="https://independentmediainstitute.org/globetrotter/" target="_blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Globetrotter</a>, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"></div>

===<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/gigantic-orbiting-billboards-in-space-are-coming/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/gigantic-orbiting-billboards-in-space-are-coming/</a>

===

<a href="http://www.alternet.org/print/media/making-babies-scared-bunnies-roots-fear-advertising">http://www.alternet.org/print/media/making-babies-scared-bunnies-roots-fear-advertising</a>

The following is the latest in a new series of articles on AlterNet called <a href="http://www.alternet.org/fear-in-america" target="blank" style="">Fear in America</a> [3] that launched this March. Read the <a href="http://www.alternet.org/fear-america/fear-dominates-politics-media-and-human-existence-america-and-its-getting-worse" target="blank" style="">introduction</a> [4] to the series.

“Fear is as primal a factor as love in influencing personality,” wrote <a href="http://www.theblot.com/psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/emotion.htm" style="">psychologists</a> [5] John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner in 1920. “Fear does not gather its potency in any derived manner from love. It belongs to the original and inherited nature of man.”

The names of Watson and Rayner may have fallen into obscurity, but Professor Watson’s influence has been profound. He founded the school of psychology known as Behaviorism, which focused on observable expressed behaviors instead of introspective conditions of the mind, and he argued that human behavior was susceptible to training, as with any other mammal. Watson and Rayner’s <a href="http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/little-albert-experiment.htm" style="">experiments</a> [6] with manipulating the fear responses of a baby boy remain one of the most infamous examples of unethical practices with human subjects. Watson and his graduate student, Rayner, attempted to make a baby known as “Albert B” afraid of cute fuzzy animals. The experiment succeeded.

Watson and Rayner started with the premise that fear was innate. The experiment explored three primary questions: 1) Could fear toward certain objects be taught? 2) Would the child learn to fear associated objects on his own? 3) Once fear had been established, would it remain? In other words, can we control the shape and direction of fear by manipulating the subject’s environment, thereby creating a series of phobic associations in the mind?

Watson would use a technique based on Nobel Prize-winner Ivan Pavlov’s famous experiments with dogs, who had been trained to salivate at the sound of a buzzer. Using these same principles of association, Watson and Rayner attempted to “condition” Albert to be afraid of white rats and rabbits by pairing the sight of them with a loud clanging noise.

The testing on little Albert started when he was nine months old. Why did his mother allow the testing? Nobody knows. Watson described her as “a wet nurse at the Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children.” However, there were no wet nurses at Harriet Lane, and Watson was known to be sloppy about those sorts of details. Speculating about the mother’s motivation leads nowhere, since we don’t know with certainty who she was. That sort of guessing also belongs to one of the schools of psychology that Watson opposed. Because Watson burned the notes associated with the experiment, the identity of baby and mother have long been an academic mystery.

What we do know, based on a scholarly paper Watson and Rayner published in 1920, is that Albert was likely chosen because he was an “unusually phlegmatic” baby, so calm and even-tempered that when he was suddenly confronted with a “white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, with masks with and without hair, cotton wool [and] burning newspapers,” he showed no signs of fear. By the time the experiment was finished, baby Albert “burst into tears” at the sight of them, even after 11 months had passed. He was never deconditioned, because finding out whether these artificially induced fears would last beyond infancy was part of the experiment.

All of this is interesting on its own, but what makes the story particularly fascinating is the twist: In 1920, Watson was fired from his prestigious academic post at Johns Hopkins University. Ostensibly, it wasn’t due to the now-glaring ethical lapses in the Albert B. experiment. As psychiatrist <a href="http://jeankimmd.blogspot.com/" style="">Jean Kim</a> [7] noted in an email to me, research institutions and hospitals now have review boards that “examine adherence to informed consent and ethics before approval,” but these standards are anachronistically applied to research conducted in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Instead, the married professor was fired over his scandalous affair with Rayner. His next job? Advertising.

Starting at a low level, Watson quickly rose to become vice-president of J. Walter Thompson, the great rival of the fictional advertising firm of Sterling Cooper on Mad Men. Once in place at this New York firm, still one of the biggest names in advertising, Watson’s behaviorist theories could be put in place.

“<a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4188763?sid=21105542777861&uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739696." style="">His doctrine</a> [8],” wrote historian Peggy J. Kreshel, “which recognized prediction and control as the goal of psychology, meshed well not only with broader Progressive concerns of social control, but more particularly with the goals of the business community.” Watson is broadly credited with putting “science” into advertising, but he is more specifically the father of “psychological advertising.” Watson concluded that logic failed to convince consumers to buy the advertised product because humans are irrational. Using scientific methods, he also determined that consumers couldn’t tell one product apart from another. So, he decided to “sell the image.” As far as he was concerned, the most effective way to do this was by inducing fear:

"Watson told advertisers to <a href="http://www.theblot.com/wp-admin/www.newdesigngroup.ca/blog/short-history-psychology-advertising/" style="">stir up</a> [9] the consumer’s emotions: "tell him something that will tie him up with fear, something that will stir up a mild rage, that will call out an affectionate or love response, or strike at a deep psychological or habit need."

By dint of the same mechanism of association that made Albert fearful of white fluffy animals and objects (including Santa Claus), one of Watson’s most successful ad campaigns convinced women that Pebeco toothpaste made them sexy. On the face of it, neither association —white fur with “threat,” toothpaste with “allure”—stands to reason. Which is precisely the point.

But Watson’s work also showed that that the cycle of fear can be broken. In a lesser-known study of a boy named Peter, he completed a process now known as “desensitization.” A nervous child, Peter was Albert’s temperamental opposite. Peter started out afraid of white rats and rabbits, and lost his fear of them following repeated exposures paired with pleasurable rewards given to him. Because Peter’s fear of cute mammals stands apart from the sociocultural norm, it points to one of the lingering questions raised by Watson’s work: Are humans innately predisposed to like some animals and fear others, such as spiders? The answer <a href="https://theamericanscholar.org/mice-and-spiders-and-bugs-oh-my/#.VPiKPOF0fIX." style="">seems to be yes and no</a> [10]. It’s a combination of atavistic instincts combined with modeling behaviors: an adult screams, so the baby screams, and the baby learns to be afraid of spiders. Loud sound and negative reaction equals fear.

Hence, the way to fight irrational fear is through exposure coupled with the refusal to reward panic based on childish ignorance. “Fear is borne on the power of doubt,” science historian <a href="http://jsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/03/03/jsh.shv022.full?keytype=ref&ijkey=ktObOnWmuI5XQk8" style="">Rob Boddice</a> [11] wrote in an email to me. “Objects of fear fill the spaces where knowledge and certainty are absent. Since knowledge is hard to come by and even harder to disseminate, fear spreads like a virus, attaching to hearsay and heresy, until knowledge finally, reassuringly penetrates. But just as uncertainties are temporary, knowledge is historical, subject to revision and revolution. Thus, the objects of fear change over time.”

One day, it’s white rats and rabbits. The next, it’s terrorists and Ebola. These are scary things, to be sure, yet if fear is an understandable response to vague and unfamiliar threats, to be ruled by that fear is to remain at the level of an animal. For Watson, those fearful/angry/lustful instincts were the reason Behaviorism worked in the first place. As far as he was concerned, humans were animals (and by that, no insult was intended), and that likeness required him to observe men with the same dispassionate eye as "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Behaviorism-John-B-Watson/dp/0393005240/ref=la_B001K8NZJ4_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426016516&sr=1-1#reader_0393005240" style="">an ox you slaughter</a> [12]," and just as easily transformed into a docile and profitable body.

In early-20th-century America, the susceptibility of humans to react like any other mammal to behavioral conditioning was as controversial as Darwinian evolution and for the same reason—the affront to human ego. But in the new 1930 introduction to Behaviorism, Watson was able to point out that behaviorist theory had already profoundly influenced various spheres of thought in just a few short years, quietly disseminating into business and design as the objections dribbled away.

Almost a century has passed since Watson turned a hapless infant into a cringing wreck, fearful of bunnies, beards and Santa Claus. In the meantime, his psychological principles for achieving advertising success have arguably turned all denizens of consumer culture into baby Albert, manipulated by sounds and images into making associations that trigger three primal emotions: love, rage and fear. The applications have merely become more overt, with the designs of casinos and supermarkets carefully calibrated to <a href="http://www.livecasino.co.uk/resource/casino-design/" style="">create</a> [13] compulsions for items we don't need. It’s become a popular truism that American <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/is-your-brain-culture/200902/culture-happiness-and-laboratory-rat" style="">culture</a> [14] treats consumers like lab rats on a wheel, dangling sex, food, revenge and rewards just out of reach, to be forever chased. Turns out that feeling of running for your life while being stuck in one place is more accurate than anyone knew.

Paula Young Lee is the author of several books, including <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Deer-Hunting-Paris-Memoir-Travelers/dp/1609520807/ref=tmm_pap_title_0" style="text-decoration: none;">Deer Hunting in Paris</a> [15]: A Memoir of God, Guns, and Game Meat, winner of the 2014 Lowell Thomas Travel Book Award of the Society of American Travel Writers.

</div>

===

eg:

<span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: none; display: inline !important;">Vioxx is the brand name for <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Merck" title="Merck" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">Merck</a><span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: none; display: inline !important;">'s anti-inflammatory drug and pain medication, initially marketed as an alternative to analgesics that aggravate stomach ulcers. Merck's marketing of Vioxx was unusually aggressive. In January 2001, <i style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">O'Dwyers PR Daily<span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: none; display: inline !important;"> reported that Merck had paid Bruce Jenner and the former Olympic skater Dorothy Hamill for media interviews they gave discussing Vioxx. <sup id="cite_ref-1" class="reference" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Vioxx#cite_note-1" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[1]</a><span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: none; display: inline !important;"> A November 2001 study by the <i style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">National Institute for Health Care Management Research and Educational Foundation<span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: none; display: inline !important;"> found that<span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: none; display: inline !important;"> Merck spent $160 million to advertise Vioxx in 2000 alone; more than <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anheuser-Busch" title="Anheuser-Busch" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">Anheuser-Busch</a><span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: none; display: inline !important;"> spent that year promoting Budweiser beer. <sup id="cite_ref-2" class="reference" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Vioxx#cite_note-2" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[2]</a>

<h2 style="background-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">Recall</h2>

<dd style=" line-height: 1.5em; margin-left: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-right: 0px;">"laboratories and network of independent drug safety experts in favor of hiring more people to approve drugs. ...the agency (is) increasingly reliant on and bound by drug company money." <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Vioxx#cite_note-3" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[3]</a></dd>

</dl>

<p style="margin: 0.4em 0px 0.5em; line-height: 19.2px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It was not until 2004 that strong, publicly available research tied Vioxx (a COX-2 inhibitor), to a significant increase in heart attacks among users. The drug was pulled off the shelves that fall. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Vioxx#cite_note-4" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[4]</a> Following the Vioxx recall, many faulted Merck's over-the-top <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Direct-to-consumer_advertising" title="Direct-to-consumer advertising" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">direct-to-consumer advertising</a>. According to <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Public_Citizen" title="Public Citizen" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Public Citizen</a>'s Health Research Group director, "Advertising and promotions played a major role in making people think Vioxx was safer and more effective than it is." According to former <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Food_and_Drug_Administration" title="Food and Drug Administration" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Food and Drug Administration</a> (FDA) associate commissioner <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Wayne_Pines" title="Wayne Pines" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Wayne Pines</a>:

<dd style=" line-height: 1.5em; margin-left: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-right: 0px;">"If we see product liability emanating from Merck's decision... (It will) encourage drug companies to disclose the maximum amount of a drug's risks in their advertising." <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Vioxx#cite_note-5" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[5]</a></dd>

</dl>

Merck responded to the Vioxx recall by launching a <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Public_relations" title="Public relations" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">public relations</a> campaign to salvage its image and portray its pulling the drug in as positive a light as possible. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Vioxx#cite_note-7" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[7]</a> The campaign included three full page ads in seven prominent newspapers; several television appearances and testimony before Congress by the company's CEO. However, leaked emails and other internal documents indicated that the company knew about the side effects long before the drug was withdrawn. According to Merck's media relations director, "the mantra has been openness, integrity and transparency." <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Vioxx#cite_note-8" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[8]</a>