Six months ago, I wrote about airlines’ new policies of dividing cabins into as many as 9 different tiers or classes of customers, creating a sense of peer pressure between the haves and have-nots. Now, researchers say this passenger hierarchy appears to lead to more in flight aggression by passengers.
The business model of the Internet is spying. Supposedly, by knowing everything about everyone, marketers selling products, services and political B.S., can target their ad (aka propaganda) messages precisely to each individual. An academic study finds these targeted ad do not work well and do not deliver a value commiserate with their higher price.
CrossFit abandons Facebook due their privacy problems, security problems and that FB randomly and without warning deletes legitimate accounts and groups with millions of followers. Keep this in mind if you believe there is no “slippery slope” in what FB is doing to public discourse, positive and negative.
An academic study finds that Google steers news searches towards articles in left leaning publications versus to similar stories in right leaning publications. This is another post in our series about the influence that publishers and corporations (including social media) exert on public opinion.
Amazon, for some time, blocked advertisers from running ads that were said to contain “religious content”. This included gifts and clothing items with “biblical quotes and religious language”. Amazon has now announced this was done in error. This is another in our series of how large publishers and corporations use their online dominance to control online speech and thought.
Facebook bans those who appear to engage in hate speech or promoting acts of violence, and says it will ban those who may, in turn, make supportive comments about those who have been banned.
Social media companies want to act like an edited publication that is liable for its content while simultaneously saying they are like the telephone company which is not liable for the content carried over their network. Social media companies promote net neutrality to require third party Internet networks to carry their content unimpeded – while social media company’s simultaneously disable other people’s contents. This is a challenging problem.
Police routinely ask Google to provide information about all phones within a neighborhood of a crime. This has resulted, in at least one example, of an innocent man arrested for murder. While released a week later, he was fired from his job – even though he was 100% innocent. Further, from the linked news article, Google retrains location information for potentially forever – we already know that Google collects location data even when you disable Location services.
For once, Facebook is honest? 🙂
Facebook continues to claim they oppose discrimination in all forms, in spite of mountains of evidence showing they continue to discriminate based on age, gender and other attributes in their ad platform.
Social media promoters know that “outrage” leads to more views. That’s why conspiracy theories and other outrageous content flourish on social media – because they are watched.
Fake news, fake reviews – its all the same after a while. Any web service relying on user contributed content has devolved into the noise of fake posts. Now, AI is being applied to writing fake reviews, in an attempt to get around the AI code that seeks to detect fake reviews.
AI didn’t work to filter everything: Youtube to ban comments on most videos featuring children under 18 (and perhaps others).
Youtube just axed comments from tens of millions of videos featuring children – such as, you know, actual family friendly videos – and says they will not run ads on videos that may have “inappropriate comments”. In effect, to make Youtube family friendly, Youtube has just killed off family friendly channels.
Severe mental health issues come with being a moderator for Facebook wacky posts.