Facebook comes for the children

Viewed in the context of Twitter culture in 2017, it is very obviously a bad faith campaign by white nationalists and alt-right accounts to target members of the mainstream media for harassment by exploiting Twitter’s policies, which are riddled with loopholes and vague interpretations.

In fact, Twitter’s abuse policy is so flaky that the platform couldn’t seem to decide if my tweets broke the rules or not. A few weeks ago, someone filed a report about the very tweet my account was locked over and tweeted out screenshots showing the “kill all white people” tweet wasn’t a violation of Twitter’s rules.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, countless women have taken to Facebook to express their frustration and disappointment with men and have been promptly shut down or silenced, banned from the platform for periods ranging from one to seven days.

Around noon on Monday, McCain tweeted a call to action requesting help from his audience. “We’re only 74 Twitter followers away from 3M — spread the word & help us reach this big milestone,” he tweeted. Doing the math, that means he was sitting pretty with 2,999,926 followers at the time. At the moment, he has 2,993,757 followers and the number is rapidly declining as people see an opportunity to tell McCain what they think of him.

The senators have good reason to be worried about fake comments sent to the FCC, especially those opposing net neutrality. In total, the FCC released nearly 22 million comments submitted through its website during a public commenting period from April 27 to August 30 of this year. The FCC received significantly fewer online comments—only around 4 million—the last time it asked the public to weigh in on net neutrality in 2014.

Over 80 percent of the comments are believed to have been sent by bots, according to an October analysis conducted by the Gravwell, a data analytics company. Most of the automated comments opposed net neutrality, while around 95 percent of “organic,” or believed to be legitimate comments, favored the current regulations.

According to a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems by researchers at Notre Dame University, some 73 percent of posts on Reddit are voted on by users that haven’t actually clicked through to view the content being rated. This is according to a newly released dataset consisting of all Reddit activity of 309 site users for a one year period. In the process, the researchers identified signs of “cognitive fatigue” in Reddit users most likely to vote on content. Online aggregation is then somewhat a function of mental exhaustion.

This year’s top ship comes from the animated sci-fi show “Voltron: Legendary Defender,” where fans have latched on to the chemistry between the solemn loner, Keith, and the goofball sharpshooter, Lance.

The clip above, from season three, is a nice sampling of their (so-far platonic) relationship.

“They’re just adorable with each other,” Ms. Brennan said of the pairing, popularly known as Klance. “On Tumblr specifically, a lot of the content about Klance is really cute fan art.”

Few advertisers are willing to negotiate direct deals with platforms that don’t have enormous scale, meaning ad-revenue rates are lower for newer platforms. In turn, there’s less overall revenue to be shared with creators, which means creators are less likely to support newer platforms for a sustained period of time.

Although we introduced direct fan patronage as an additional business model, the profit margin was insufficient to cover the high costs of storing and delivering video.

A millennial-focused site, Neverthink has “channels” of video content scoured daily from all over the internet and streamed directly from their sources (typically YouTube) by a team of 15 editors. You can’t skip videos.

1. Moore’s Law plus the internet makes smart people smarter, and stupid people less smart.

11. Parts of social media will peel off into smaller, more private groups. At the end of the day, many will wonder which economies of scale and scope have been lost. And gained. Others will be too manipulated to wonder such things.

I have loved the internet, but Donald Trump and the opportunistic trolls he has created or emboldened have ruined the internet for me. A place that I used to go for joy, for connection, for information, has been perverted, abused, and reduced. I can’t blame Trump alone; Facebook and its ilk have sought to whittle down and define the internet in a manner that has not only diminished its power, but provided thugs and thieves with tools to abuse humanity in ways that have previously only been possible inside of a video game. The Masters of the Cloud, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, have made the whole of the internet into a violent game. Facebook, Twitter, and social networks in general are powered by a logic of rewards, and any system in which points can be scored can be gamed. And it has been gamed, it has been tightened up and used as a cudgel, and it’s beat down a populace in ways that are both easily describable and frighteningly spectral.

What I want everyone to see is that there is no here and there. There is one world, whether it pulses on a screen in front of you, or is flesh right next to you. How we talk to one another, use one another, attack or embrace one another is real life. Emotional and psychological wounds don’t cut less deeply because they have been delivered at a remove. What you do on the internet is what you’re doing in real life.

The Department of Homeland Security has been capitalizing on the availability of social media data, asking foreign visitors for their social media handles. This summer saw the latest development from one DHS agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is seeking to mine social media to make sweeping predictions about foreign visitors to the United States — and, by extension, monitoring the Americans in their network.

Setting aside for a moment whether a program could even do what ICE hopes it will accomplish, it is an enormously dangerous proposition. As a group of more than 50 civil society organizations pointed out to DHS in a letter released in November, it is likely to be custom-built for discrimination. In addition to the fact that the scheme was birthed from the travel ban, a watered-down version of which was found by an appeals court to “drip with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination,” it arises in the context of Trump’s derogatory statements about a range of immigrant groups. It is easy to imagine that a system built in that environment will disadvantage groups targeted by the president, whether intentionally or through the use of ill-conceived tools to measure an individual’s contributions to society.

The initiative is also likely to chill speech and association that is protected by the U.S. Constitution and by international human rights frameworks. Any visitor who knows that her online communications will be scrutinized by the U.S. government — not just as a one-time matter, but continuously for the duration of her stay — will choose her words carefully, perhaps choosing not to post messages that are critical of government policies or that discuss views disfavored by the current administration. U.S. citizens might exercise greater caution in speaking, meeting or collaborating with foreign visitors, worried that their speech will attract attention as well. And as a practical matter, it is highly implausible that a program purporting to scrutinize the Internet would pick up only materials that are posted by or related to foreign visitors; rather, it will sweep in vast quantities of content about lawful permanent residents and citizens as well.