We may never know why I only saw left wing propaganda on Facebook in 2016, since Facebook is so secretive about what they do with our data. But I now have a working hypothesis as to what happened. In the 2nd half of 2016 and especially in the fall of 2016 prior to the election, my Facebook news feed was filled with political propaganda, essentially all of it “left wing” propaganda, especially propaganda posters from fake news services such as…
Facebook and Instagram apps, routinely installed on smart phones, collect your location information and log it with Facebook. In fact, 49 out of 93 apps on my Android device have the Location permission set to ON (I have since turned several of them to OFF). Source: Three ways social media is tracking you – Business Insider More evidence that the sole business of social media is surveillance spying and propaganda messaging.
Stores use your loyalty card to identify you and all of your purchases. Your purchase transactions are then sold to other marketing companies. This data, in turn, can and is matched to your Facebook account and other online data using the phone number that you gave to the store and to Facebook or Google. Source: Loyalty Cards are used to spy on your purchases, and not just with the vendor | Coldstreams The matching operation uses the phone number you…
I do not see as many of these strange social media posters, partially because I have stopped following people who posted stuff like this: It’s a fake quote, of course. So what is the point of posting stuff like this on social media?
Social media, confirmation bias and its use in marketing #FakeNews #Propaganda #SocialMedia (I originally posted this on my tech blog, May 24, 2014, about 2 1/2 years before “fake news” became a popular meme. Since then, social media has become a friction-less platform for the spread of propaganda, fake news, and worse.) Confirmation bias occurs when we tend to give weight to information that supports our beliefs and to ignore or discard information that opposes our beliefs. There are several studies…
“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…
Protestors shut down a speaker at an event that is local to where I live. I am not familiar with the speaker or the protestors and their issues but I found this description of interest: Protests are seldom really about the object of the protest. They are about the protesters, who seek attention for their organizations, their causes, their ideologies, and themselves. And they are about achieving a certain kind of emotional release, bordering on frenzy. The scheduled talk by…
As noted here and in the next post, below, fake and false items spread faster on social media than truthful items. Based on widespread news reports, you’d think that bots and the Internet Research Agency were the primary cause but look again: When they looked at who was spreading the wrong stuff, they found it was ordinary users of social media. “We conclude that human behavior contributes more to the differential spread of falsity and truth than automated robots do,”…
There’s a file showing everything Facebook has on you. And it’s pretty scary. Source: The weird and surprising things I found in the file Facebook has on me – NZ Herald
The spin on this article, like 99% of such articles, is that propaganda is primarily used by government and state-like organizations and actors. That isn’t true of course, but the article does recognize that the problem is inherent to the social media platform and business model itself: The more people that use a platform designed to connect as many as users as possible — even if they spread propaganda or hate speech — the more successful it is. Tech companies…