patrick.net

People realize now that FB - and many others - are selling every bit of private information they can get to the highest bidder for propaganda purpose?

I thought this was the entire premise of this industry.

All the kids these days know that Facebook is for old people like your parents...

c0nfused says

are selling every bit of private information they can get to the highest bidder for propaganda purpose

Kind of seemed obvious with the amount of info people freely give away. You seem to realize that, so don't take that the wrong way. I'm more saddened/troubled by the idiots that fall for the propaganda after they freely gave away said information and personal details. There are so many people that I once thought were reasonable and smart people but have literally changed for the worse likely due to the "groupthink" of social media. This goes for either "Libtard" or "Trumpcuck" variations.

This statement is a bit sensationalistic, but I kind of regret having kids and bringing them into this world seeing where it's going. I like Patnet and will always hang around, but some of the thread topics and comments being flung at the wall lately remind me a lot of the movie Groundhog Day. There are still good topics of course, but it's a lot of the same issues being brought up and the exact same argument, with the exact same people, having the exact same positions. This seems to be going on everywhere, not just here.

Very few, if any here, will admit when they're wrong. So not sure why everyone keeps arguing over the same thing day after day. Would like to see some more creativity coming from some of the regulars here to be honest. I'm not singling out any individual users or any "tribe" just acknowledging that the content of late has been regurgitated many times and no one has changed their view. So why keep doing it?

I just posted a new updated profile selfy on Facebook. I was so fabulous. A female undergraduate at Oxford sent me a friend request. Of course, in reality, it is probably a Russian hooker with a vicious drunken Russian pimp.

Heraclitusstudent says

People realize now that FB - and many others - are selling every bit of private information they can get to the highest bidder for propaganda purpose?

I thought this was the entire premise of this industry.

It was a problem to segment like EFF, then it wasn't when Facebook was joining the "Fake News" crusade to link articles to strong Left-wing biased Snopes and Polifake.

Now that it came out that Bannon hired a (former) Facebook Contractor to do social marketing research, all of a sudden the Left rediscovered the problem of privacy.

It wasn't a problem when Obama and Clinton "used" Social Media Datamining in their campaigns, however. Indeed their campaigns were praised for being internet savvy.

Snowden says FB is about surveillance.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/edward-snowden-facebook-is-a-surveillance-company-rebranded-as-social-media
Apparently he doesn't understand the concept of propaganda.

WookieMan says

I'm more saddened/troubled by the idiots that fall for the propaganda after they freely gave away said information and personal details.

The human mind is biased and so vulnerable to propaganda. This is true for all of us. Don't think you are immune.

Once someone is sure their side is better than the other side, and they know better than the other guys, they're basically hand puppets.

c0nfused says

Facebook is using us. It is actively giving away our information

It's selling your information, not giving it away!!!

How is FB going to defend itself: "That's how our business works."???

Left are finally upset, but only after Republicans used info to their advantage...

Seems very usual selfish motive.

Is Facebook the next Hitler?

So the blogs were mostly outcompeted. A few of the best and most interesting blogs became full-fledged online publications, but a lot of the small, quirky, one-person amateur bloggers moved onto social media. That turned out to be a big mistake, because the era of social media has recentralized the media. Instead of a million blogs—what Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame called an “Army of Davids“—we now have a social media economy mostly controlled by three big companies: Twitter, Facebook, and Google.

So we get shadowbanning, arbitrary Twitter suspensions, and Twitter throttling the traffic of people they don’t like and controlling what articles you can tweet links to. We traded the old mainstream media gatekeepers for new, worse, less publicly accountable gatekeepers in Silicon Valley—a new breed of pinch-nosed Puritans with pink hair, piercings, and tattoos, who will shut us down if we don’t use the right pronouns.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/19/social-media-mistake-heres-experiment-find/

#neverinstalledthatshit

On Sunday, The Guardian reported on the supposedly nefarious workings of President Trump’s data-gathering team at Cambridge Analytica. The report suggested that Cambridge Analytica had essentially issued questionnaires through a third party; those questionnaires, which were personality quizzes, requested that you use your Facebook login. Cambridge Analytica then compiled data regarding those who completed the quiz and cross-referenced that data with political preferences in order to target potential voters.

This isn’t particularly shocking. In 2012, The Guardian reported that President Obama’s reelection team was “building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before.”

What, exactly, would Obama be doing? According to The Guardian, Obama’s new database would be gathered by asking individual volunteers to log into Obama’s reelection site using their Facebook credentials. “Consciously or otherwise,” The Guardian states, “the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page — home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends — directly into the central Obama database.”
Facebook had no problem with such activity then. They do now. There’s a reason for that. The former Obama director of integration and media analytics stated that, during the 2012 campaign, Facebook allowed the Obama team to “suck out the whole social graph”; Facebook “was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.” She added, “They came to [the] office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”

Not so with Trump. As soon as Facebook realized that Cambridge Analytica had pursued a similar strategy, they suspended the firm.

Again, this isn’t surprising. Since Trump’s election, Democrats — in search of a rationale for their favored candidate’s defeat — have blamed a bevy of social media outlets. Senate Democrats trotted out pathetic Russian-created memes on Facebook, viewed by a handful of human beings, as an excuse for Hillary’s loss; Democrats claimed — without evidence — that “fake news” had swamped Facebook and thus led to Trump’s victory. Democrats have also insisted that Facebook be regulated. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) raged, “You’ve created these platforms, and now they’re being misused, and you have to be the ones to do something about it. Or we will.” Facebook’s former privacy manager called for the government to step into an oversight role regarding Facebook.

In February, Wired magazine ran a cover story specifically dealing with Facebook’s role in the election of 2016, and their subsequent attempts to “fix” the problem. After the election, Mark Zuckerberg even met with Barack Obama, apparently in an attempt to convince Obama that he was serious about stopping the “misuse” of the platform. And in February, Zuckerberg said he wanted to re-jigger the algorithms on his platform to benefit content that Facebook deems “trustworthy, informative, and local.” Wired celebrated: “You can’t make the world more open and connected if you’re breaking it apart.”

The result of Facebook’s algorithmic changes: conservatives have been slammed. And that’s the point. A study from The Western Journal found that conservative sites have lost an average of 14 percent of their Facebook traffic; leftist sites saw a minor increase. Even major publications saw that effect: The New York Daily News saw a bump of 24.18 percent, while the New York Post dropped 11.44 percent.

And that’s the goal in covering Cambridge Analytica, and Russian interference on Twitter, and all the rest — even without any serious information suggesting that such interference shifted votes, the left can rest assured that its Silicon Valley allies will act to de-platform Republicans and conservatives. There’s a reason Twitter has suspended alt-right racists but continued to recommend that others follow Louis Farrakhan; there’s a reason YouTube is being sued by Prager University; there’s a reason Google used automatic fact-checking on right-wing sites but did no such thing for left-wing sites.

We’re in the midst of a radical reshifting in social media. Ironically, the people who have stumped against regulation — conservatives — are those being targeted by social media companies. If companies like Facebook, YouTube, Google and Twitter don’t start acting like platforms again rather than like motivated left-wing outlets, Republicans likely won’t let principle outweigh practicality for long.

http://thehill.com/opinion/technology/379245-whats-genius-for-obama-is-scandal-when-it-comes-to-trump

I interviewed at a company called Optimizely which grew out of Obama's campaign. They let you try out different versions of web pages to see which one is more effective at getting donations and email addresses, but they don't like to point out their origin in the 2012 campaign:

https://www.optimizely.com/customers/obama2012/

I actually worked at Amazon for a year where my job was collecting statistics and making reports on ABCD testing. Amazon often has four different versions of the same page up and is constantly tweaking them to see which leads to more "conversions" to paying customers. I suppose that's fair play, but also seems manipulative because they don't tell you that they are experimenting on you. Everyone assumes that the page they see is the same one that everyone else sees.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-20/ftc-said-to-be-probing-facebook-for-use-of-personal-data

Which has taken the stock down:

And now there is a flood of articles about Facebook's exposure of personal information:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180318/00111439443/both-facebook-cambridge-analytica-threatened-to-sue-journalists-over-stories-cas-use-facebook-data.shtml
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43474760
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/20/facebook-data-cambridge-analytica-sandy-parakilas

Parakilas said he “always assumed there was something of a black market” for Facebook data that had been passed to external developers. However, he said that when he told other executives the company should proactively “audit developers directly and see what’s going on with the data” he was discouraged from the approach.

He said one Facebook executive advised him against looking too deeply at how the data was being used, warning him: “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?” Parakilas said he interpreted the comment to mean that “Facebook was in a stronger legal position if it didn’t know about the abuse that was happening”.

He added: “They felt that it was better not to know. I found that utterly shocking and horrifying.”

Heraclitusstudent says

How is FB going to defend itself: "That's how our business works."???

I forgot corporate PR consists in saying the exact opposite of the truth with sufficient aplomb.
"Selling data on millions ‘is the opposite of our business model,’" says Facebook’s Boz
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/selling-data-on-millions-is-the-opposite-of-our-business-model-says-facebooks-boz/

The Company was doing publicized news stories about this business model when Obama was King around here.
Everyone cozied up to the TV to consume every juicy tidbit in great detail. They even willfully downloaded, the "Your Life" app to participate in the social experiment.

My guess they got heads up the company is about to crash, so they are singling this one company out, that started out working for Obama. To try to say Facebook collapse was Trump fault somehow. Trump was king of Twitter, he had virtually no presence on Facebook to speak of.

It's the most bogus dishonest projection I've seen the Evil Liberals pull. The Voters aren't stupid they know who used FB and who didn't.