Facebook: All Your Data Is Still Belong to Us :)
Facebook had another oopsie, letting 5,000 app developers continue to have access to user data they should not have had access to.
“Doomscrolling Is Slowly Eroding Your Mental Health”
In the midst of an ineptly managed pandemic and ineptly managed civil unrest and economic fiasco people try to make sense of it by reading everything they can. Scrolling through post and news story after news story is called “doomscrolling” and it destroys your mental health. Sadly, much of the bull shit is not from random social media posts but from actual experts who spew nonsense.
Major advertisers suspend ads on major social media platforms
Starbucks joins many other large companies in suspending the placement of ads on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter due to hate speech concerns.
This did not age well: “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice: The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.”
On April 29th, The Atlantic published an article by writer Amanda Mull, titled: “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice: The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.” What happened: Deaths fell. By a lot.
Privacy: How to reduce Google’s stored data about you
Google collects everything it can about you – they have introduced some tools to help you control what Google collects and to auto-delete data after a specified time period.
Journalism: USA Today misreports on Oregon, even miscounts the number of Counties
Just about all of the numbers in this USA Today “news report” are wrong, and easily cross checked for the correct numbers. This. Is. Journalism. Where facts are strictly optional.
BS alert: “‘Ring of fire’ eclipse could be sign of apocalypse”
No, the world is not going to end. This a bad headline designed to strike fear in the reader. It’s based on conspiracy theories and people seeking to find arbitrary patterns in randomness. But – time for some media scary headlines!
Journalism: I don’t think that word means what you think it means
“27 police officers injured during largely peaceful” protests. Or something. Several examples of creative reporting, including the MSNBC reporting saying protests are not unruly as a building burns behind him. Words used to have common meanings but apparently not any more. This post is not about the protests about the reporting.
News media writes reports about past tense events before the events have occurred
Washington Post publishes a pre-written news report about the BLS unemployment report – and the pre-written report was completely wrong. The WaPo later replaced the fictional reporting with an actual report.
Begging the question fallacy, again: This is exactly who you are
Police shove an elderly, 75 year old man, causing a serious head and brain injury. They walk right past his unconscious body. Then they lie about it. And afterwards the city proclaims this “doesn’t reflect the true character of the Buffalo PD” when, in fact, it is exactly their true character. This is known as the “Begging the question fallacy”.