#but this is a trolls blog..................... people are memeing left right and center on it.................. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

shroom-ish · 2 years ago

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hi i appreciate your attempt to correct me but:

A) im aware it is a troll

B) as a lapsed catholic that went to 16 years of catholic school (K-8, high school, and three years of college before I dropped out) I was attempting to draw on my own experience of "catholics" and parody a response that I might have given to the people who abused me as a child. I appreciate the idea that that "this is not a belief espoused by anyone who actually practices the religion" but I was there when my friends were told their dogs were going to hell so I appreciate your concern about my inability to understand the post in it's context but

C) "in my own experience" (which may be different from yours 😳) there are few catholics (and christans for that matter) who care about the doctrine of their religion in any significant way that leads to genuine understanding and/or reformation of their behavior and beliefs. Most of the catholics I know are largely concerned with how they appear to the people around them rather than possessing any true dogmatic consistency.

so im sure you can understand why i might choose to use my own art (**writing**) and the opportunity of a random internet troll to explore the ways that I have been hurt by this institution, but I understand if I committed to the bit a little too hard.

(im pulling this out of the tags to make sure there's no confusion)

im aware that there are catholics with a nontoxic and healthy relationship to catholicism

edit: also, i remembered, what if the blog is itself a joke of a different traumatized catholic??? I thought it would be funny to respond seriously because... idk they seem to be taking pretty seriously whether it's joke or not lol.

too many people see evolution as just animals becoming better animals when the truth is that theres a species of boar that evolved to die because its tusks grow into its skull because the males with long tusks fuck the most

#the mushroom talks?#i appreciate your concern but why are you bothering me?#like im happy to respond but it's a joke?#and im also autistic that is largely how i ended up abused by these people #so im not mad if you didn't get it but do you really need to roll up on the trolls blog post to defend catholicism #or am i allowed to be hurt about it?#like if it was someone who was genuinely sharing about their catholic faith on their blog...#im not gonna roll up and start shitting on their post im aware that there are people with a nontoxic relationship with catholicism #that was why i ended up dropping out of that college #but this is a trolls blog..................... people are memeing left right and center on it..................#again im sorry for the confusion

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friendly-peep · 5 years ago

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Which Homestuck characters would read Homestuck and their opinion

idk i’m bored. What’s Homestuck^2? What’s epilogues? We’re strictly Homestuck in this house. Also only doing main characters, I’m not going to dive into the Felt or caparacians, I want this to be done today.

Beta kids:

June: Avid reader. Got in early and read the whole thing. Got shirts, unironically liked it.

Rose: Got in late, but got into it. Loved the tarot deck, uses it to pretend she’s reading while she just tells people their truths. Noticed some narrative issues but overall liked it.

Dave: Got in shortly after June did, read for a while, but his irony poisoning led to him sassing the HECK out of it. Made a diss blog. Kept reading it “ironically” and cannot tell if he actually likes it or not. Got a god tier hoodie he wears at home. Sampled some of the soundtracks for his raps.

Jade: Loved it. LOVED IT. Got the full soundtrack. Made remixes. Got all the shirts. One of the blogs that posted “UPD8!” whenever an update happened. Big fanartist during the Gigapauses.

Beta Guardians:

June’s Dad: Tried to get into it to connect to his daughter’s interest, but the memes were too much, so he became the “Are ya winning, daughter?” dad. Very supportive but would need fifty slow paced “Homestuck explained” videos.

Mom Lalonde: Read it, but was too intoxicated to remember most. She holds obscure knowledge and will remember minute trivia, but don’t ask her about any of the large plot points.

Bro Strider: Too busy being A Mess Of A Human Being to sit down and read.

Poppop Harley: Too busy being A Dang Explorer to sit down and read.

Alpha kids:

Jane: Takes time to read it slowly. Has a blog of theories she constantly updates. Was upset about how some plot points got dropped and underdeveloped.

Roxy: Much like Jade, loved it. While Jade made remixes, Roxy cosplays. She has killer cosplays of most characters. Screamed about updates on twitter. No filter, accidentally drops spoilers left right and center.

Dirk: Deep, DEEP character examinations. Draws diagrams, writes essays. Unironically liked the potential of Paradox Space, may have even submit his own stories to be a guest artist.

Jake: Read the whole thing, liked it, missed many connections and plot points, was satisfied with the ending. Got some merch, can say “I read Homestuck” in public and be blissfully unaware of any positive and negative baggage that comes with saying so.

Alpha Guardians:

Jane’s Dad: Much like June’s Dad, tried to get into it. Unlike June’s Dad, watched and read his daughter’s theories (and Dirk’s explanations when Jane linked them to him) and became A Walking Homestuck Encyclopedia. Jane is unsure how to feel about this. He, however, does not reference it.

Roxy’s Rosemom: Too busy fighting the good fight to read. It’s in her radar but didn’t get the time to read it.

Dirk’s Davedad: Read it as a novelty. Sent Hussie a gold-plated Bad Dragon dildo. Put offhand references to it on his movies, but they were so oblique that even readers didn’t get it.

Jade English: Too busy running her own baking good company to read Homestuck. Not even in her radar.

Alternia Trolls:

Aradia: Much like Dirk, got REAL DEEP into it. Makes youtube vids explaining classpects and narrative points. Actually wrote a dissertation on Homestuck.

Tavros: Tried to get into it, but the first few acts were not to his taste so he never got to the trolls ironically enough. Likes the character designs though.

Sollux: Next level Dave. Critiques the FUQUE out of it on every platform he can. If Hatedom is a thing, he made it. He’s the founder. It’s him. But he read it to the end.

Karkat: Read it, loves it, does some interesting character relationship examinations. Predicted who would end up with who with 100% accuracy. Wasn’t a vocal fan, didn’t get merch, but still liked it.

Nepeta: The shipper who launched a thousand ships. She writes crackfic but with deep care, making sure it makes sense that characters would end up together. Got one of every homestuck shirt. Very into it.

Kanaya: Got into it only because her friends got into it. If Karkat hadn’t talked about it she would not have gotten into it but she did because she wants to be able to carry a conversation with her friends. Not a huge fan.

Terezi: She can and WILL correct you if you get trivia wrong. She did not sit through hours of text-to-speech pesterlogs for some scrub to get it wrong. Defiant Homestuck defender. She’ll cut you if you say you don’t like Homestuck (she won’t, but she’s judging you from the other side of the room)

Vriska: Skipped the first acts and jumped right into Alternia. Little context, little care. Pretends she didn’t, gets facts hilariously wrong which Terezi takes as an invitation to tease her. Fanartist.

Equius: Another fanartist. He made physical media as opposed to drawings. Slow reader, got into it late and didn’t finish until way after the comic had ended. Did not get to experience the comic without Random Paradox Arms all over the place. Loved by the community for his short reaction posts about what happened at the point he’s at.

Gamzee: Either first person to post “Update” when comic updated, or doesn’t read for months and then catches up in two days. Skips many chat logs, but still gets most of the plot no problem. Remembers exact phrasing of the posts he does read though.

Eridan: Another Character Analysis blogger. He dives into (pun unintended) why some characters are The Absolute Worst and writes fanfic of how they would be if they had a chance to be in a different circumstances. The Problematique fan, but only because people assume the worst of him. He’s actually pretty chill.

Feferi: Superfan, and Super Content Creator. Started making plushies and charms and eventually started selling them. Her stuff became a badge of honor and people posted themselves hugging their plushies during the gigapause.

Ancestors:

Too busy caught up in their personal turmoils to read any of it. Except the Condesce. She sent Hussie a diamond-studded Bad Dragon dildo.

Beforus trolls:

Damara: Big fan, but doesn’t express it because of the crowd she’s with. But she has a blog where she tries to get in touch with new readers and is always open to answer questions others might have. Not a Big Name fan, but she’s much more vocal online than in person, and even then it’s through an alt account.

Rufioh: Got people into it, but he himself didn’t finish reading after the Scratch. Said he would but he just never got to doing so.

Mituna: Prone to ranting when updates happened. Very emotionally invested, nearly died when Game Over happened.

Kankri: The nitpicker to end all nitpicks. He critiqued everything, and hated that there were hero mode, simplified and silly drawings. Genuinely disliked all characters for faults that he himself has, yet never self-examined. Got a following that consisted three-quarters of people who made fun of his rants and one-quarter of people who were as intense as he is.

Meulin: Big, BIG fan. Prolific fanfic writer, if a character pairing exists, rarepair or not, she wrote a fic about them. Likes all characters and as such thinks she must devote roughly the same wordcount for everyone she can. Disappears for months then reemerges with twenty new fics.

Porrim: Moderate fan, great cosplayer. The more complex the outfit, the more she wanted to make it. Routinely goes out in Jade’s Dead Shuffle and Three in the Morning dresses because she is incredibly proud of them.

Latula: Not a big fan. Knows most of what she knows through cultural osmosis because her friends got into it, but she’s not likely to ever read it herself. Likes how into it her friends are though.

Aranea: Much like Jane’s Dad, she’s the walking encyclopedia, except she memorized the content of almost every page, and if she doubts her knowledge, will immediately go to her computer and look up what she is unsure of. Tries not to talk people’s ears off and will only talk about Homestuck when asked about it.

Horuss: Super into it. To a maybe creepy degree. Doesn’t show in public but if you get access to his secret blogs it’s more like character shrines. Don’t dig too deep into it.

Kurloz: Read it, kinda into it, but not that big of a fan. He will talk about it but he’s pretty lukewarm about the whole thing.

Cronus: Read it to impress a crush, got genuinely into it, but isn’t a vocal fan.

Meenah: Didn’t read it, much like Latula learned about it because everyone around her talked about it. Unlike Latula, she mocks everyone for liking something she says is “for nerds”. Still kinda wants to read it to be part of the conversation but her pride of Not Knowing About Homestuck is too great to overcome that hurdle.

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mari-yah · 4 years ago

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Blog Post #10

What are some weapons that Internet Trolls use To be destructive online? Can those weapons always be bad?

"The Trolls' use of the term, as memes within the troll space compose a holistic system of meaning, memes only make sense in relation to other memes," as mentioned by Phillips having these memes can be weapon in the troll space. Again memes can be used for harm, but also for good as in making connections to people online. This sense of making content relatable to people can help people feel part of a community therefore brining them in this circle of closeness to people online.

Was Grandpa Wiggly a Troll? Yes or why not?

"While some were able to brush off the events of Grandpa Wiggly’s unmasking as amusing or perhaps just another day on the Internet, others seemed to be genuinely outraged. However, most Redditors seemed to agree that Grandpa Wiggly was a troll. But what does it really mean to call someone a troll?" as it is still up to question and still leans both ways as well. Grandpa Wiggly was as in his own words a character, but the people who didn't know that were still in a sense left in the dark and conceived leaving them feeling like Grandpa Wiggly was troll for the deceit.

Why is it that trolling happens a lot more frequently than in person bullying/trolling?

"fully 92% of internet users agreed that the online environment allows people to be more critical of one another, compared with their offline experiences. But a substantial majority, 68%, also agreed that online environments allow them to be more supportive of one another." This data right here pulled off of pew Research really displays how internet does allow people , "to be more critical of one another" in other words also leaves cushion for the trolls to be free within that space of taking "critical" too far. Yet without the internet, it wouldn't allow us to be as supportive to each other.

In Leslie Jones's case, was it the safest thing to go after her trolls? Why?

Leslie Jones had the misfortune of dealing with relentless trolls who refused to give up on just being so ill will towards her, such as creating a fake twitter account under her name, and slander her name and reputation, to people who didn't know her and got that first impression of her. She decided to try and get her followers and ever herself involved in order to try and stop this evil being that was completely always trolling her, may have not been the safest way, but she did create a small support movement for her in hopes of clearing her name.

Bergstrom, K. (2011). “Don’t feed the troll”: Shutting down debate about community expectations on Reddit.com. First Monday

Duggan, M. (2014), “Online Harassment” Pew Research Center, pp. 1-11.

Phillips, W. (2015), "Defining Terms: The Origins and Evolution of Subcultural Trolling”. This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture.

Silman, A. (2016). A Timeline of Leslie Jones's Horrific Online Abuse.

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yung-america · 5 years ago

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Blog Post: “Reclaiming” Fun

Welcome to Yung America! A new center for a new type of rebellion against the political establishment- not a rebellion of violence or anger but a rebellion of creativity and fun. Contrary to what you might hear on CNN, there is nothing wrong with expressing yourself through memes or jokes. In fact, having fun and being energized is essential to any movement that wishes to succeed. The United States of America, and much of the world has become polarized into ��left” and “right” camps, and while the policy differences between the two sides are vast, the people that make up the two “sides” share much in common. Unfortunately, for us, each side, but particularly the left, has been overtaken by gatekeepers, in the media and political establishment, that largely push division and censorship.

Many liberal, progressive, and independent thinkers have had their voices silenced, and have been told that they must get in line with the priorities of an elite class of establishment thinkers and Twitter checkmarks who must know best. Any fun, or creative and independent thought tends to be mocked and looked down upon. Perhaps captivated by the Trump campaign of 2015-2016, many right-wing and alt-right groups such as 4Chan have already begun their rebellions against the establishment- and while many of them may advocate bigoted, harmful, and misguided policies, they are having plenty of fun doing so. And it’s exactly the opposite of what a lot of progressives, liberals, and people on the broad “left-wing” spectrum are doing- instead of having fun as they prepare to fight a much-needed peaceful political revolution, they spend time censoring one another, yelling about everything, and obsessively focusing on being morally correct to the tenth degree rather than letting people be people and doing what works best for them. As merely a casual observer of politics, and the current political landscape, I choose to not let this go on as it is any longer. I have gotten involved in volunteering for the Andrew Yang 2020 Presidential campaign, as well as the Paperboy Prince campaign for Congress in New York’s 7th District. But I am starting this webpage not only to promote these campaigns(which I will be doing plenty of) , but to create a movement that goes beyond merely the chaotic day-to-day news cycle of politics. I want to start a movement that allows people to express themselves creatively, truthfully, and allows us to have fun as much as possible. When racist trolls on 4Chan are claiming symbols as their own, making “edgy” memes, and controlling the conversation, we are losing, especially when corporate media gets it into our heads that we are not allowed to do the same. When the people who are having fun and being energized are Donald Trump’s supporters, and not liberals, progressives, libertarians and the like, we are losing. So yes, this website is ideological in the sense that the founders have a bias, just like anyone else, and in this case- my bias is Pro-Yang Gang, Pro-Paperboy, and anti-establishment, libertarian left/center-left. But this website is open to anyone, so long as you try to put humanity first. Yung America aims to be not just another hacky political blog, but something truly revolutionary. Or just a place to fuck around and have fun. Whatever works best, I guess. Without further ado, thanks for visiting, and let’s get this motherfucking money. It’s Our Time!

Sincerely,

Big T

#Paperboy2020 Yang2020 YangGang ItsOurTime YungAmerica #blog

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kirstymcneill · 5 years ago

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10 things you can do to tell better stories in the 2020s

This piece first appeared on the ACEVO website on the 26th of February 2020.

Folk at The Wellcome Trust are thinking big. Really big. They are looking at ways to improve the health of everybody everywhere and what role all of us can play in furthering science. But they know that philanthropy – even at its most strategic and ambitious – needs to keep adapting to changed conditions. I was really pleased to have the chance to speak with them about what I think the strategic communications environment looks like for the next ten years and to share some lessons we’ve learnt at Save the Children about how to tell better stories in these volatile times.

I started with four hypotheses about the world we are in, identifying trends that I think are simultaneously significant, global and likely to last the full decade. The first is the increasing political potency of debates about inequality. At a popular level that will play out with continual anger about the causes and consequences of the global financial crisis. For businesses and governments it will be found in the mantra of ‘Leave No-One Behind’, the pledge around convergence that is at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals. In Westminster and Whitehall, it will mean ‘levelling up’ between North and South.

The second is the extent to which we are in a movement moment. There has been a big uptick of popular mobilisation in many of the contexts where we work, despite the shrinkage of civil society space and the ‘age of impunity’ around attacks on aid workers, activists, human rights defenders and journalists. It is dangerous to stand up but increasing numbers of people are prepared to and movements which speak to core values or immediate needs are scaling quickly.

The third is that we are losing the battle over narrative and norms (and we don’t even know it). Whether it’s defending vaccines, the impact of aid, the legitimacy of the welfare state or refugee and migrant rights, many justice movements are losing a battle over narratives and norms in closed digital spaces we can’t even see.

The fourth is that all institutions face a crisis of legitimacy. Trust in both the motivations and effectiveness of institutions is low across many of the contexts where we work. Here in the UK, this is partly a reflection of our economic, cultural and geographic distance from our audiences, and the ‘empathy delusion’ that stops us feeling it. Questions about white saviourism and colonialism in international organisations will rightly become more insistent as fluency in the language of power and privilege grows.

If these hypotheses are correct, they add up to a pretty inhospitable environment for social purpose organisations like Wellcome and Save the Children. The strategies that served us well for the last decade won’t serve us well for the next ten. There are, however, ten things we can do to meet and master the challenges of these new times.

If inequality is going to dominate debates, we need to understand more about what’s driving it. That means:

1. Backing ‘systems entrepreneurs’ and not just thematic specialists. We absolutely need people with deep technical expertise in specific issues but the people making the biggest difference will be those who can see how different decisions fit together to create systemic inequalities and injustices. The RSA calls this ‘thinking like a system, acting like an entrepreneur’. Strategic philanthropy will increasingly back disruptive individuals with a diagnosis of and prescription for broken systems.

2. Investment in tools like Save the Children’s Group-Based Inequality Database (GRID). There is nothing more political – or more revealing – than how a society allocates money on who lives and who dies. If we care about global health we have to care about how it is financed and who is being left – or being pushed – behind.

If we are in a movement moment we should:

3. Increasingly think about ‘fields’ rather than sectors and coalitions. I’ve spent a lot of my career running formal charity coalitions and the lessons on how to do that is a blog for another day. Increasingly I’m convinced we will need much looser movement infrastructure in the future, finding ways to make sense of constellations including thinkers, writers, cultural leaders, funders and systems entrepreneurs as well as organisational and grassroots leaders. When I have written before about our movement moment I have stressed the need for unbranded leadership emerging from lots of different organisations. Increasingly I think some of our leaders won’t have an institutional home at all and funders will need to find a way to work with those whose contribution will take the form of writing books or producing art to help us make sense of where we are.

4. Make the move from campaigning to organising. Save the Children is in the middle of this transition but the campaign for aid and development has long understood the importance of ‘local resonance’ and not giving the (false) impression that your issue is for ‘other people’s people’, as campaign director Richard Darlington lays out so well here.

If we are losing the narrative and norms war our best bets are to:

5. Kill off the literalism. We know that telling people they are wrong just entrenches their views and we know that myth-busting simply makes the myths more memorable. I’m afraid it’s time to say goodbye to #AidWorks, #VaccinesWork and #CampaigningWorks (unless we are just using them as ways to tag content to make it easier for those who already agree with us to find). Instead, we should focus more on appealing to universal human truths as we did with Save the Children’s recent #IAmTheFuture brand advert.

6. Investing significantly in engaging at the level of popular culture. The Holocaust Educational Trust did this successfully with Holby City, the Children’s Society have recently been working with Hollyoaks and you can read more about Unbound Philanthropy’s cutting edge thinking here. There is clearly an appetite for programming that helps social issues become tangible and relevant – 24 Hours in A&E is now in its 20th season – but there doesn’t seem to be much coordination between organisations and funders working on culture. If I’m wrong I’m very happy to be – so please get in touch if this is happening quietly.

7. Back those who are charting what’s happening in closed online spaces and take their advice. The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s Don’t Feed the Trolls report was a gamechanger for me (and led to me going on the board, for full disclosure). On many issues professional campaigners are often blind to the online forums shaping tomorrow’s memes and testing out the dog-whistles that do so much damage to the causes and communities we love.

And finally, if we face a crisis of legitimacy the areas to focus on are

8. Becoming as diverse as we can as quickly as we can. The ‘Empathy Delusion’ report is one of the best things I’ve read this year, charting not only how far many comms professionals are from our audience, but how dangerously naïve we are about that being the case. Staying in our bubbles but developing greater empathy with those outside them is not the answer – bursting the bubbles through radical inclusion is. NPC’s Walking the Talk series has a load of resources on that if you don’t know where to start.

9. Making an intellectually self-confident case for the value of institutions. I spoke at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government last year and made the case for public sector leaders being more assertive about their value and their values. I was asked, fairly, what it would look like in practice. A few months later it became clear – it looks like the Chief Medical Officer calling out the errant nonsense of a politician or the Made at Uni campaign giving tangible examples of what universities do for all of us.

My final tip doesn’t relate to any of the specific trends but is the most important thing we can do if we feel overwhelmed by the combination of them:

10. Take care of each other. There is a lot of discussion in activist circles about self-care. My worry is this is coming at the same time as the mass retreat to private life as many of our best campaigners and communicators are concluding the public square is just too toxic to operate in. I understand the temptation and I’ve written elsewhere about the seven trends that are undermining our democracy. I’m frightened and on the edge of burn-out too. I know it’s tough out there, but if our collective liberation is rooted in our collective action then surely we need to find a way to move to collective care, a model where all of us take care of each of us and nobody has to take care of themselves.

We don’t have any time to lose in testing and adapting these ten lessons and formulating new ones. We have just ten years to meet the Sustainable Development Goals. In the coming decade, we could determine, once and for all, that it is intolerable that anybody anywhere will die simply because they are too poor to stay alive. If we achieve it, people like us – the campaigners and communicators – will have been at the heart of the greatest thing we’ve ever done as a species. What greater story could there be than that?

#communications #campaigning #philanthropy

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investmart007 · 7 years ago

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Facebook | Social media plays whack-a-mole with Russia interference

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/7P3MOL

Facebook | Social media plays whack-a-mole with Russia interference

Facebook is spending heavily to avoid a repeat of the Russian interference that played out on its service in 2016, bringing on thousands of human moderators and advanced artificial intelligence systems to weed out fake accounts and foreign propaganda campaigns.

But it may never get the upper hand. Its adversaries are wily, more adept at camouflaging themselves and apparently aren’t always detectable by Facebook’s much-vaunted AI. They employ better operational security, constantly test Facebook’s countermeasures and then exploit whatever holes they find.

“They’ve got lots of very good, smart technical people, who are assessing the situation all the time and gaming the system,” said Mike Posner, a former U.S. diplomat who directs New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

With the U.S. midterm elections approaching and renewed scrutiny on Capitol Hill, Facebook revealed this week that it has uncovered and removed 32 apparently fake accounts and pages. The accounts appear designed to manipulate Americans’ political opinions using tactics similar to those adopted ahead of the 2016 presidential election on social-media services, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and Reddit.

This time, however, whoever is responsible is doing a better job hiding their tracks. They are buying ads with U.S. or Canadian dollars, not rubles, and using virtual private networks and other methods to look more like people logging in from U.S locations.

“Offensive organizations improve their techniques once they have been uncovered,” Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos wrote in a blog post Tuesday. That also makes it harder to know who Facebook’s current adversaries are.

“Because the 2016 operation was widely seen as a success, it means a number of other players are likely entering the field,” said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins University who is writing a book about 20th century disinformation efforts.

Much like during the Cold War — when Soviet agents once pretended to be the Ku Klux Klan to stoke racial division — the strategy remains to “strengthen the fringes, boosting the far right extremists and far left extremists at the same time,” Rid said.

Facebook has not said who’s responsible for the latest influence campaign. The fake accounts, however, resemble those created from 2014 through 2016 by the Internet Research Agency, a so-called troll farm based in St. Petersburg, Russia. In February, U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 people associated with the IRA for plotting to disrupt the 2016 election.

The Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank that works with Facebook to analyze disinformation around elections worldwide, analyzed eight of the 32 pages and accounts a day before Facebook shut them down. While researchers found the pages left “few clues to their identities” compared to Russian accounts Facebook shut down in April, they noticed that more posts avoided English text in favor of memes or other graphics.

Such text can yield telltale grammatical errors common to Russian speakers. Some cropped up in posts that used text, such as conjugation mistakes between singular and plural verb forms and the misuse of articles like “a” and “the.”

The Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found many of the accounts were similar to IRA pages in their approach, tactics, language and content — in particular, the targeting of specific demographics like feminists, blacks, Latin Americans, and anti-Trump activists.

“It is becoming clearer that IRA activity represents just a small fraction of the total Russian effort on social media,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, speaking Wednesday at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. “In reality, the IRA operatives were just the incompetent ones who made it easy to get caught.”

Experts, meanwhile, warn that Facebook’s AI tools aren’t a panacea. The tools can help human moderators identify posts that warrant a closer look, but they can’t do the job themselves.

“A couple thousand moderators are all going to have slightly different criteria that they spot,” said Joanna Bryson, a computer scientist at the University of Bath. “It’s not quite as easy to sneak by as it is with a single algorithm.”

Miles Brundage, a research fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, says any Facebook AI is in for a “cat and mouse game of evasion and detection” with adversaries who can try different techniques until they find something that works.

Facebook, which last year said IRA-connected accounts generated 80,000 posts that could have reached 126 million people, isn’t the only social-media network that’s been targeted by Russians. Twitter told Congress last October that it shut down more than 2700 accounts linked to the IRA, but only after they put out 1.4 million election-related tweets.

Google likewise said it found two accounts linked to the Russian group that bought almost $5,000 worth of ads during the 2016 election, as well as 18 YouTube channels likely backed by Russian agents.

For the moment, however, Facebook is alone in disclosing additional problems. Google did not immediately respond when contacted to see if it had discovered any further influence efforts. Twitter had no comment, and in a statement, Reddit dodged the question, saying only that it has always had measures in place to “prevent or limit” malicious actions.

In general, tech companies have been reluctant to share everything — or anything — they find with the public, even as they work behind the scenes with law enforcement and intelligence officials.

By MATT O’BRIEN and RYAN NAKASHIMA , Associated Press

#artificial intelligence #camouflaging themselves #constantly test #Facebook #Humanity Institute #immediately respond #Mike Posner #plays whack #Reddit dodged #Russia interference #social media #TodayNews

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anchorarcade · 7 years ago

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Why Congress is the last place Facebook, Twitter, and Google want to be this week.

http://ryanguillory.com/why-congress-is-the-last-place-facebook-twitter-and-google-want-to-be-this-week/

Why Congress is the last place Facebook, Twitter, and Google want to be this week.

Photo illustration by Dado Ruvic/Reuters

We’ve been trying to make sense for more than a year of how the Russian government helped the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. Monday’s charges and revelations from the Mueller investigation began to clear one path of potential answers. Tuesday and Wednesday’s Capital Hill hearings featuring representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google might better illuminate another.

While the threat of Russian interference in the 2016 election started making headlines back in June of last year, when the Democratic National Committee found that a hacker operating under the name Guccifer 2.0 had infiltrated the DNC’s servers, it wasn’t until this September that Facebook admitted it had been gamed by the Russians, too. Soon after, Twitter and Google both also disclosed that Kremlin-backed groups appeared to have used their social media–sharing and ad-targeting tools in an attempt to sway the election and help secure Donald Trump’s victory. Often, these efforts pushed far-right messages in line with the Trump campaign’s message; in other cases they attempted to sow discord and confusion by peddling false stories and pushing the buttons of movements on the left, like Black Lives Matter. We’ve learned how these prongs of the Russian disinformation campaign worked in dribs and drabs. Congress, too, has investigated how the Kremlin may have meddled in our election, and this week it’ll put the largely unregulated platforms that unwittingly helped those efforts in the hot seat.

First up is a hearing on Tuesday, when staff from Facebook, Twitter, and Google will go before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham. There, Facebook is expected to tell Congress that a Kremlin-affiliated group’s ads were served to 29 million people and that after those posts were liked or shared, the reach of that content stretched to approximately 126 million people over the past two years, according to multiple reports on Facebook’s prepared remarks. Earlier, Facebook had estimated that the Kremlin-backed ads reached about 10 million users—a lowball figure, apparently.

Then on Wednesday, general counsel from all three companies will testify at hearings before the House and Senate intelligence committees on how exactly a foreign government was allowed to buy political ads targeting Americans before our election. So far there’s evidence that Russian-linked operatives used Facebook, Twitter, and Google to meddle in the U.S. election in almost every imaginable way, including registering fake accounts and faux organizations masquerading as concerned voters and activist groups, flooding Twitter with militias of bots, organizing bogus grassroots events, and plastering social networks with hateful, divisive memes, fake news, and viral posts in order to manipulate American voters in the run-up to Election Day. Expect questions on Tuesday and Wednesday from unhappy politicians wanting to know what exactly these companies were aware of and why they didn’t do more to stop it.

Silicon Valley is not enjoying this spotlight. Platform companies want to be seen as neutral playing fields, not participants in the body politic.

Google finally offered details about what it plans to share with Congress this week. According to a blog post published late Monday, the company found 18 channels on its YouTube platform with connections to a known Kremlin-backed content operation, which uploaded 1,108 videos with a total of 43 hours of content posted to YouTube between June 2015 to November 2016, right before the election. Those videos apparently notched 309,000 views. Google also says it found evidence of $4,700 spent by a Russian propaganda group on search and display ads. Google also maintains that its Google Plus social network (which, yes, is still a thing) identified “no political posts in English from state-linked actors,” yet last month ThinkProgress reported that it found a Google Plus page for the group “Black Matters US,” which appeared to also be linked to Russian state actors. That Google Plus page was recently suspended, tweeted Casey Michel, the journalist who spotted the account. So Google might be lowballing its estimates here, too.

And Twitter will tell Congress that it has located 2,752 accounts that were run by Russian-government backed operatives and more than 36,000 bots that sent some 1.4 million tweets over the course of the election, according to the Washington Post. Last month, Twitter told Congress that it had only found 201 accounts associated with Russian-affiliated accounts Facebook had disclosed. That figure was criticized by Sen. Mark Warner, who charged that Twitter’s disclosures at that time were “inadequate” and “deeply disappointing,” since Twitter was only piggybacking on the analysis of its social media rival.

For obvious reasons, Silicon Valley is not enjoying this spotlight. Platform companies want to be seen as neutral playing fields, not participants in the body politic. Yet for much of the left, these internet companies may now represent the clearest point of blame yet for why Trump won—other than the fact that nearly half the electorate voted for the man. For the chunk of the right that always thinks someone is persecuting its beliefs, these firms have been objects of suspicion for some time now. Recall how much Facebook overreacted to its flimsy “Trending News” scandal, in which it was accused of suppressing news stories of interest to conservative readers. The Russia scandal is a migraine that is several orders of magnitude more blaring.

At stake: the overall freedom of some of the most valuable companies in the world. Pressure from the left and the right could lead to increased scrutiny and regulation from Washington, which is the last thing Silicon Valley wants. Then again: Like a kid who really hates lightning bugs, these companies are extremely good at snuffing out flickers of oversight. In the case of Google and Facebook, they would be remiss if they didn’t leverage their billions in profits to keep Washington out of their backyards—and they are.

There’s already a bill in the Senate, the Honest Ads Act, that would force social media companies to reveal who bought political ads on their platforms if more than $500 was spent, a description of what audiences were targeted by the ads, and how much was paid, lest they pay a fine. Broadcasters and publishers are already required to disclose this type of information and post disclaimers on ads to help voters know who exactly is trying to influence them.

Though the Honest Ads Act seems like a rather reasonable extension of existing campaign ad law, Google, Twitter, and Facebook aren’t rooting for it. Instead, the three companies are trying to show that they can regulate themselves just fine. In September, shortly after admitting that Russian operatives spent $100,000 on 3,000 political ads surrounding the 2016 election, Facebook outlined a number of new rules it was implementing that it hoped would prevent that kind of Russian interference from happening in the future. The reforms include a new tool that will show users all the ads that any one particular Facebook page has bought, no matter which users were targeted. And on Friday, Facebook said that it would extend its transparency rules beyond political ads to cover all ads served on the platform.

Last week, Twitter shared its plan to build a new Transparency Center, which would show who bought an ad, how long it’s been running, and whom it was targeted to. Political ads will also include a special marker on the tweet to help them stand out from ads that aren’t supportive of a particular candidate. Google hasn’t announced a new plan for dealing with political ads, but the search giant did demote RT—the Kremlin-funded news network that a January report from the director of national intelligence called out as part of “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine”—from its “preferred lineup” category, which reportedly guaranteed the channels revenue from advertisers.

But those proposed changes came only after members of Congress aired their dissatisfaction, and all three companies dragged their feet in accepting Congress’ invitation to testify. Facebook, Google, and Twitter might say that they’re ready to clean up their own mess, yet they’ve largely shown in recent weeks that they’re sore about being scolded and mostly just want to avoid new regulations.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko/AFP/Getty Images.

And of course they do. Facebook made $85 million from advertising and promotion of the Trump campaign alone, according to Theresa Hong, one of the main brains behind the digital arm of his presidential bid, and that doesn’t include posts from super PACs or other shady political groups that were gunning for a Trump victory. Likewise, Facebook and Google both made millions off bigoted ad campaigns leading up to the election, including an offensive satirical travel ad about what Paris might look if it became the “Islamic State of France.” That ad was made by the organization Secure America Now, an advocacy group dedicated to inspiring fear and bigotry against Muslims and defeating Hilary Clinton. Facebook didn’t only take its ad dollars; the company also worked directly with the group to test a new video format and build a case study for the anti-Muslim ad campaign. Meanwhile, it took Twitter 11 months to shut down a Russian troll account pretending to represent the Tennessee Republican Party after it was flagged on three separate occasions by the state’s actual GOP. These issues were simply not a priority for these companies until pressure from Congress and scrutiny from the media made them one.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter were well aware that their tools were being used by domestic groups trying to stoke divisive fear and hatred in voters before the election. They either helped or looked the other way, and they certainly had the power to better monitor and flag when a non-American group used their sites to promote election-related content, too.

Still, as with most things that happen in Congress, don’t expect a preponderance of evidence to result in reasonable policy reforms. The Federal Election Commission has had plenty of opportunities to regulate online political ads, but there hasn’t been pressure from Congress to get it done. That’s probably in part because many members of Congress rely on data-driven ad targeting from all kinds of dark-money sources in order to boost their prospects of winning elections, too. And Facebook and Google have both lobbied the FEC over the years to exclude their online ads from traditional political ad disclosure rules.

None of this means this week’s hearings are sure to be useless. Congress could extract all kinds of details from Facebook, Twitter, and Google about how much they knew about Russia’s election meddling, which could work to bolster support of the Honest Ads Act. The public hearings could propel the companies to make more dramatic changes internally, too. Brutal congressional hearings in 2016, after all, preceded the resignation of the CEO of Wells Fargo over a fraud scandal; Sen. Elizabeth Warren even recommended as much.

But more than anything, we’re likely to learn at least a little more about the how corporations and the Russian government may have unwittingly conspired to helped Trump win the election. And knowing more about the conditions that got us in this mess could help to ensure history doesn’t repeat itself. Let’s just hope our elected representatives don’t throw softballs.

Read more in Slate about Russia’s 2016 election meddling.

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awesomefelicitylewis-blog · 7 years ago

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Why Congress is the last place Facebook, Twitter, and Google want to be this week.

http://ryanguillory.com/why-congress-is-the-last-place-facebook-twitter-and-google-want-to-be-this-week/

Why Congress is the last place Facebook, Twitter, and Google want to be this week.

Photo illustration by Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Silicon Valley is not enjoying this spotlight. Platform companies want to be seen as neutral playing fields, not participants in the body politic.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko/AFP/Getty Images.

Read more in Slate about Russia’s 2016 election meddling.

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nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

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Hyperallergic: Required Reading

A total solar eclipse as seen on Monday, August 21, 2017 above Madras, Oregon. The total solar eclipse swept across the continental United States from Lincoln Beach, Oregon to Charleston, South Carolina, while a partial solar eclipse was visible across the entire North American continent along with parts of South America, Africa, and Europe. (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani, via NASA’s Flickr)

A witness to the Charlottesville terrorist attack explains how he ended up at the center of various conspiracy theories and “fake news”:

Desperate to lay blame on anyone besides the alt-right, they seized on these facts to suggest a counter-narrative to the attack, claiming there was no way that someone with my background just happened to be right there to take the video. Even ignoring the fact that someone with my background—raised in Virginia, UVA graduate, lives in Charlottesville, worked to resolve ethnic conflicts overseas, politically progressive—is exactly the kind of person you’d expect to find at a protest against Nazis, their theories were absurd and illogical. They wrote that I was a CIA operative, funded by (choose your own adventure) George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, the IMF/World Bank, and/or a global Jewish mafia to orchestrate the Charlottesville attack in order to turn the general public against the alt-right. I had staged the attack and then worked with MSNBC and other outlets controlled by the left to spread propaganda. They claimed my ultimate goal was to start a race war that would undermine and then overthrow Donald Trump on behalf of the “Deep State.” (I’m generalizing here as the theories are widely variant and logically inconsistent, and I’m only aware of the small percentage I could be bothered to read.)

Satirists can’t keep up with Trump, but they’re trying. Here a bunch discuss various magazine covers they created post-Charlottesville.

The Working Family Party had a great response to Louise Linton’s (Steven Munchin’s wife’s) tone deaf Instagram post this week:

Louise Linton, wife of foreclosure bankster @stevenmnuchin1 tagged brands on her Instagram. We tagged how she bought them. http://pic.twitter.com/57PTHkzc7k

— WorkingFamiliesParty (@WorkingFamilies) August 22, 2017

ProPublica reports on how major tech companies are helping far-right websites monetize their hate:

But ProPublica’s findings indicate that some tech companies with anti-hate policies may have failed to establish the monitoring processes needed to weed out hate sites. PayPal, the payment processor, has a policy against working with sites that use its service for “the promotion of hate, violence, [or] racial intolerance.” Yet it was by far the top tech provider to the hate sites with donation links on 23 sites, or about one-third of those surveyed by ProPublica. In response to ProPublica’s inquiries, PayPal spokesman Justin Higgs said in a statement that the company “strives to conscientiously assess activity and review accounts reported to us.”

A far-right group is trying to smear antifa groups with a fake meme campaign. BBC summaries Bellingcat’s findings:

The online campaign is using fake Antifa (an umbrella term for anti-fascist protestors) Twitter accounts to claim anti-fascists promote physically abusing women who support US President Donald Trump or white supremacy.

Researcher Eliot Higgins of website Bellingcat found evidence that the campaign is being orchestrated on internet messageboard 4Chan by far-right sympathisers.

Guatemalan artisans are going after the fake sellers on Etsy and elsewhere, and with some success:

Using bots to scan for keywords and specific types of images, Dillon locates products on Etsy, Google and Shopify that seem suspect and then reaches out to individual sellers to ask what percentage of profits are passed back to the artisans, what their transparency policies are and more. Sellers who can’t prove that they have legitimate relationships with Guatemalan artisans are then reported to their hosting sites to be removed. So far, this process has led to the identification of over 64,000 products on Etsy alone that infringe on artisan copyrights, and communication with Etsy’s legal team has led Dillon to believe the company will be cooperative with Ethical Fashion Guatemala’s requests for infringing product removal. Similar conversations have taken place with teams at Google and Shopify.

David Batty takes a look at the accusations of anti-semitism against Larissa Sansour’s new film project showing at the Barbican:

In a letter to Sandeep Dwesar, the chief operating and financial officer of the Barbican, Merron wrote: “While the Barbican synopsis casts the film as a sci-fi feature about fictitious technologically advanced aliens who land in an area to implant a ‘false history’, I understand that the film is clearly filmed in Israel and that the dialogue is in Arabic and purports to show the ‘aliens’ seeding the land with porcelain in an effort to create the ‘false’ impression that they have a historical connection to it.

Requesting its removal from the exhibition, Merron said: “It is therefore not much of a stretch to suggest that the film is a means by which to deny the historical Jewish connection to Israel and an exercise in delegitimisation. Accusing Jews of falsifying our connection to Israel smacks of antisemitism and is of grave concern.”

In reply, Dwesar said: “The short film has been programmed for its poetical vision before anything else. … Having spoken to the curator and the artists, the intention is that the symbolic visual language in the film speaks of history and tradition, yet it cannot necessarily be placed in any distinct or quantifiable time period.”

Wolf Warrior 2 is the second biggest grossing film in Chinese film history but there’s a darker side to this pro-military propaganda flick. Writing for RobertEbert.com, Simon Adams breaks it down:

This is the second highest-earning film in all of Chinese history, and its characters’ sense of patriotism is built on the back of racist assumptions that would, in a European or American narrative, be rightfully criticized for being part of an ugly “white savior” power fantasy. In time, “Wolf Warrior 2” might seem benignly kitschy, though its core ideas about how only the Chinese military can save a nameless African country from bloodthirsty native rebels and amoral European mercenaries, will always be gross.

… Look at how the Africans celebrate their newfound savior by behaving like racist fantasies of uncivilized mindless savages: they dance around an open bonfire while pounding on hand-drums. Look at Tundu, Leng’s portly African “godson” sidekick who sells bootleg porn and eats a lot. Heck, look at Tundu’s mom, an overweight woman who breaks bottles and body-slams African rebels to protect her son. Tundu’s mom’s heroism might be a sign of her being a secret bad-ass, but her violent outbursts are played for laughs. She’s a punchline, not a supporting character. She has no more depth than the African rebels who shoot up Tundu’s fellow victims.

And there’s this distressing piece of news: Chinese Film Critic Feared Fired After Damning Review of ‘Wolf Warrior II’

A group wants to fix our mistaken assumptions about bubonic plague images and they’re doing something about it:

Between about 1347 and 1353, the Black Death wiped out an estimated 50 percent of the European population. It was horrendous. “People were terrified,” says Jones.

You would think, Jones says, “that if this was such a major catastrophe, there must be drawings of it. But there aren’t.”

The web’s most toxic trolls may live in Vermont (while Iowa and Nevada come in neck and neck in second place):

And … This Website Will Mail Your Ashes To The GOP If Trumpcare Kills You. Really.

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

The post Required Reading appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly · 8 years ago

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Over the course of Donald Trump’s staggering political rise, observers tried to make sense of him by borrowing a metaphor from the internet: Trump, they said, was a troll. He was described as turning presidential aspirants into “Twitter trolls” (by a primary challenger, Marco Rubio), as “the world’s greatest troll” (by the data whiz Nate Silver) and, after his inauguration, as “our Troll-in-Chief” (by the liberal pundit Touré). Each was meant as a dig: The troll is the bottom-feeder of internet culture, not a hero. But Trump himself gladly owned the slur. When a Twitter user called him “the most superior troll” on the platform back in 2013, Trump replied, “A great compliment!”

Trolling isn’t just about manning an unhinged Twitter account. It describes an ethos. The troll is a figure who skips across the web, saying whatever it takes to rile up unsuspecting targets, relishing the chaos in his wake and feasting on attention, good or bad. For Trump, that means inciting political panic with glib news conferences, all-caps tweets and made-up terrorist attacks, shifting his beliefs to suit his whims. During the campaign, the ambiguity of this spectacle worked to his advantage, freeing his supporters from their own responsibilities: When he called for a 2,000-mile-long wall or suggested banning an entire religion from entering the country, the sheer extremity of these ideas let voters view them as goading performances instead of real plans. And with every political shrug, the web’s most antisocial sensibility rose further into the heights of American public life.

Now that the trolling ethos has infiltrated the actual core of government, whole systems are being forced to improvise around Trump’s inscrutable center. He is a frequently insincere and unserious person, placed in the most serious of positions. Politicians on the right find themselves staking claims on Trump’s throwaway accusations, pretending that massive vote fraud exists or that angry constituents at town halls are paid protesters. Journalists wrestle with late-night tweets that carry the weight of the presidency but also seem designed only to enrage and confuse. What does it mean for the American presidency itself to become a fake out?

Troll culture was forged in the primordial ooze of the internet, in a time when online social interaction took place in rolling walls of text. In 1993, LambdaMOO, a popular virtual community, was besieged by a user called Mr. Bungle, a character dressed as a clown in a semen-stained costume. One evening, Mr. Bungle used a programming trick to make it appear as if other users were performing violent sex acts on one another. Later, when his targets demanded an explanation, Mr. Bungle typed: “It was purely a sequence of events with no consequence on my RL” — real life — “existence.” He was just messing with people, delighting in the power to provoke reactions from a remove. And because everyone involved could just log off, those left shaken by words on a computer screen were made to feel silly. As one commentator said during the ensuing controversy, “I think that freedom would be well served by simple toughening up.”

Mr. Bungle was a lone wolf, but trolling could also be a communal activity. On 1990s Usenet groups, users would post in-jokes and provocations in a bid to flush out naïve newcomers. And with 4chan, an anonymous, anime-obsessed message board started by a teenager in 2003, trolling charged beyond its online vicinity and into the offline lives of distant strangers. In the most notorious incident, 4chan trolls latched onto a Myspace page memorializing a seventh-grader who had killed himself, ridiculing the child’s recent disappointments and seizing on grammatical errors in posts from mourners. (One had called him “an hero.”) Soon they were placing harassing phone calls to the boy’s parents and snapping prank photos at his grave.

Trolling was always about the distance between people who care and people who don’t. The people who cared always lost.

Internet trolls work by exploiting the gap between the virtual and the real. They float, weightless and anonymous, across the web, then reach out and rattle people who are pinned down by fixed ideologies, moral codes and human emotions. Any attachment to principles — even really basic ones like “don’t torture grieving parents” — gives the troll an opening. Stretching back to Mr. Bungle, trolling was always about the distance between people who care and people who don’t. The people who cared always lost. Often, they were counseled to detach as much as the trolls had: to withhold their outrage, to not “feed the trolls,” to pretend there was a real distinction between doing horrible things and meaning them. So the trolls scampered on to their next targets, amassing more followers along the way.

It was during the summer of 2014 that internet trolling boiled over into a mainstream crisis. It began with a seething, accusatory blog post about a video-game developer named Zoe Quinn, written by an ex-boyfriend. What seemed like a small, personal conflict managed to explode into a culture war, complete with bomb threats and harassment campaigns. First came the nihilistic trolls, some even hoping to compel Quinn to “an hero” herself — tittering 4chan code for committing suicide. But as #GamerGate, as it came to be called, grew, it coalesced into a movement that looked awfully political. Despite their self-presentation as ciphers, trolls have always had a point of view, and #GamerGate offered a platform for a whole coalition to express its distrust of media, resentment toward women and anger at progressive critiques of racism and misogyny. They had demands, too: They worked to get journalists fired, to pressure advertisers, to silence feminist critics.

To outsiders, #GamerGate looked like a cesspool of angry, entitled young men nobody else wanted to talk to. But some right-wing figures spied an opportunity. Mike Cernovich, author of a hypermasculine self-help blog called “Danger and Play,” joined the cause. (“I use trolling tactics to build my brand,” he later told The New Yorker.) So did Milo Yiannopoulos, then writing for the website Breitbart News, which helped midwife the controversy from a fringe freakout to a right-wing political perspective. (“I hurt people for a reason,” he said recently. “I like to think of myself as a virtuous troll.”) Donald Trump saw political promise in this world, too: As his White House bid seemed on the brink of collapse last summer, he found a new campaign manager in the Breitbart executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon, a sincere nationalist with trolling tendencies of his own.

‘Performance art can be so hard for normal people to understand.’

Now, Bannon sits on the National Security Council, and many Trump supporters are fusing the trolling ethos with old culture-war tropes, amusing themselves by calling liberals delicate “snowflakes” and delighting at being “in” on Trump’s “joke.” As the right-wing columnist John Feehery put it after Trump’s Feb. 16 news conference: “Performance art can be so hard for normal people to understand.” People like Cernovich — who jumped easily from #GamerGate to the Trump train — have taken to calling their political posture “antifragile,” Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s word for systems that thrive on volatility and stress. Trump, Taleb has said, is “heavily vaccinated because of his checkered history” — nothing new can shame him. Nothing matters.

The troll figure feels as new as the smartphones in our hands, but his trail of destruction stretches deep into history. Toward the end of World War II, Jean-Paul Sartre looked at the anti-Semites of Europe and saw something that still sounds familiar. “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies,” he wrote in the 1944 essay “Anti-Semite and Jew.” They “are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.” Anti-Semites “delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.”

Recently we’ve witnessed a resurgence of this winking Nazi type. PewDiePie, a wildly popular YouTube video-game star, filmed a “prank” in which he hired two men to hold up a sign that said “Death to All Jews.” Pepe the Frog, an online cartoon that morphed into a 4chan meme, has been co-opted by plugged-in fascists who redraw him with swastikas for eyes. And after the white nationalist Richard Spencer, a man who has voiced support for “peaceful ethnic cleansing,” yelled “Hail Trump” at a Washington conference and received Nazi salutes from crowd members, he claimed it was all “ironic.” These days even David Duke, a sincere and straightforward white supremacist, is sharing racist memes and getting called a “troll.” But when Spencer showed up in Washington for the inauguration, explaining his Pepe lapel pin to the press, a masked protester ran up and collapsed all that ironic distance by punching him in the face.

Trolls work through abstraction, leveraging the internet and irony to carve out a space between actions and consequences. Becoming president has blown Trump’s cover: There’s nothing more consequential than this. Trolls are typically outsiders, and sad ones: They don’t fit into the dominant group, so they terrorize it from the sidelines. Part of what makes Trump’s administration so alarming is that the troll sensibility now dominates. And when that happens, it’s reminiscent of what Sartre described: No reason, no principle, just the pure exercise of power.

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ds4design · 8 years ago

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Inside the U.S.'s Only Ocean Exploration Ship

Pearl Harbor, Dawn. Credit: Jennifer Frazer

I happened to be in Hawaii last month at the same time that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA)'s ship of exploration, the Okeanos Explorer -- of live-streaming, ocean-esplorin’ fame -- was docked in Pearl Harbor. There are several ships that do that, but only one belongs to the American people. This one.

On a whim, I wrote to see if I might get a tour of the ship while I was around. Considering the events of the last few weeks, I’m glad I did it while I had the chance. I got to see NOAA Mission Control, the bridge, and the ship’s faithful ROV Deep Discoverer (nicknamed D2)… sort of. When on board, it lives under a protective cover inside a garage. But I was so close to the sampling baskets on the front that I could have reached out and touched one. And I’m kinda sorry now I didn’t!

Anyhow, if you’re a regular reader of this blog you’re no doubt aware that I am a booster for ocean exploration. I regularly argue it is every bit as important – perhaps more -- as exploring space. This is our home, after all, and exoplaneteers notwithstanding, it’s the only one we’ve got. I’ve often featured clips from the voyages of the Explorer here on my blog, and I’ve spent hours watching their live feed as they explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new ecosystems, and boldly go where no one has gone before. ‘Cause that’s their actual job.

Here she is the morning I saw her, which happened to be Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

That actually presented a problem in getting me in to a military base on a holiday, but fortunately an employee of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (also located in Pearl Harbor) offered to give me a lift. Thank you kind sir!

I was met by MeMe Lobecker and Mike White, physical scientists and hydrographers who work on the Explorer's mapping projects.

Here is the "Wet Lab":

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

It's long and skinny. On the left is a fume hood for sousing specimens in preservative chemicals. On the right toward the rear are dissection lights. On the floor are coolers for the preserved specimens. Can you imagine staring into a microscope here with the smell of formalin in the air (the fume hood never gets it all) while the ship pitches and rolls? Paging Dr. Dramamine.

The samples add up fast. Deep Discoverer can retrieve two to three biological samples per dive, so they may end up with around 40 samples by mission end. All those specimens must be properly preserved and documented.

By the end of the expedition, Lobecker said, they may also have several hundred pounds of rocks, which have the advantage of needing significantly less dissection and preservation. [Seasick biologists give geologists a slanty eyed side squint]

The spirit of Star Trek really does permeate this ship -- and at the captain's behest, no less, according to Lobecker. Here, for example, is the door to Mission Control:

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

While we were there, we heard this sound followed by a message about an upcoming drill. Do you know it? It's the intercom whistle from the original Star Trek TV series. When he came aboard, the current commanding officer asked for the ship to sound like Star Trek, and the crew Made It So.

Here is Okeanos Explorer Mission Control. Everything is swathed in black.

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

Here is the front row where the ROV pilot and copilots sit. And those wooden boxes, buttons, and joysticks, my friends, are how you drive an ROV.

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

Note the ropes, which I assume are battening mechanisms to prevent those control panels from going anywhere unauthorized while at sea.

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

Long hours at sea probably provide ample time for the fashioning of a lucky crane ...

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

...or for the drawing of the ocean invertebrate Glaucus atlanticus, which I wrote about on this blog long ago. This one was spotted on a black dry erase board at the back of Mission Control. Note also the poem, which I assume is an original composition by one of the crew or science team, since a google search turned up nothing like it on the interweb. In case you can't read it, it says,

Larger than cities,

but on maps there's no mark

Your mission gives light

to our home in the dark

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

Here is the back row where the mission scientists sit. There are usually two or three, and they chat with dozens of participating scientists on shore as the mission unfolds. There is a mere two second delay between the observations of Deep Discoverer on the bottom of the ocean and their appearance on the screen at mission control, while only five to ten seconds separates what D2 sees from what scientists in America see (where they may sitting up in their jammies in the middle of the night).

The three scientists listen to what the shore-side scientists are telling them seems interesting or worth investigating, confer among themselves, and then tell the ROV pilots in the row in front of them what objects and critters should get a closer look.

Mapping, the line of work that Lobecker and White are in, although not as sexy in this biologist's opinion as ROV diving, is another of the ship's missions and among the most important. As recently as 2000, up to 95% of the ocean remained unexplored. Lobecker told me scientists have estimated that in the Pacific Ocean there are over 100,000 seamounts -- underwater peaks rising in excess of 1,000 meters from the seabed -- that remain unmapped by any modern equipment.

The Navy must be nettled by this, because they created something called the "Red Dot Program" in which they list seamounts they'd really love to have mapped if Okeanos Explorer, you know, ever happens to be in the neighborhood. Lobecker said she has no idea how the Navy picks them. "We don't ask," she said. "We just map."

Any data generated by the ship, whether biological, geological, or cartographic, becomes available to the public. We paid for it, after all.

Going bow-ward from Mission Control through a hall lined with two to four person "state rooms" where the scientists live while at sea and up two flights of stairs (past the officers' quarters) brought me to the bridge. Here is the floor mat that greets you there.

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

I also spotted this important control panel stuck to the wall toward the rear. I think half of America feels a desperate urge to hit that yellow button right now.

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

Here is where you drive the ship.

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

That machine Lt. Aaron Colohan is standing behind is an extremely expensive piece of equipment originally designed for oil tankers and supply ships called a "Dynamic Positioning System". It can hold the 2000-ton ship in position on the open ocean to within one meter. One meter! In theory, it's no more complex than the trolling motor on my dad's fishing boat, which can accomplish the same feat. In practice: probably a lot more complex. You can imagine how important the ability to nail the ship down, so to speak, might be if you've got a $3.5 million dollar ROV armed with Superbowl-quality cameras trying to do extreme close-ups while plucking delicate creatures from the seabed at the end of a 4,000 meter tether.

In high enough seas, the system will eventually fail. It is the captain and crew's job to determine when things are getting dicey enough that it's time to pull the ROV out of the pool. Extraction takes a mere two hours if the ROV is at 4,000 meters, so they'd better choose well.

It could be even longer, since D2's max depth is 6,000 meters, much deeper than the 3,700 meter average depth of the ocean. To put that in perspective, 6,000 meters is nearly 20,000 feet -- 6,500 feet or so higher than the elevation of the tallest mountain in Colorado -- and about four miles deep.

Without the dynamic positioning system, Colohan said, it would be impossible to do ROV dives unless the sea were like glass. The ROV itself can take a beating, but the delicate instruments on it not so much.

This is the most important feature on the ship: the captain's chair.

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

I note that it lacks cup holders. I saw an uncannily similar one on the bridge of the USS Missouri, also docked in Pearl Harbor. I guess Naval captain's chair technology has not advanced much in 70 years. I also note the convenient proximity of the equal-opportunity toilet. Which is better than the House of Representatives could say, until recently.

This is the antenna farm, way up at the top there.

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

Lobecker said that sometimes when they notice they're getting screwy data, they go out to have a look at the farm and there's a bird standing on it.

Note also the Hawaii flag.

This is how you get internet at sea:

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

It's called the VSAT bubble, and there's a tracking antenna in there that moves as the ship pitches and rolls to stay locked on to the nearest satellite 25,000 miles above. This antenna also beams the ship's data to shore.

Here we have Deep Discoverer's camera sled Seirios. They are joined by a tether. Seirios hovers over D2 like a big brother, keeping an eye on the ROV and offering a wider perspective on the scene to the ROV pilots and scientists. As I mentioned, it's wearing its PJs.

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

Here's what it looks like while at sea:

Credit: NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Our Deepwater Backyard: Exploring Atlantic Canyons and Seamounts 2014

This is the crane used to catch and release Deep Discoverer.

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

On the end is a truck tire that has been repurposed as a "swing arrestor". When Deep Discoverer is hauled in, it hits that tire which dampens any lateral motion and allows the ROV to be more safely deposited on deck.

Here's what it looks like (note the obvious treads on the tire):

Credit: NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Our Deepwater Backyard: Exploring Atlantic Canyons and Seamounts

Here it is from the front:

Credit: NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Gulf of Mexico 2014 Expedition

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to see Deep Discoverer uncovered either. But seeing it in person, even covered, did enable me to make one observation. The ROV is enormous! It's the size of a large room...

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

... and much bigger than the dinky ROVs I've seen in the movies. In this image, the row of hard hats in the background should give you the scale.

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

On the bottom left you can see the rugged plastic biological specimen collection basket. That is the one I got to stand next to and could have reached out and touched. On the right side of the ROV is a similar looking rock box. Lobecker observed that rocks that look small on camera frequently emerge from the ocean not so wee. I guess Objects in Camera Are Larger Than They Appear.

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

Here is D2 in its garage. You can see the railroad that can be used to slide it in and out. No comment on the enormous ... buoys.

Credit: Jennifer Frazer

Thus ended my tour. I asked my guides what their most surprising, scary, or favorite moments aboard Okeanos Explorer had been. Lobecker recalled a time that oil workers alerted them to a suspected shipwreck of potential archaeological importance. To their surprise, they encountered a nine-foot wide asphalt extrusion/artform on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Only one or two such structures had ever been seen in the world before -- and not in the gulf -- and they had never even been given a name. They dubbed it the "tar lily".

Credit: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Okeanos Explorer Gulf of Mexico 2014 Expedition

White recalled retrieving a device intended to measure the speed of sound in local water -- a shiny silver probe at the end of a long line. To the crew's shock, just as they were pulling it out, a nine-foot swordfish leapt from the water, no doubt perturbed the lunch it had tracked all they way back to the ship had somehow made a miraculous escape. The crew was pleased the swordfish hadn't chomped it first. "What are you going to do [if] you hook a 2,000 pound fish that pulls 10,000 pounds?" White observed.

But more mundane moments aboard Explorer also have the abiity to thrill. Nighttime Deep Discoverer retrievals are popular spectator events aboard ship, Lobecker said, as a glow gradually suffuses the deep before the whole contraption is hoisted dripping and lights ablaze to deck. It must be magical.

Space is not the final frontier, at least not yet. Nor is it the only one still capable of inspiring surprise and wonder. Let us not, in our understandable haste to reach for the stars, forget that.

You can follow the explorations of Okeanos Explorer here. Their live-streaming feed of any explorations in progress is here.

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investmart007 · 7 years ago

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Facebook | Social media plays whack-a-mole with Russia interference

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/7P3MOL

Facebook | Social media plays whack-a-mole with Russia interference

Experts, meanwhile, warn that Facebook’s AI tools aren’t a panacea. The tools can help human moderators identify posts that warrant a closer look, but they can’t do the job themselves.

Google likewise said it found two accounts linked to the Russian group that bought almost $5,000 worth of ads during the 2016 election, as well as 18 YouTube channels likely backed by Russian agents.

In general, tech companies have been reluctant to share everything — or anything — they find with the public, even as they work behind the scenes with law enforcement and intelligence officials.

By MATT O’BRIEN and RYAN NAKASHIMA , Associated Press

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