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Category: Computational Propaganda

Journalists and Academics seek special privileges on Facebook

Journalists and Academics seek special privileges on Facebook

Facebook restricts certain conduct on its platform. However, journalists and academics are seeking to  receive special privileges to do things that are prohibited for others. Journalists and academics, for example, would be permitted to set up fake accounts with fake or curated content, for the purpose of studying users. Individuals, however, would be banned from conducting the same research and thus, would be prohibited from verifying or evaluating the work of journalists and academics. Basically, the proposal is to have…

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Smart TVs track everything you watch, and link that to your computer and smart phone connected devices too

Smart TVs track everything you watch, and link that to your computer and smart phone connected devices too

Once enabled, Samba TV can track nearly everything that appears on the TV on a second-by-second basis, essentially reading pixels to identify network shows and ads, as well as programs on Netflix and HBO and even video games played on the TV. Samba TV has even offered advertisers the ability to base their targeting on whether people watch conservative or liberal media outlets and which party’s presidential debate they watched. …. Samba TV can also identify other devices in the…

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Computer algorithms that analyze #Facebook “Likes” understand your thinking better than your spouse #DeleteFacebook #Privacy

Computer algorithms that analyze #Facebook “Likes” understand your thinking better than your spouse #DeleteFacebook #Privacy

Facebook (and Youtube and Twitter) have conducted a global experiment on human populations without consent of the guinea pigs by analyzing our “Likes”. Facebook’s digital model of us is more accurate than our own understanding of ourselves. Computers need evaluate as few as 100 Likes to make a judgement more effective than a human. Analyzing just 300 Likes enables the model to know more about the subject than does the subject’s spouse. Computer models achieve “peak” accuracy when more than…

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Youtube’s recommendation algorithm pushes people to watch ever more extreme content

Youtube’s recommendation algorithm pushes people to watch ever more extreme content

“Soon I noticed something peculiar. YouTube started to recommend and “autoplay” videos for me that featured white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content. … What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire…. YouTube leads viewers down a rabbit hole of extremism, while Google racks up the ad sales.”   Regardless of topic, Youtube’s recommendation algorithm  recommends videos containing more extreme versions of whatever it is you just watched. This makes sense from a…

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“Computational propaganda”

“Computational propaganda”

I just saw this term on Twitter. It refers to the use of automation to deliver propaganda messaging on social media. We’ve heard of “bots” and “bot networks” – as examples, but it could also include automated tech and sales support systems that use algorithms to respond to customer inquiries. The term highlights a new direction in propaganda for the 21st century – “computational propaganda” – and points to the automation of propaganda messaging as a key advancement in propaganda…

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