Fake polls as political propaganda
Using “fake telephone polls” to reach voters with campaign propaganda. Why do they use fake telephone polls? Probably to prevent people from hanging up on the telephone solicitation.
10% Of Twitter Users Create 92% Of All Tweets
Some people tweet a lot.
Privacy: “How Covid-19 Turned College Campuses Into Surveillance Machines”
Colleges and universities instituting intense and personal surveillance of students for everything from attendance tracking, identifying groups deemed too large, to tracking students temperature and health symptoms, automatically. Scary stuff.
What social media [thinks they] know about us
Social media compiles a dossier on each of us (even we do not belong to the platform) to understand us better than we understand ourselves. This information is then used to target advertising at us – basically finely targeted propaganda. Some times they are selling products, other times services, and some times ideas (politics). Regardless, their analysis has made some big misses about me 🙂
I am so old, I remember when newspapers were bastions of free speech and expression
Washington Post advocates for social media platforms to censor political speech.
Twitter censoring even more content, and this time their censorship could kill people
Dr. Scott Atlas put out a tweet with factual information and questions as to why real world data indicates our current face mask policies are not working. Twitter deleted the tweet. The questions he raised, however, are real. By suspending speech, Twitter prevents the opportunity to find solutions or improvements that would overcome the limitations made obvious in the data. Twitter’s action are a clear and present danger to everyone.
Social media posts/memes reveal widespread ignorance about Covid-19 and pandemic policies
I did some scanning of social media for “test positive” and found numerous cases of people testing positive for stupidity.
Quite a few were sharing a meme that a doctor or group of nurses had sent in a batch of unused Covid-19 tests to a lab and all came back as having tested positive. Obviously, that is a social media meme – there is never any provenance to the story, no details to check it out. Clearly, a fake meme suited for social mania sharing.
Social media meme claims nurses or doctors sent unused Covid-19 tests to lab and they all came back positive
There is a meme going round that a doctor or a group of nurses sent an unused batch of Covid-19 tests to a lab and all the tests came back positive. This is virtually certain to be a fake social media meme that is not true. Poynter notes there is no evidence for this but then incorrectly says that because the tests have a low false positive rate, false positives are not a problem. But that is not true once you understand how the conditional probability works – when used to screen large groups of people where the disease prevalence is low, most of those getting a positive test result are actually false positives.
True: “We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | TED Talk”
Should FB and Twitter be broken up or regulated like a utility?
Twitter and Facebook blocked or suppressed links to stories from the New York Post, a 200 year old U.S. newspaper with the 4th largest circulation in the country.