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Three Good Links

@protoslacker / protoslacker.tumblr.com

I read posts online that interest, infuriate, stimulate, inspire, or otherwise move me. I'll share short snippets. Mastodon Shuffle
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Facebook commits crime after crime after crime, often overseen by top officials concerned about revenue impacts. After the first couple of times, it’s reasonable to criticize Facebook. But now, the question is simply, where are the cops? If no one will stop firms from committing crimes, then the result is the rise of corporate warlords like Facebook, who just bludgeon and steal without consequence. These firms will in turn finance public relations specialists who make arguments about how all of this theft is the result of technology, that the ‘internet killed media,’ as if lying to advertisers so you can steal their money is magic sorcery.

Matt Stoller at BIG. Facecrook: Dealing with a Global Menace Facebook is engaged in a giant crime spree to steal ad money.

A battle over speech in Australia shows what top executives really think of the rule of law.

#facebook#monopoly#fraud
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Maps and the Territory

At Facebook a cousin posted a link to an article. 5 Ways Christians are Getting Swept into a Secular Worldview in This Cultural Moment. that stuck in my craw.

I wrote a comment and then deleted it. That's usually enough for me to move along. And really my first rule of thumb on Facebook is "Bite your tongue!" But in this case I ended up leaving another comment on her post anyway.

This discomfort made me think about my maps for thinking about Christianity as well secularity and how different those maps are to the maps the author uses for these constructs of the and how they are so different from my good and kind cousin.

My thoughts turned to a book written in 1965, The Secular City, written by an American Baptist minister and theologian, Harvey Cox. I didn't read the book until something like a decade later, but I'm pretty sure I knew about it earlier. Time Magazine back in the day had a regular Religion page and I was an avid glance at Time. And the reason I'm pretty sure I knew about Cox, was he was a voice carted out to comment on "The Death of God" which was one of those topics everyone was talking about one summer.  The Secular City was a huge best seller and it's very hard to imagine a  book like it being a best seller today today. Anyhow, the book is part of a map I use to think about Christianity. A similar set of maps might be labeled: Liberation Theology.

One of the next things I saw, via 3 Quarks Daily was a 20 minute video at Youtube of René Girard speaking about violence and religion. Girard's mimemtic theory and his mythic interpretations of the Bible is another map I use for thinking about Christianity. The essential bit is the Bible stories of scapegoats take the point of view of the victim not the victor.

There are other maps, and these mentioned represent different routes and landmarks more than just the ideas of René Girard or Harvey Cox. But both Girard and Cox are presenting  Christian worldview very different from the one Natasha Cain presents.

Part of why it's hard to talk about whiteness and racism is that religious ideas often are central but we all know better than to discuss religion. I think my cousin will probably "bite her tongue" and who am I to disagree? But I think most of us are more capable of talking about sacred matters together even when we profess different views. One of the challenges is for discussions to  incorporate different maps--perhaps lenses is a better term--with the goal being understanding more than proving someone right or wrong.

#religion#chrisitanity#race#violence#facebook#internet
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There’s no proof that Facebook’s changes had political intentions, but it’s not hard to imagine that the company could tweak its algorithms in the future, if it wanted to. To guard against that potential, new laws could bar changes to the algorithm in the run-up periods before elections. In the financial industry, for instance, “quiet periods” in advance of major corporate announcements seek to prevent marketing and public-relations efforts from artificially influencing stock prices. Similar protections for algorithms against corporate manipulation could help ensure that politically active, power-seeking Facebook executives – or any other company with significant control over users’ access to information – can’t use their systems to shape public opinion or voting behavior.

Jennifer Grygiel in The Conversation. Facebook algorithm changes suppressed journalism and meddled with democracy

#internet#algorithm#facebook#law#politics
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If even modestly successful, Libra would hand over much of the control of monetary policy from central banks to these private companies,” said Hughes, a co-chair of the Economic Security Project, an anti-poverty campaign group. “If global regulators don’t act now, it could very soon be too late.

Chris Hughes in an article by Rob Davis in The Guardian. Facebook co-founder: Libra currency could give firms excess power

Chris Hughes says involvement of private companies is threat to autonomy of nation states

h/t Phil Jones

#internet#money#nation states#facebook
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Facebook, you were on the wrong side of history in that. And you were on the wrong side of history in this -- in refusing to give us the answers that we need. And that is why I am here. To address you directly, the gods of Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey, and your employees and your investors, too. Because 100 years ago, the biggest danger in the South Wales coal mines was gas. Silent and deadly and invisible. It's why they sent the canaries down first to check the air. And in this massive, global, online experiment that we are all living through, we in Britain are the canary. We are what happens to a western democracy when a hundred years of electoral laws are disrupted by technology. Our democracy is broken, our laws don't work anymore, and it's not me saying this, it's our parliament published a report saying this. This technology that you have invented has been amazing. But now, it's a crime scene. And you have the evidence. And it is not enough to say that you will do better in the future. Because to have any hope of stopping this from happening again, we have to know the truth. And maybe you think, "Well, it was just a few ads. And people are smarter than that, right?" To which I would say, "Good luck with that." Because what the Brexit vote demonstrates is that liberal democracy is broken. And you broke it. This is not democracy -- spreading lies in darkness, paid for with illegal cash, from God knows where. It's subversion, and you are accessories to it.

Carole Cadwalladr at TED Talks. Facebook's role in Brexit--and the threat to democracy

#internet#advertizing#facebook#youtube#google#twitter#poltics#law
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The “Gilets Jaunes” or “Yellow Jackets” protests have only gotten more violent since they began last month. Three people have died, hundreds more have been injured. To hear the protesters tell it, they’re marching through the streets to fight back against rising fuel prices and the high cost of living in the country. Beyond that, though, it’s an ideological free-for-all. Fights have also been witnessed among demonstrators, and some have sent death threats to other protesters.

Ryan Broderick in BuzzFeedNews. The "Yellow Jackets" Riots In France Are What Happens When Facebook Gets Involved With Local News

The Yellow Jackets movement is what happens when you point Facebook's traffic hose at France's small towns. The question now is: How do you turn it off?

#yellow vests#Internet#politics#insurection#facebook
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British Parliament seizes internal Facebook documents by threatening to jail a rival exec
boingboing.net

Ted Kramer is CEO and co-founder of Six4Three, a creepy US-based machine-learning startup whose debut product was a Facebook app called Pinkini that let you search your friends' photos for pictures of them in bikinis; when Facebook shut down the app after a terms-of-service change, Six4Three sued Facebook and obtained a key trove of internal Facebook documents through the discovery process.

(Sometimes I question my reading comprehension abilities. Reading this news at other outlets left me wondering what happened? I found Cory Doctorow’s reporting while searching to find out the name of the CEO of Six4Three. Doctorow clearly reports not only what happened but also suggests why it matters.)
#internet#privacy#encryption#national borders#law#facebook
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If we take Girard’s mimetic theory seriously, the consequences for the way we think about social media are potentially profound. For one, it would lead us to conclude that social media platforms, by channeling mimetic desire, also serve as conduits of the violence that goes along with it. That, in turn, would suggest that abuse, harassment, and bullying – the various forms of scapegoating that have become depressing constants of online behavior – are features, not bugs: the platforms’ basic social architecture, by concentrating mimetic behavior, also stokes the tendencies toward envy, rivalry, and hatred of the Other that feed online violence. From Thiel’s perspective, we may speculate, this means that those who operate those platforms are in the position to harness and manipulate the most powerful and potentially destabilizing forces in human social life – and most remarkably, to derive profits from them. For someone overtly concerned about the threat posed by such forces to those in positions of power, a crucial advantage would seem to lie in the possibility of deflecting violence away from the prominent figures who are the most obvious potential targets of popular ressentiment, and into internecine conflict with other users.

Geoff Shullenberger in Cyborgology at The Society Pages. Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection

#peter thiel#facebook#politics#internet#violence
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For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains. There’s an old-fashioned word for this: corruption. In corrupt systems, a few bad actors cost everyone else billions in order to bring in millions – the savings a factory can realize from dumping pollution in the water supply are much smaller than the costs we all bear from being poisoned by effluent. But the costs are widely diffused while the gains are tightly concentrated, so the beneficiaries of corruption can always outspend their victims to stay clear. Facebook doesn’t have a mind-control problem, it has a corruption problem.

Cory Doctorow in Locus. Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags

#surveillance capitalism. politics#surveillance#facebook
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Zuckerberg, in a well-known incident he now surely regrets, was asked in the early days of Facebook why people would hand over their personal information to him. He responded, “They trust me—dumb fucks.” We’re finally starting to appreciate the depth of the insult to us all. Now we need to figure out how to keep the corporations we have supported with our taxes, data, and undivided attention from treating us like dumb fucks in the future.

Tamsin Shaw in The New York Review of Books. Beware the Big Five

The Darkening Web: The War for Cyberspace by Alexander Klimburg

#internet#inequality#word society#book#facebook
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Carroll argues that Cambridge Analytica failed to share the necessary information when he asked. To get the rest of his data—if there was in fact more, as Nix had bragged—Carroll would have to sue.

Jackie Flynn Mogensen reporting--updated on March 16, 2018-- in Mother Jones. A Groundbreaking Case May Force Controversial Data Firm Cambridge Analytica to Reveal Trump Secrets This US professor is counting on British data privacy laws to get some answers.

Take Back Our Voter Data

#law#privacy#facebook#cambridge analytica#internet#politics#take back our voter data
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Near the end of that year[2015], a report in The Guardian revealed* that Cambridge Analytica was using private Facebook data on the Cruz campaign, sending Facebook scrambling. In a statement at the time, Facebook promised that it was “carefully investigating this situation” and would require any company misusing its data to destroy it.

Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore and Carole Cadwalladr in The New York Times. How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions

*Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users

#facebook#malfeasance#politics#law.
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On Friday, four days after the Observer sought comment for this story, but more than two years after the data breach was first reported, Facebook announced that it was suspending Cambridge Analytica and Kogan from the platform, pending information over misuse of data. Facebook instructed external lawyers and warned us we were making “false and defamatory” allegations, reserving Facebook’s legal rights.

Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison in The Guardian. Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach

Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters 

Facebook’s response to well-documented reporting--see also The New York Times, How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions--is not appropriate given the importance of this data breach--plain language makes clear what this is about --despite Facebook’s spin of policy violations.

#facebook#news#journalism#corpirations#politics#malfeasance
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Former Facebook employees say the engineering-driven, “move fast and break things” approach worked when the company was smaller but now gets in the way of understanding the societal problems it faces. It’s one thing to break a product, but if you move fast and break democracy, or move fast and break journalism, how do you measure the impact of that—and how do you go about trying to fix it?

Mathew Ingram at Columbia Journalism Review. The Facebook Armageddon

The social network’s increasing threat to journalism

#internet#journalism#facebook#advertising#Monopoly
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