Category: Social Media

Morons

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You know the story, Donald Trump gets kicked off of Twitter, Donald Trump and Evil Minions™ create a Twitter clone, and said clone gets flooded by Sonic the Hedgehog Pr0n.

You just KNEW that this would happen:

Nary a month after the dramatic implosion of former president (and current Twitter refugee) Donald Trump’s attempted blogging career, the septuagenarian authoritarian’s “team” of grifting enablers has launched its latest attempt at a social network for folks who are just too darn patriotic for mainstream social media…and also for all sorts of Sonic the Hedgehog porn.

The unpleasantly named GETTR—Hillary Clinton lives rent-free in that dude’s head—is essentially a Twitter clone. Its slogan, “the marketplace of ideas,” suggests that inexplicably fence-sitting centrists might find it appealing as well, and that’s particularly true if they’re into furry vore artwork and memes about Sonic the Hedgehog getting pregnant.

That keeps coming up, doesn’t it? It seems that GETTR’s early launch (it was originally promised for Independence Day) has attracted a variety of leftist riff-raff from TikTok, weird Twitter and the like, and they’ve embraced the unsavory, Trump-associated birdsite wannabe as the perfect place to share degenerate hentai, furry porn, leftist Sonic memes, and stock photos of pudgy, aged men in their underwear.

I need to get an account, and tell people that, “Joe Biden has given us lemons, so go to lemonparty dot org.”

Note to my reader(s), do not under ANY circumstances EVER go to lemonparty dot org. 

That which is seen can never be unseen.

The Dog Ate My Homework

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So now, Amazon is blaming social media for the plague of false reviews on its site.

If they have the resources to dedicate to tracking their shoppers’ habits, and the resources to surveil and harass their employees at the slightest whiff of a unionization effort, they have the resources to fix this:

Amazon today said it can’t stop fake product reviews without help from social media companies, and it blamed those companies for not doing more to prevent solicitation of fake reviews.

In a blog post, Amazon said its own “continued improvements in detection of fake reviews and connections between bad-actor buying and selling accounts” has led to “an increasing trend of bad actors attempting to solicit 

fake reviews outside Amazon, particularly via social media services.”

Amazon doesn’t handle the fake review problem because they don’t want to.  Anything near a full accounting would reveal just how badly they are screwing their customers, and they make a lot of money by screwing these same customers.

That’s also why they are so lackadaisical about pursuing counterfeit product in their market.

It’s the Fraud, Stupid

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woah exhibit 16. more Facebook docs quietly unsealed yesterday – it gets worse. A full, damning senior execs’ email thread (CFO, COO) unsealed. Facebook slowed unsealings in this fraud case and spun it as “cherrypicking.”
Top marketing exec, Carolyn Everson, weighs in here. /1 pic.twitter.com/Zn51XNcKxn

— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) April 25, 2021

It’s Called Fraud

As I have noted a few times, any in depth examination of Facebook would reveal systematic fraud. 

Recently revealed emails uncovered in the fraud lawsuit against the social media network show Facebook was deeply aware that it was providing false information to advertisers, which seems to be a slam-dunk case of fraud.

Both Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandburg are famously “Hands On”, and this is at the core of their business.

They knew that they were defrauding advertisers, and they took their money anyway:

Carolyn Everson, one of Facebook’s most senior advertising executives, said the company had to “prepare for the worst” over claims that it overstated the potential reach of its advertisements, according to newly released court filings.

The world’s largest social network has been fighting a class-action lawsuit in California since 2018 over claims that its figure for its “potential reach”, which told advertisers how many people saw their ads, included duplicate and fake accounts.

Facebook has argued that the numbers were only estimates and that advertisers are charged for actual clicks and impressions, rather than for the potential reach of an ad.

But according to filings in the lawsuit that were unredacted over the weekend, Everson, the vice-president of Facebook’s global business group, wrote an email in 2017 that said the metric “clearly impacted [advertisers’] planning”.

“We are going to get really criticized for that (and justifiably so),” she said. “If we overstated how many actual real people we have in certain demos, there is no question that impacted budget allocations. We have to prepare for the worst here.”

………

The lawsuit, which was filed in northern California in 2018 by a small-business owner, alleges that Facebook executives knew the potential reach figure was “misleading” and took no action to correct it in order to “preserve its own bottom line”.

It points to research showing Facebook had suggested potential reach in certain US states and demographics that was greater than the actual populations in those geographies.
A Financial Times investigation in 2019 found similar discrepancies in Facebook’s ads manager, an online tool to help advertisers build campaigns, even though the company made some changes to its potential reach definition earlier that year.

They knew that the metrics were complete crap, and they tried to bury the information and continued to use the bad data to get paid.

Break out the cuffs, Ponch.

My, How Nick Clegg has Fallen

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Roll Tape!

In 2010, largely on the basis of being telegenic and glib, Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrats, (Slightly Silly Party) managed to snag enough seats in Parliament, no mean feat in Britains first-past-the-post system, to be the junior member in coalition with David Cameron and the Tories until the next election, where

In the next election, they lost 48 of 57 seats, because the electorate realized that all Clegg cared about was proximity to power.

Speaking of Nick Clegg’s pathological need to be close to power, he is now Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, and so, much like his days in UK politics, defending the indefensible.

In this case, the former head of the Lib Dems is defending Facebook’s algorithms and its reckless and insecure handling of user data. 

Clegg’s descent into an irrelevant joke does not surprise me one bit:

Facebook wants to reintroduce users to its algorithms.

On Wednesday, within the span of a few hours, the company took several steps to encourage users to trust its ranking and recommendation systems. In a blog post, Facebook said it would make it easier for users to control what’s in their feeds, pointing to both new and existing tools. In an apparent attempt to buttress that announcement, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg published a 5,000-word Medium post defending the company’s ranking algorithms and repudiating the argument that those algorithms create dangerous echo chambers. Clegg also defended Facebook’s algorithms in a wide-ranging interview with The Verge published on the same day.

Taken together, these moves appear to be a concerted campaign by Facebook to repair the negative reputation of its algorithms, which many say actively encourage and incentivize political polarization, misinformation, and extreme content. The efforts come as the company faces heavy criticism from lawmakers for its platform design, and just a week after CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress during a hearing on misinformation.

In its latest PR blitz, Facebook is pushing the idea that it’s not particularly responsible for the proliferation of polarization and extreme content on its platforms and is taking appropriate steps to combat both. That defies longtime critics, who have said Facebook’s algorithms are engineered to reward the most odious content, a specific narrative that Facebook and Clegg are actively denying.

………

“Nick Clegg’s Medium post is a cynical, breathtaking display of gaslighting on a scale hard to fathom even for Facebook,” a spokesperson for the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of scholars and activists critical of Facebook, told Recode. “Clegg asks, ‘Where does FB’s incentive lie?’ A better question might be: Where does Nick Clegg’s incentive lie? The answer to that is clear.”

“Facebook managed to both insult its users for being too dimwitted to understand how its algorithms work while also blaming them for taking advantage of them too effectively,” said Ashley Boyd, the vice president for advocacy at Mozilla, in a Wednesday statement. “The News Feed controls unveiled today amount to nothing more than an admission that its algorithms are the problem.”

Ashley Boyd’s quote is spot on, and I have nothing to add.

Why the Hell Haven’t I Been Banned from Twitter?

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And I am outraged that James Hodgkinson was not a better shot.

— Jack Dorsey Is Objectively Pro-Nazi (M.G. Saroff) (@40_Years) March 4, 2021

Seems bannable to me

In response to a Tweet from Steve Scalise (R-LA) wherein he expressed, “Outrage,” over the House of Representatives passing a bill to make it easier for people to vote, I replied, “And I am outraged that James Hodgkinson was not a better shot.”

James Hodgkinson, as you probably already know, was the left-wing gunman who opened fire on a baseball practice being conducted by Congressional Republicans, severely wounded Representative Scalize. (He nearly died, both from the immediate effects of the shooting, and later from a post operative infection.)

Not only am I still on Twitter, but I haven’t even been called an asshole.

At least this time, unlike the last time, I will actually have done something meriting a banning.   (Last time, it was (I think, I never got an answer) for using the term “Wymyn” as a part of a joke.)

You have to love automated content moderation, where things like discussions of chess get flagged as hate speech.

Why Facebook is Freaking Out Over Apple

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About 7 months ago, I mentioned that a Dutch broadcaster turned off tracking ads, and went with simple contextual ads, and earned more money.

Contextual ads are, for example, you read a story and the ads are based on what you are reading, so if you were looking as sports, you would get ads for beer, and if you were looking at barbecue recipes, you would get ads for beer, and if you were reading a story about a heat wave, you would get ads for beer. 

Tracking ads, on the other hand will look at everything that you have done in the past 18 months, and determine that because you looked at sports, barbecue, and the weather, you get served an add for beer. (all ads lead to beer, but that is another post)

The reason that tracking ads are more popular these days is because they are supposed to get higher response rates..

Certainly, that is what the incumbents, like Facebook and Google want you to think, because if contextual ads work just as well, then pretty much anyone can go into the online ad business, and Google and Facebook can no longer slurp up most of the revenue

This is why Facebook is going nuclear about Apple’s new privacy policies, which will require an explicit opt-in for tracking.

It’s not because they would lose a whole lot of money with this, they would still sell ads, but because this is a massive A/B test on the internet giant’s business model.

If advertisers find that non tracking ads work just as well, or nearly so for less money, they will switch to non-tracking ads.

This is why we have leaked emails in which Mark Zuckerberg states that, “We need to inflict pain,” on Apple.

I’m inclined to believe that Mark Zuckerberg already knows that the ad tech he sells is a lie, and the emperor does not wish to reveal his sartorial choices.

All this is a long way around to seeing that we now have another data-point in addition to the Dutch broadcaster NPO, we also have the New Zealand news site Stuff, which has abandoned Facebook to no effect. (They did so because of Facebook’s irresponsibility both before and after the Christchurch shootings)

The short version, (video below) is that Stuff cut advertising spending on Facebook with, “No traffic impact at all,” and since they stopped posting on Facebook, they have been unable to tease out any impact on traffic.

Video below:

Things that Remind Me of Mom

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My mom died over 44 years ago, when I was 14.

One of the things that I recall was her deep affection for turtles.

At one point, we had 17 turtles as pets in the house, roughly divided between Red Eared Terrapins and Eastern Box Turtles, (Separate habitats) with a few others thrown in. (Also iguanas and cats, but that’s another story)

Well, this story has me wondering how she would have reacted to this picture.

A listener in Medina, Ohio messaged to tell me that her local fire department rescued 10 turtles from a blaze and they made LIL TURTLE OXYGEN MASKS for them!! My heart truly can’t handle this ❤️🐢❤️ pic.twitter.com/idhAO9q9W6

— Michelle Collins (@michcoll) February 25, 2021

Today in Evil, Facebook Edition

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This time, it’s not Zuck, it’s Sheryl Sandburg, who shut down people that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did not like. 

What’s more, it is clear from the internal communications, they did so despite Facebook’s publicly stated affection for freedom of speech, because it was more profitable to side with despots.

No big surprise. 

Also not a surprise, Facebook structured it to make it look like a network error, so as few people as possible would know.

Do Not Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg is Your Friend

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Whether he agrees with Alex Jones and the rest of his wacko, my parents are first cousins, X-Files wannabe, black helicopter, tinfoil hat wearing, stupid, dim-witted, thinks pro wrestling is real, lunatics*, or just thinks that they are good for his bottom line, Mark Zuckerberg’s choice to put right wing nut Joel Kaplan in charge of Facebook policy is an indication that Zuckerberg is dangerous and needs to be brought to heel.†

Case in point, when Facebook finally came up with a policy to deal with fabulists fomenting violence, Mark Zuckerberg killed it to make sure that Alex Jones still had a platform.

I am not sure how to handle such issues on social media, but making sure that sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandburg are not making what are literally life or death decisions about terrorist groups on the basis of web site engagement seems to me to be a good start:

In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened.

Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a “giant hoax,” and that the teenage survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting were “crisis actors.” But Facebook had found that he was also relentlessly spreading hate against various groups, including Muslims and trans people. That behavior qualified him for expulsion from the social network under the company’s policies for “dangerous individuals and organizations,” which required Facebook to also remove any content that expressed “praise or support” for them.

But Zuckerberg didn’t consider the Infowars founder to be a hate figure, according to a person familiar with the decision, so he overruled his own internal experts and opened a gaping loophole: Facebook would permanently ban Jones and his company — but would not touch posts of praise and support for them from other Facebook users. This meant that Jones’ legions of followers could continue to share his lies across the world’s largest social network.

“Mark personally didn’t like the punishment, so he changed the rules,” a former policy employee told BuzzFeed News, noting that the original rule had already been in use and represented the product of untold hours of work between multiple teams and experts.

………

Zuckerberg’s “more nuanced policy” set off a cascading effect, the two former employees said, which delayed the company’s efforts to remove right-wing militant organizations such as the Oath Keepers, which were involved the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. It is also a case study in Facebook’s willingness to change its rules to placate America’s right wing and avoid political backlash.

Internal documents obtained by BuzzFeed News and interviews with 14 current and former employees show how the company’s policy team — guided by Joel Kaplan, the vice president of global public policy, and Zuckerberg’s whims — has exerted outsize influence while obstructing content moderation decisions, stymieing product rollouts, and intervening on behalf of popular conservative figures who have violated Facebook’s rules.

In December, a former core data scientist wrote a memo titled, “Political Influences on Content Policy.” Seen by BuzzFeed News, the memo stated that Kaplan’s policy team “regularly protects powerful constituencies” and listed several examples, including: removing penalties for misinformation from right-wing pages, blunting attempts to improve content quality in News Feed, and briefly blocking a proposal to stop recommending political groups ahead of the US election.

………

An integrity researcher who worked on Facebook’s efforts to protect the democratic process and rein in radicalization said the company caused direct harm to users by rejecting product changes due to concerns of political backlash.

“Out of fears over potential public and policy stakeholder responses, we are knowingly exposing users to risks of integrity,” they wrote in an internal note seen by BuzzFeed News. They quit in August.

Those most affected by Jones’ rhetoric have taken notice, too. Lenny Pozner, whose 6-year-old son Noah was the youngest victim of the Sandy Hook shooting, called the revelation that Zuckerberg weakened penalties facing the Infowars founder “disheartening, but not surprising.” He said the company had made a promise to do better in dealing with hate and hoaxes following a 2018 letter from HONR Network, his organization for survivors of mass casualty events. Yet Facebook continues to fail to remove harmful content.

“At some point,” Pozner told BuzzFeed News, “Zuckerberg has to be held responsible for his role in allowing his platform to be weaponized and for ensuring that the ludicrous and the dangerous are given equal importance as the factual.”

………

When Kaplan joined Facebook to lead its DC operation in 2011, he had the connections and pedigree the company needed to court the American right. A former clerk for conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, he served as a White House deputy chief of staff under President George W. Bush after participating in the Brooks Brothers riot during the 2000 Florida presidential election dispute. During a Senate confirmation hearing in 2003 for a post with the Office of Management and Budget, Kaplan was questioned about his role in the event, which sought to stop the tallying of votes during the Florida recount.

Though he initially maintained a low public profile at Facebook, Kaplan — COO Sheryl Sandberg’s Harvard classmate and former boyfriend — was valued by Zuckerberg for his understanding of GOP policymakers and conservative Americans, who the CEO believed were underrepresented by a liberal-leaning leadership team and employee base.

(Emphasis mine)

Kaplan is a man who literally pretended to be a Florida resident and then used the threat of violence to shut down vote counting in Miami/Dade County in the 2000 election, but because he went to Harvard (Zuckerberg’s alma mater) and dated Sheryl Sandberg, so because he’s “someone like them”, and because they just ……… don’t ……… care, this individual is  Facebook’s VP of global public policy.

That this man has the ear of Mark Zuckerberg says a lot of things about the CEO of Facebook, none of it good.

The most important thing to note here is not that Kaplan is a bad person, but that Zuckerberg is a horrible person, and a horribly dangerous one as well.

*Sorry, I think that I just channeled the con Denis Leary.
†Sorry, I think that I just channeled the non even a bit of a comedian Hillary Clinton.

Worse Response to a Bad Idea

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The Australian government is in the process of passing a law that requires payment for linking to news sites, which to my mind is a horrible idea, and Mark Zuckerberg’s response to all of this is to have Facebook ban all Australian news content from their platform. 

Granted, Australia is not a huge market, at 25 million people, it’s only about 5 million more people than the New York City metropolitan area, but this ham-fisted response is going to do a lot of damage to Facebook while mildly inconveniencing the people of Australia.

I don’t expect Zuckerberg to cave, and in that case, I see Australia generally moving to some other source of rumors, genocidal racists, fascism, and cat pix.

The Australians are a hardy and inventive people:

Facebook has followed through on its threat to ban Australians from seeing or posting news content on its site in response to the federal government’s news media code.

The tech giant’s Australian and New Zealand managing director, Will Easton, said this would block links to Australian publishers from being posted, while no Australian users would be able to share or see content from any news outlets, both Australian and international.

“The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content,” he said in a blog post published on Thursday morning. “It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia.

“With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter.”

………

Users on Thursday reported seeing a pop-up error window when they attempted to post links to news, stating these cannot be posted in response to the news media code.

………

Facebook’s move is in contrast to the approach from the other major platform subject to the code, Google.

Although Google had threatened to withdraw its search engine from Australia if the code went ahead, in the past week, Google has signed agreements with some of Australia’s biggest publishers, including News Corp, Nine Entertainment and Seven West Media, for payment for its News Showcase product. The Nine deal is reportedly worth $30m a year.

As several people have pointed out to me, Facebook blocked itself. pic.twitter.com/LVhyJMAHfp

— Josh Taylor (@joshgnosis) February 17, 2021

Yes, Facebook banned Facebook, I think that the Aussies would call this an “Own Goal”

It gets even worse, because Facebook f%$#ed up the rollout of the ban, shutting down non-profits and government agencies as well:

The Bureau of Meteorology, state health departments, the Western Australian opposition leader, charities and Facebook itself are among those to have been hit by Facebook’s ban on news in Australia.

On Thursday morning Facebook began preventing Australian news sites from posting, while also stopping Australian users from sharing or viewing content from any news outlets, both Australian and international.

The social media giant said it made the decision in response to the news media bargaining code currently before the Senate, which would force Facebook and Google to negotiate with news companies for payment for content.

………

As Australia prepares to begin the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, state health departments, including SA Health and Queensland Health, were unable to post.

St Vincent’s Health in Melbourne said it was “extremely concerning”its Facebook page had been blocked “during a pandemic and on the eve of crucial Covid vaccine distribution”.

Facebook is claiming that this was a “Mistake.”

If you believe that, I have a bridge in Melbourne made completely of Koala poop to sell you.