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Category: Civil Rights

Social media: 2 years ago, Google shut down the blog, email and all services of a prominent statistician

Social media: 2 years ago, Google shut down the blog, email and all services of a prominent statistician

In 2017, without warning or recourse, Google shut down all services associated with Salil Mehta, a professor of statistics, editor of a statistics journal, author of a best selling book on statistics, a former Obama administration official and later, a polling statistics adviser to the Trump campaign. His offense? He ran a blog about mathematics! Google, Facebook and Twitter have become the totalitarian governments of the 21st century, stifling speech their algorithms choose to flag. Unlike us peons, Mehta is well connected and a huge outcry caused Google to reinstate his account.

Journalism: How the media reports on murders of the transgendered – and how it conflicts with the data

Journalism: How the media reports on murders of the transgendered – and how it conflicts with the data

There are many news reports about a growing “epidemic” of transgender murders in the United States. However, the data show a nearly constant trend line from 2015 to 2019. Further, the transgender murder rate, based on the data, is 1/4th to 1/2 that of the overall U.S. population. (It is possible that the underlying data is poor, which the Human Rights Campaign hypothesizes – but news reports calling out an epidemic in the absence of data to support that are not even pseudo news reporting – they are creative fiction writing.)

All murders are wrong, period. Violence and hate are wrong, period.

This post is about news reporting, not the transgender community.

WSJ: #Google let’s most any software company read your #Gmail

WSJ: #Google let’s most any software company read your #Gmail

Software developers scan hundreds of millions of emails of users who sign up for email-based services. Disclosures are often buried in user agreements. Source: Tech’s ‘Dirty Secret’: The App Developers Sifting Through Your Gmail – WSJ They also let employees of those companies personally read your email: this is “common practice”. As already suggested on this blog, they data mine the hell of our emails, logging your purchases, financial records, travel records and more. For companies that want data for…

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Interesting example of how propaganda messaging lives forever and is recycled

Interesting example of how propaganda messaging lives forever and is recycled

The senator [Sanders] from Vermont says 40 percent of guns are sold without a background check. The Washington Post notes the figure came from a small survey in 1993/1994 before major changes in gun laws. The latest data indicate it is 13%, not 40%. But remember, the first propaganda message someone hears is the one that sticks – undoubtedly this figure has stuck with Sanders for a quarter century. Source: Bernie Sanders resurrects a ‘zombie’ claim on gun sales without…

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Double Double Double Cross propaganda

Double Double Double Cross propaganda

A UCLA student journalist reported a story using a photo of a sign in front of a student housing home that said “No Blacks Allowed”. Russian trolls picked up the photo, extensively edited, and then posted it on a Russia run propaganda group called Blacktivist, to emotionally target members of the group. The FB group had 360,000 “Likes”, which was more than the Black Lives Matter group itself. But Blacktivist was a fake group designed by Russian trolls to racially…

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China: Your social media posts have wrong “opinion orientation”

China: Your social media posts have wrong “opinion orientation”

Welcome to our Western social media future! China’s popular, social-media platform Sina Weibo reintroduced key elements of its service a week ago after they were suspended in January by the country’s Internet regulator for failing to halt the spread of “harmful content.”In January, the Beijing office of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) declared that, “obscenity, low taste, and ethnic discrimination continued to spread on Sina Weibo,” along with content containing “wrong public opinion orientation.” Source: China boosts censorship of…

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Society now requires us to be liked on social media?

Society now requires us to be liked on social media?

Not only is a “strong social media presence” now a prerequisite for many, if not most, jobs, but companies have begun to look at your number of followers as both a measure of monetary value and a career determiner. And according to TIME.com, employers actually consider people without Facebook suspicious. “If you boycott Instagram, you’re cutting yourself off from a lot of opportunities,” said Emily. “I started posting more selfies, despite being self conscious about it, because honestly—you get so…

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U.S. firms use social media age-based ad targeting to discriminate against older workers

U.S. firms use social media age-based ad targeting to discriminate against older workers

Major U.S. employers use social media’s ability to display job ads only to those in certain age groups, such as between age 25 to 36, or below age 38 or below age 50. They are using this feature to advertise job openings only to younger workers, thereby removing older workers from their candidate pool. Examples: Verizon targeted showed ads only to those age 25 to 36 years old UPS targeted age 19 to 35 State Farm targeted age 19 to…

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The problem with censoring speech is … who gets to be the censor?

The problem with censoring speech is … who gets to be the censor?

Who gets to be the censor? Crazily, Americans say they favor free speech and censorship! … the survey also found Americans willing to censor, regulate, or punish a wide variety of speech and expression they personally find offensive: 51% of staunch liberals say it’s “morally acceptable” to punch Nazis. 53% of Republicans favor stripping U.S. citizenship from people who burn the American flag. 51% of Democrats support a law that requires Americans use transgender people’s preferred gender pronouns. 65% of…

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