Social Panic

The FAA and other officials, using high tech gear, are unable to locate any drones among the media reports of unknown drones cruising over the skies of Colorado, then Nebraska, and now California and North Carolina. This post includes a listing of numerous well publicized drone sightings, alleged near misses and collisions that turned out to have never occurred. But such wide spread publicity led to mass hysteria, which is itself a technique of propaganda messaging.

State of Colorado says no evidence of criminal activity, finds evidence of people confusing stars, planets and toys as a drone fleet in the sky.

Facebook lost about $113 billion market capitalization this week (per news reports). Twitter share price also fell about -20%. One pundit on Twitter remarked that while government did nothing about Facebook’s privacy scandals, the free market itself just assessed a $100 billion fine on Facebook, of which about $16 billion came out of Mark Zuckerberg’s pocket.

At a local comic con, of all places, a cosplayer and recent sociology graduate introduced me to the term “mean world syndrome”. Mean world syndrome is a term coined by George Gerbner to describe a phenomenon whereby violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. Source: Mean world syndrome – Wikipedia She says sociology, as a field, suffers from mean world syndrome as all they do today is study things…

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Source: Newspapers run IDENTICAL letters slamming Trump’s Supreme Court pick | Daily Mail Online At least one of the signatories to the letter says she never sent the letter and suggests that her name was lifted off a petition. This was an astro-turf propaganda operation, flooding the world with a message that is made to look like it comes “from the people” (grass roots) when in fact, it was manufactured by an organization or public relations agency working on behalf…

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The company said it would invest in more “authoritative” news videos to counter the conspiracy-theory clips that plague the site. It will also insert “text articles” in feeds when breaking news occurs, and will roll out an “information panel” promoting videos from legitimate news groups. Source: YouTube Will Invest $25 Million to Fight Fake News – The Daily Beast Presently, Youtube already stuffs my Youtube video feed with news videos, usually CNN but sometimes other networks. I do not watch…

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An entire Events Calendar just for political outrage events! Bay Area political events: Supreme Court protest, polarizing politics – SFChronicle.com There’s got to be something for everyone to be outraged about!  

I moved this post to my Internet of Things blog: Venmo’s broken security While it deals with privacy issues, it is a better fit for that blog, which also covers security and privacy issues, versus this one which is primarily propaganda and privacy issues on social media.  

“I don’t like the phone because my [parents] are on their phone every day … I hate my mom’s phone and I wish she never had one,” one student wrote in a photo posted to Beason’s Facebook page that has since been turned to private. The post was shared more than 261,000 times — parents expressed guilt, and fellow teachers echoed similar conversations they’ve had in their classrooms. Source: kgw.com | I wish my mom’s phone wasn’t invented, 2nd grader…

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Source: Yahoo and AOL Just Gave Themselves the Right to Read Emails, Access Bank Records | Trending

In a peer-reviewed study we published this month, we find op-eds do change minds. After reading opinion pieces, we found people were far more likely to agree with the author’s point of view. Even in today’s allegedly post-fact world, people are capable of considering new evidence and reaching new conclusions. Source: This column will probably change your mind – The Washington Post