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Category: Social Media

Store “Loyalty Cards” are combined with social media data to log your purchase habits

Store “Loyalty Cards” are combined with social media data to log your purchase habits

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…

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I’m so old, I remember writing about fake news in 2014 :) #fakenews

I’m so old, I remember writing about fake news in 2014 :) #fakenews

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…

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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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Protests seldom about “object of the protest” but about the protestors?

Protests seldom about “object of the protest” but about the protestors?

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…

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Who spreads fake news on social media? You do.

Who spreads fake news on social media? You do.

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,”…

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Propaganda is inherent in the platform

Propaganda is inherent in the platform

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…

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Could you throw a U.S. Presidential election for just a few dollars per day?

Could you throw a U.S. Presidential election for just a few dollars per day?

Parties in Russia bought ads on U.S. social media regarding candidates for U.S. President in 2016. About $100,000 was spent on Facebook ads, of which 44% was spent prior to the election. Additional actions took place on Twitter and Instagram. “Fake posts” were also created on social media for the purpose of being Liked, Shared and Commented on. It is claimed that about $2 million total was spent by the “American” department of the Internet Research Agency in Russia. The…

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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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