Colleges and universities instituting intense and personal surveillance of students for everything from attendance tracking, identifying groups deemed too large, to tracking students temperature and health symptoms, automatically. Scary stuff.
Social media compiles a dossier on each of us (even we do not belong to the platform) to understand us better than we understand ourselves. This information is then used to target advertising at us – basically finely targeted propaganda. Some times they are selling products, other times services, and some times ideas (politics). Regardless, their analysis has made some big misses about me 🙂
Washington Post advocates for social media platforms to censor political speech.
Dr. Scott Atlas put out a tweet with factual information and questions as to why real world data indicates our current face mask policies are not working. Twitter deleted the tweet. The questions he raised, however, are real. By suspending speech, Twitter prevents the opportunity to find solutions or improvements that would overcome the limitations made obvious in the data. Twitter’s action are a clear and present danger to everyone.
I did some scanning of social media for “test positive” and found numerous cases of people testing positive for stupidity.
Quite a few were sharing a meme that a doctor or group of nurses had sent in a batch of unused Covid-19 tests to a lab and all came back as having tested positive. Obviously, that is a social media meme – there is never any provenance to the story, no details to check it out. Clearly, a fake meme suited for social mania sharing.
There is a meme going round that a doctor or a group of nurses sent an unused batch of Covid-19 tests to a lab and all the tests came back positive. This is virtually certain to be a fake social media meme that is not true. Poynter notes there is no evidence for this but then incorrectly says that because the tests have a low false positive rate, false positives are not a problem. But that is not true once you understand how the conditional probability works – when used to screen large groups of people where the disease prevalence is low, most of those getting a positive test result are actually false positives.
Twitter and Facebook blocked or suppressed links to stories from the New York Post, a 200 year old U.S. newspaper with the 4th largest circulation in the country.
C-Span’s political editor, who was to moderate the 2nd presidential debate, has been placed on indefinite suspension after admitting to lying and falsely claiming his Twitter account had been hacked. The lie was much worse than the original stupid Tweet.
This was inevitable. I have some security cameras that can link to the web. I turned them off whenever we are home precisely because of this. The cloud cannot be trusted. Source: Singapore home cams hacked and stolen footage sold on pornographic sites | The New Paper