Random News Stories

[pietillidie]

Interesting article on inner-sanctum Facebook wrangling over transparency.

[stui magpie]

Without reading the article is that just the appetite from people?

Facebook to me is a lot less political than Twitter and Twitter seems to attract more Left than right types

[pietillidie]

^The simple test is to look at those top tens and look at the electorate. What that tells you is that Facebook is turbocharging the crazies and enabling them to weigh on public information to an absurd extent. This is not 'the will of the people'; instead, it's the weaponising of the motivation of fanatics, religious crazies and anyone with money.

The difference with, say, the university student protests of old, is that unless you were in their path you could ignore them. But Facebook's content surfacing is the equivalent of connecting all those protests across capital cities and taking them city-wide, including to your home street, rather than them simply annoying everyone affected by traffic on Spring Street.

The answer? Show us your algorithms and let the electorate — the people with one vote each — determine whether they like the role you're playing as a mediator of information. People rely on their curation because they want and emotionally need the process to be mindless. FB knows this, which is why they're happy to add pages of controls. They're essentially hacking the rational brain and putting it to sleep; the automaticity, sense of the random and spontaneous, and extremes of emotion such as rage or adoration are highly addictive.

What have they got to fear if the game they're playing is merely one of satisfying democratic appetite and those extremists in the top ten represent people's preferred sources of information?

Regarding Facebook and Twitter, I'm guessing they're both as political. I only use them for business purposes, though, so a heavy personal user would know more.

[pietillidie]

Facebook's counter-PR tactic: incite partisan loyalty as needed. It has the data and electoral access needed to do this with bite, too, as if to underscore the original problem.

The problem's not social media; it's a lack of visibility, accountability, research access and competition. You can't hold more information on society than governments and not be accountable to electorates.

[pietillidie]

It's freaking endless, isn't it?

[pietillidie]

Krugman's eminently sensible walk-through of the spending and inflation risk numbers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/opinion/inflation-infrastructure-debt.html

[pietillidie]

Australia as climate pariah:

[pietillidie]

Great piece from Krugman on the intersection between far right politics and the quack supplement industry. Two heavily overlapping sets of unstable extremists:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/covid-misinformation-supplements.html

[pietillidie]

This is a horror show if the data is correct. Ignore the source and assume the data is good for a moment.

[stui magpie]

I couldn't find the photography thread so this will do.

2 articles from CNN with some pretty damn good nature/animal photos.

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/wildlife-photographer-award-2021-scli-intl-scn/index.html

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/comedy-wildlife-photography-awards-2021-scli-intl/index.html

[Dark Beanie]

Snap.

I just posted the comedy wildlife one under the What made me laugh today thread.

[pietillidie]

I hadn't realised US withdrawal from Afghanistan also meant the Taliban get control of Texas, too. That said, they were virtually already in control, so it doesn't surprise.

Now Christian extremists have instituted the Texas Tali-abortion-ban, what's next on their anti-Western theocratic agenda?

[pietillidie]

The rich might be getting richer, but the dim are also getting dimmer, thanks to the proliferation of cult-like lunacy. This won't surprise:

[stui magpie]

Would you volunteer to spend 14 days in isolation wearing full PPE with teenagers you'd never met? Pre vaccine?

These guys did.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-12/voluntary-isolation-for-covid-heroes/100454550

[stui magpie]

So, we've got a new alliance with the USA and UK and we're getting Nuclear submarines.