Much of the online criticism about the Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, was driven by Russian troll farms and bots as a form of information warfare intended – successfully – to tear our society apart. It’s pretty ugly.
An image search for the word “idiot” across 7 different search engines yields curious results.
The news media uses a photo to illustrate an article, but selects a photo having nothing to do with the subject. The photo is from a festival at a horse race in Great Britain on “dress up” day.
Google Image search was used to research the photo. However, Google misinterprets the photo and falsely adds “richest 1 percent of Americans”. That happened because this photo has been used, repeatedly, by U.S. media outlets to illustrate “wealth” and “richest 1%”. Google’s search algorithms then incorrectly associate “richest 1%” with this photo; Google then reinforces that incorrect conclusion by automatically adding “richest 1 percent of americans” to a search for this photo.
We learn from this that reporters and editors routinely use fake photos to illustrate “news” reports in what appears to be intentional propaganda messaging. Then we learn how Google’s artificial stupidity algorithms incorporate fake photos and textual analysis in to computational propaganda messaging.
Facebook and Twitter are algorithmically assigning users a secret “trustworthiness” score. This score is used to determine whether your posts are seen by others – in effect, its a computational shadow ban on users. Twitter takes into account who you follow and who follows you and their scores – which means people you have no control over may be determining your trustworthiness score.
FACEBOOK says it “regrets” an algorithm blunder that caused balloons and confetti to appear in posts about the deadly earthquake in Indonesia because the same spelling of a word means “I’m unhurt” or “congratulations” depending on context. Facebook automatically displayed animated festive balloons on people using FB to tell their friends they were safe by mistakenly thinking the messages contained congratulatory quotes. Facebook has repeatedly said it will use artificial intelligence (aka artificial stupidity) algorithms to identify and halt hate…
“Social media manipulation is big business,” the researchers found. “We estimate that tens of millions of dollars are being spent on social media manipulation campaigns, involving tens of thousands of professional staff.” While there is nothing new about political parties and governments using disinformation to manipulate elections at home and abroad, the Oxford researchers note that the massive, easily accessible, and lightly regulated platforms offered by Facebook and Twitter have become enormously powerful tools in the hands of political actors,…
Facebook restricts certain conduct on its platform. However, journalists and academics are seeking to receive special privileges to do things that are prohibited for others. Journalists and academics, for example, would be permitted to set up fake accounts with fake or curated content, for the purpose of studying users. Individuals, however, would be banned from conducting the same research and thus, would be prohibited from verifying or evaluating the work of journalists and academics. Basically, the proposal is to have…
Social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google attempt to discern our interests and voting profile by interpreting the text we write, the texts we receive, the posts we like and share, the web sites we visit, and combine that with data purchased from third party companies that collect our credit card purchases and store loyalty card purchases. Google is just as bad as Facebook. This information is compiled into a dossier on each of us and is sold…
Once enabled, Samba TV can track nearly everything that appears on the TV on a second-by-second basis, essentially reading pixels to identify network shows and ads, as well as programs on Netflix and HBO and even video games played on the TV. Samba TV has even offered advertisers the ability to base their targeting on whether people watch conservative or liberal media outlets and which party’s presidential debate they watched. …. Samba TV can also identify other devices in the…
This is separate from the apps that had access to friends of friends data such as those affiliated with Cambridge Analytica, and many others. This is separate from the 60 hardware partners like Chinese phone maker Huawei, that were given access to private data on Facebook. This is new – Facebook gave secret access to many additional partners too: Facebook Inc. FB 0.49% struck customized data-sharing deals with a select group of companies, some of which had special access to…
A long time ago, in a generation far away from the present, there was a TV show called “The Outer Limits” famous for its opening sequence narration: There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will…
Facebook’s website had an entire section devoted to touting the “success stories” of political campaigns that used the social network to influence electoral outcomes. That page, however, is now gone, even as the 2018 congressional primaries get underway. Source: Facebook Quietly Hid Webpages Bragging of Ability to Influence Elections
Perhaps at some point in the past few years you’ve told Facebook that you like, say, Kim Kardashian West. …. What you probably missed is that researchers had figured out how to tie your interest in Ms. Kardashian West to certain personality traits, such as how extroverted you are (very), how conscientious (more than most) and how open-minded (only somewhat). And when your fondness for Ms. Kardashian West is combined with other interests you’ve indicated on Facebook, researchers believe their…
Facebook said Wednesday that most of its 2 billion users likely have had their public profiles scraped by outsiders without the users’ explicit permission, dramatically raising the stakes in a privacy controversy that has dogged the company for weeks, spurred investigations in the United States and Europe, and sent the company’s stock price tumbling. It seems likely that more than just “public” data was taken. Facebook is not telling anyone what was taken (why the secrecy?) It seems highly likely…