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mathewingram · 4 years ago

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Another tech hearing in Congress becomes a circus sideshow

Note: This post was originally published in the daily newsletter from the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer.

One of the most notable things about the last Congressional hearing with executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter this summer — the final hearing in a fifteen-month-long investigation by the House Committee on Antitrust — was how intelligent and fact-based most of the questioning was, compared to earlier entries in that series. But a hearing on Wednesday with Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai was an unfortunate return to the kind of circus act we’ve grown used to on these subjects: a hearing about an important topic that degenerated into a sideshow full of grandstanding by politicians who either don’t understand the issues, or were happy to pretend they don’t in order to get video clips of themselves grilling a trio of billionaires and standing up for the little guy. All of which isn’t that surprising, given that the impetus for the hearing was the alleged “censorship” by Twitter and Facebook of a New York Post story, a story involving dubious claims about Joe Biden’s son that various conservative players tried desperately to turn into a Clinton-style election story.

The grandstanding started even before the actual testimony got under way, with a series of promotional tweets from Sen. Ted Cruz that made the hearing seem like a Wide World of Wrestling match. Cruz wasted no time trying to amp up the rhetoric inside the hearing itself, asking Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: “Who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear?” He went on to accuse the company of being “a Democratic super PAC, silencing views to the contrary of your political beliefs,” and after the hearing was finished, he accused Dorsey of lying under oath for saying that Twitter users were now free to post links to the Post story, which Cruz said he was unable to do. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, meanwhile, spent her time at the hearing asking Google CEO Sundar Pichai whether a software engineer who had criticized her in the past still had a job (the Google executive said he didn’t know).

Another strain of questioning focused on Twitter’s alleged “censorship” of Trump’s tweets, which seemed to be a blanket term that included everything from putting a warning label on a tweet with misinformation to the company’s pre-election policy of encouraging users to read news stories before tweeting links to them. Why did Twitter label Trump’s tweets, a number of members asked, but leave up tweets by the Ayatollah Khamenei in which the Iranian cleric threatened to destroy Israel? Or a tweet from a Chinese politician accusing the US of causing the coronavirus pandemic? About 95 percent of the hearing was theater, said Brian Fung of CNN. “Lawmakers are dug in, the companies have their talking points, and the public enjoys seeing CEOs squirm under the spotlight. That’s pretty much it. Congress has always been theater, so we’re in pretty much the same place we were a year ago.”

“There’s simply no reason to have this hearing just prior to the election, except that it may intimidate the platforms, who have shown themselves to be vulnerable to political blunt force in the past,” Sen. Brian Schatz said on Twitter about the hearing. “This is bullying, and it’s for electoral purposes,” he added in a video message. “I’ll be glad to participate in good faith bipartisan hearings on these issues when the election is over. This is not that.” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, meanwhile, accused Republicans of politicizing “what should actually not be a partisan topic,” and Sen. Tammy Duckworth said members of Congress were “placing the selfish interests of Donald Trump ahead of the health of our democracy.” Sen. Mark Warner released a statement saying he was saddened by the fact that some members “have joined in the Trump Administration’s cynical and concerted effort to bully platforms.”

In their opening statements, the CEOs of Twitter and Google both warned Congress of the dangers of removing the protections of Section 230, which a number of experts have pointed out would likely make their moderation even more heavy-handed rather than less. Mark Zuckerberg, however, seemed to meet the members of the committee halfway by agreeing that “Congress should update the law to make sure it’s working as intended.” Why would the Facebook CEO do this? As more than one industry observer pointed out, the best way to protect Facebook’s dominance over social networking is to encourage the development of regulations that only it and a handful of other multibillion-dollar companies are able to afford or manage. “Do you want to give up on competition goals in favor of content moderation goals? Then you should definitely endorse whatever CDA 230 reform Facebook does,” said Daphne Keller, the director of platform regulation at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center.

Here’s more on the tech giants:

Cow them: Danielle Citron, a professor of law at Boston University and vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, and Spencer Overton, a professor of law at George Washington University and president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, argue that despite the grandstanding at the tech hearings, “the real threat to American democracy is not censorship of conservative perspectives on social networks, but coordinated disinformation campaigns, both domestic and foreign, that sow division, confusion, and distrust.” Senate Republicans “don’t want answers from the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter, they want to cow them,” the authors add.

Echo chamber: A new study from Media Matters looked at Facebook pages that regularly post about American political news and found that right-leaning pages outperformed left-leaning pages. “Right-leaning pages consistently earned more average weekly interactions than left-leaning pages, while both types of pages earned similar engagement rates — a measure of performance that accounts for interactions,” the study found. A separate study found that Facebook creates an echo chamber for news consumption, and that conservative users are more likely to become polarized than left-leaning users. CJR is talking about this study all this week with researchers Steven Johnson and Brent Kitchens on our Galley discussion platform.

Death of local: Senator Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the House Commerce Committee, released a report in advance of Wednesday’s hearing that argues the anti-competitive and monopolistic activities of the major tech platforms have led to the death of local journalism. “News media, just like other media, are going through a transformation to the digital age,” Cantwell told the Spokesman-Review in Spokane. “In that transformation, it drastically changed the price of advertising. Local news is trying to adjust to that (and) while they’re making this transition into very disruptive, hard economic times, you also have unfair practices by a concentration of power.”

Other notable stories:

Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, revealed on Wednesday that he is the anonymous author who wrote a New York Times op-ed and a book detailing his misgivings about the Trump administration. Taylor said he understood why some criticized his decision to remain anonymous, but that he chose to do so because it “forced the President to answer them directly on their merits” rather than engaging in ad hominem attacks. White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said Taylor was a low-level, disgruntled former staffer who “is a liar and a coward,” and that he was fired for incompetence. Media watchers, meanwhile, noted that he lied twice when asked on CNN whether he was Anonymous.

City Pages, the free weekly newspaper that chronicled Twin Cities culture and politics for 41 years, will stop publishing and close immediately, owner Star Tribune Media announced Wednesday. The company said it could no longer sustain City Pages after the coronavirus outbreak forced closings and downsizing of the events, nightclubs, bars and restaurants that were its chief advertisers. With the closing, 30 people are expected to lose their jobs, and Minneapolis-St. Paul will join the growing list of US cities that no longer have an alternative weekly newspaper.

A regulatory firewall intended to protect Voice of America and its affiliated newsrooms from political interference has been swept aside by the chief executive of the federal agency, a Trump appointee, according to a report from NPR’s David Folkenflik. Michael Pack, who took over leadership of the US Agency for Global Media in June, says he acted to eliminate policies that were “harmful to the agency and the U.S. national interest.” Pack, who dismissed the heads of all the agency’s broadcasters when he took office in June, argued that the rules had interfered with his mandate “to support the foreign policy of the United States.”

Audio giant Spotify came under fire after podcast host Joe Rogan welcomed notorious disinformation peddler Alex Jones of Infowars onto his program, allowing Jones to spread conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden’s connections to Ukraine and how vaccines can allegedly give people polio. Spotify recently signed Rogan to a syndication deal that is estimated to be worth about $100 million. According to BuzzFeed, an internal email told Spotify executives to defend having Jones on the program by saying “it’s important to have diverse voices and points of view on our platform.” Spotify removed Jones’ own podcast from its platform in 2018.

A group of digital news outlets in India have agreed to form a collective called the Digipub News India Foundation, which they say will promote best practices in the industry and hold its members to “the highest standards in journalism,” according to a news release. The group said its creation was necessary because the “pursuits and interests of legacy media may not always be the same as that of digital media – especially in regards to regulation, business models, technology and structures.”

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan writes about how Facebook seems happy to tip the scales in favor of conservative news outlets like Breitbart and Ben Shapiro’s page, while down-ranking news sites like Courier Newsroom, a network of local sites that is funded by a progressive political entity called Acronym, and the left-leaning investigative magazine Mother Jones. Clara Jeffery of Mother Jones reported last week that Facebook took specific steps to suppress her organization’s journalism. “Average traffic from Facebook to our content decreased 37 percent,” after algorithm changes that Zuckerberg signed off on in 2018, she wrote.

TikTok announced on Wednesday that it is expanding the resources provided in its in-app election guide in the US, to include direct access to sites that help users get information about polling locations, and those that help people having voting difficulties, according to a report by TechCrunch. The company also said it’s working with the Associated Press to provide access to an interactive map that will show live results for both federal and state elections, as well as ballot initiatives. This map will be updated with live results starting on Election Day, the company said.

Nieman Journalism Lab reports that City University of New York has revamped its Journalism Creators Program and made it 100 days long (down from four months) and fully remote. The program is supported by a grant from the Facebook Journalism Project as well as scholarship funding from media companies such as Substack, LION Publishers, and Media Lab Bayern. The cost of the program is now $4,000 per student, down from over $10,000 for out-of-state participants.

Another tech hearing in Congress becomes a circus sideshow was originally published on mathewingram.com/work

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meaningofmotorsport · 3 years ago

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IndyCar Detroit Doubleheader Review

Race 1

It was a drama filled start to the weekend in the Motor City, with a variety of strategies, a first time winner, and a horrifying crash, which delayed the race for over an hour.

Having come straight from F1, there was a lot of hype and expectation around Ericsson, when he joined Schmidt Peterson back in 2019, similar to what we see now with Grosjean. However, despite the odd, good result, he was never able to get a win and really break through, and now having been with Chip for nearly 2 years, there was pressure to deliver, and on Saturday he did so. Undoubtedly, he was helped by strategy and luck, but he was quick, and was pressuring Power before the 2nd red flag. With that now off his back, what he can he do for the rest of the year? It could open the flood gates for him!

Veekay and O’Ward, who completed the podium, also drove really well, especially for Pato, who grabbed the pole, lost out early on in the race, but fought back through to an amazing position. After not expecting much from RLL this weekend, they had a solid race, locking out 4th through 6th, and if Sato hadn’t of lost out on the restart, he could have done much better!

Rossi and Dixon lost out through the first red flag, which put them back much like it did for Pato, however, they just couldn’t fight back through in the same way. At least for Dixon, he limited the losses and is still looking strong in the title fight. The same can be said for Newgarden, who didn’t have his left rear wheel properly attached after the first pit stop, and lost a lap. Yet, through a lucky wave around, great passing and a healthy overcut, got back just inside the top 10, to bring home some useful points.

As I mentioned before, we saw a couple of red flags in the 1st race, the 1st of those being a harrowing crash for Rosenqvist. His throttle got stuck mid corner just before the back straight, and he ploughed into the wall at high speed, going through the tyres, and moving the concrete wall quite a way. He was fine, but for safety reasons, due to the high g impact, was stretchered away and taken for checks at the hospital. This caused a long red, as they fixed the barrier and cleared up the crash. We did get a small 2nd red flag, when Grosjean, after running well all day, hit the wall in the closing laps. So, the race was paused to get a green finish, which to be frank was absolute rubbish.

That 2nd Red, caused major heartbreak for Power, who was leading at the time, as his engine would not refire, due to an ECU issue, and not only did he lose the win, but he also lost any chance of good points! You do have to feel for Will, who drove well all day, and looked as though he would finally put all the tough times behind him!

Race 2

In some ways, the race on Sunday was more straightforward, however, that wasn’t due to a lack of action! As, whilst Newgarden dominated the first ¾ of the race, it all came down to a last 10 lap shootout, which gave incredible passes, close action, and brilliant saves!

After not converting the pole on Saturday into a win, Pato used the disappointment as energy, combined with wanting to do well for his injured teammate, to bring home an incredible win, from midpack! He had one of the fastest cars, and on that last restart, calved his way through 4 cars to win, his second of the year, and possibly the most satisfying! This now puts him firmly into the title fight, and could be tough to beat down the line!

It could have been a perfect day for Newgarden, having grabbed pole, and used the harder tyres in the first stint to build a gap. It all came undone though, when he was forced to pit early the 1st time, due to the risk of a yellow by Kellett. From there his strategy looked much tougher, and multiple restarts just chewed through his tyres, so he was lucky to finish 2nd, but was still disappointed! Given the bad luck he has had this weekend, he did well to gain in the title fight, and has another shot at the championship!

After a disaster in Race 1, Palou bounced back rather well, to end up on the podium, minimising the losses to O’Ward in the championship. Like Pato, he ran well at Road America last year, so could be a threat there again. For most of the race, Herta was the driver with the best chance to challenge Josef, however, when it mattered, on the restarts, he couldn’t make the most of it, and got swamped by two fellow youngsters. Once again, Andretti Autosport, aren’t having the year they hoped for!

Rahal comes out of the weekend with 2 top 5’s, a good showing on a track he has done well at before. The team doesn’t look consistently quick, but could spring a surprise at some places. At least Power got something out of this weekend, after being screwed out of the win on Saturday, although 6th will do nothing to mend the wounds. Expect a fiery Will for the rest of the year, trying to get a win for Penske!

Dixon was solid and quiet all day, just racking up points, and Ericsson drove a confident comeback, following an appalling qualifying, after winning his 1st IndyCar race. Hunter-Reay and Sato also recovered well over the 70 laps. Kudos to Askew, who jumped in at the last minute for the No.7 car at McLaren, and did as good a job as you could expect from him really.

You have to take your hat off to Firestone, as they brought the perfect tyres to Detroit, which was what gave us the grandstand finish we saw. They consistently do such a brilliant job in IndyCar, and help to give us great racing! On the flipside, the performance of NBC over the two races, was rather shambolic, not in the broadcast itself, but in the scheduling! With a new TV contract looming, IndyCar needs to get this sorted out!

The Detroit Doubleheader has gone from being a parade for sponsors, to being a weekend of entertaining racing, and this weekend did not disappoint. The best news from the weekend, is that Rosenqvist is safe and well, and will hopefully be back to racing soon. Meanwhile, the circus rolls on to Road America, for hopefully some more good racing!

-M

#indycar #detroitgp #detroit gp 2021 #indycar2021 #motorsport

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monstersmonthly · 4 years ago

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Horsepower Rewind: The Debut that Held Off Digger Devastation

Not having the Monster Jam World Finals in Las Vegas beginning last year had a different feeling to it. Sam Boyd Stadium, already set for demolition later in 2020, was hosting a regular event, and later the All-Star Challenge, but when one thinks of Monster Jam in that city, it thinks of late-March, and a massive gathering of both fans, and trucks.

Over the years, the amount of trucks that actually are there, even just for display, continued to go up to the point of having over 100 in attendance.

But, as is sometimes the case, some are kept hidden for special moments later in the night, or as it turned into nights. Back in 2011, it was one of those moments where one machine not only was unveiled for all to see, but it saved a night of anguish for a family.

Luckily for me, and my father, we were spending our second year in Las Vegas, and we were ready for anything that was coming to us. Or…so we thought.

On this night, the Anderson family was having a rough go at the big show. Dennis Anderson, after having such an amazing and astounding season in racing, suddenly found himself scrambling after the quarter finals. In that race, the engine in his Grave Digger suddenly began having trouble, and when he pulled into the pits, then-crew chief Dustin Brown and the entire fleet of Digger drivers suddenly found themselves with a dire diagnosis. Anderson was not only out of racing, but was potentially out of freestyle, as his truck was finished.

Not wanting to disappoint his fans, the crews thrashed as quick as they could and took out the seat, the pedals, and the steering wheel of Anderson’s chassis. The team had several additional Digger trucks in the pits, from different drivers. Team driver Chad Tingler had his truck there as part of the pit party for fans to sit in the truck. So, the team quickly removed the door and had to make an entire swap so that Anderson could drive his truck for freestyle.

“I don’t like that truck, it doesn’t handle as good, but we’re gonna put on the best show we can,” Anderson said while his team was quickly doing the swap.

Anderson’s freestyle was short, and had it’s moments, but it wasn’t a ragged-edge run that was expected of Anderson.

Meanwhile, his son, Adam, still had not gotten over the Vegas curse that had haunted him years prior when he clipped the curb in racing and rolled cage-first into a tree alongside the racing lane. Since that moment, his luck in Vegas was always snake eyes, and this night was no exception. He fell out early in racing, and then in freestyle despite a wild save off his first hit, his Grave Digger The Legend lost all but right-front drive. His truck was going nowhere, and he suddenly found himself a spectator.

At the end of the night, Jim Koehler was declared the winner after the voting came down to a tie breaker between his run in Avenger, and Cam McQueen’s opening run in Nitro Circus. But, the encore was yet to come. After seeing three Grinders do a tandem run, and three Maximum Destruction pieces crash out, the fans were left waiting to see what was next.

One run…one driver…one debut…and one family got to witness history.

The screen flashed a skull, with bolts going down the face, a purple bandana covering the mouth. The story of the build, the truck that was set to debut in January, suddenly was halted when it’s driver suffered an injury in the off-season. But, the wait, and the desire, still remained, and with his father, and brother, standing in the crowd, it was time to unleash the newest machine to carry the Digger name.

Over the speakers came a sentence that set the course for a legacy.

“Ladies and gentleman, for the first time ever, this is Ryan Anderson…SON UVA DIGGER!”

And with that, out came a 1950 Willy’s Panel Van, with a junkyard of competing trucks that had been destroyed, ready to just put on a show.

And what a show it was.

Every bit of the run was fast, but methodical. The way he controlled the throttle was exactly the same as his father, and the truck even sounded like his father’s truck with the exhaust that was installed. Anderson hit every part of the track, from the step-up stack to the the center pad. From the jammer hill to the box van, every bit of the track was covered. But, his next-to-last hit was the one that put it over the top.

It was already done twice on the night, by McQueen and Debra “Madusa” Miceli, but not without damage. Anderson, he hammered the backside of the semi trailer, and landed the most perfect backflip on the night, and kept on rolling for one more hit before shutting the truck off.

His father and brother…screaming and jumping as if they were kids at what they had seen. Fellow drivers, and even future drivers, went ballistic. The crowd was roaring so loud the grandstands were shaking under our feet. That moment was one that he, and Las Vegas, shall never forget.

So what has Anderson done since then…the same thing at every show. He would burn it down, and has even started the movement of the skills challenge when he debuted the monster moonwalk a few years ago. Anderson’s skills are second to none, and to many he is considered the most naturally talented driver in Monster Jam. Although his chassis has changed a few times since that initial run, how he drives certainly hasn’t.

Anderson even had the opportunity this year to head to the Hoonigan Transmission Burnyard, who he’s been affiliated with for several years, and on a track with no cars, no hills…not even one jump, would lay down a run that even the Hoonigan crew itself said was better than any run they had from vehicles weighing one-tenth the side of Anderson’s truck.

There is no question that as it stands now, Anderson is the most talented driver in not just Monster Jam, but in the entire business. There are some that come close, but in my eyes, there is no one better at the wheel of one of these beasts.

It all started on that night in 2011, and he continues to get better. The sky may not even be the limit for this young man.

About The Author

A fan since 1988, at the age of 3, Dustin became more involved in the monster truck industry in the last decade. Through his website, All About Horsepower, and images at Horsepower Photography, he provides great insight into the sport.

#All About Horsepower #Horsepower Photography #Monster Truck #Monster Trucks #Monster Truck Photography #Monster Truck Racing #Monster Truck Freestyle #Monster Truck Two Wheel Skills #Monster Truck Wheelies #Monster Truck Show Near Me #Monster Truck Shows Near Me #Monsters Monthly #son uva digger

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clubsocial-india · 4 years ago

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New on Sports Illustrated: Kevin Harvick Wins at Darlington as NASCAR Returns to Racing

Kevin Harvick beat Alex Bowman to win NASCAR’s first race back, a spectacle closely watched to see if the racing series could successfully resume work.

DARLINGTON, S.C. — This was a 400-mile drive unlike any other in modern-day NASCAR.

The grandstands were completely empty. There was not a single tailgate inside the track. Everyone wore face coverings—some with the team logos, others opting for plain disposable medical masks. It was nothing close to the corporate sponsorship, pomp and patriotic traveling circus that symbolizes NASCAR.

But when the engines fired at Darlington Raceway following a 10-week layoff during the coronavirus pandemic, it turned into a regular old race.

Kevin Harvick beat Alex Bowman to win NASCAR’s first race back, a spectacle closely watched to see if the largest racing series in the United States could successfully resume work.

“I just want to thank everybody from NASCAR and all the teams for letting us do what we do,” Harvick said. “I didn’t think it was going to be that different, but it’s dead silent out here. We miss the fans.”

It was a crucial gamble for NASCAR, which had to get back to the track to stave off financial ruin. With races on hold, no money was coming into the sport whatsoever and the NASCAR business model cannot sustain the lack of revenue.

NASCAR developed a health plan approved by officials in both South Carolina and North Carolina and scheduled seven races over the next 11 days at two tracks. As other states began to open, the series tacked more races to fill the calendar with 20 events across seven Southern states between now and June 21. There will be no spectators at least through that date.

This first event was called the “The Real Heroes 400” and dedicated to health care workers fighting the coronavirus pandemic. The names of health care workers across the country were substituted for the drivers’ names above the door on each of the 40 cars.

The health care workers then virtually gave the command to start the engines.

“These heroes will signal that NASCAR has returned, bringing back the intense competition and side-by-side racing we’ve all missed,” NASCAR President Steve Phelps wrote in a letter to fans released Sunday morning.

“Our drivers, race teams and officials have been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to get back to the race track and we want to assure you that we have taken the return to racing very seriously.”

The industry had to be extremely careful because to even get to the Coca-Cola 600 next week at Charlotte Motor Speedway, NASCAR had to get it right at Darlington.

Steve O’Donnell, executive vice president of NASCAR, was pleased with the collective effort from the industry.

“We didn’t have to tell anyone or remind anyone to wear a mask,” O’Donnell said. “It felt a little odd with the garage area because it was scaled down in terms of personnel, but all in all I think it went really well.”

Teams were required to submit rosters in advance with only 16 members allotted per car. Names were on a list at a checkpoint at the end of a gravel road just off Harry Byrd Highway and everyone who passed through had their temperature checked and logged before they could enter.

NASCAR did not have to turn anyone away, and all 40 drivers were cleared to race. NASCAR has declined to do COVID-19 testing to ensure those tests go to those in need.

Among those to make it inside were Ryan Newman, back for the first time since he suffered a head injury exactly three months ago in a wreck on the final lap of the Daytona 500. Newman missed only three races because of NASCAR’s shutdown and finished 15th in his return.

Also in the field was Matt Kenseth, who at 48 was the oldest driver at Darlington and he raced for the first time since the 2018 season finale. Kenseth was brought out of retirement by Chip Ganassi when Kyle Larson was fired for using a racial slur during an iRacing event that kept NASCAR occupied when racing was on hold. Kenseth finished 10th.

The odd and empty setting was the backdrop for some typical NASCAR mishaps. Seven-time champion Jimmie Johnson crashed while leading on the final lap of the first stage, a better result than poor Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who barely made it out of the second turn before he crashed.

Stenhouse never finished a single lap and finished last.

And even without fans allowed on the property, a small grass fire still broke out behind a section of the track. Gray smoke billowed during a caution, which is not that odd a sight at a NASCAR race.

Bowman, who signed a one-year contract extension with Hendrick Motorsports on Saturday, was second. Kurt Busch, winner of the closest finish in Darlington history, was third for Ganassi.

Chase Elliott gave Hendrick two cars in the top-four. Denny Hamlin was the highest-finishing Toyota driver at fifth for Joe Gibbs Racing, one spot ahead of teammate Martin Truex Jr.

Tyler Reddick, a rookie with Richard Childress Racing, was seventh at “The Track Too Tough To Tame.”

Erik Jones, winner of the Southern 500 here last September, was eighth and John Hunter Nemechek was the second rookie inside the top-10 at one of the most technical tracks on the circuit. It was the first top-10 for Front Row Motorsports on a track other than a superspeedway in three years.

It was the 50th career victory for Harvick, in a Ford for Stewart-Haas Racing. A previous winner at Darlington, Harvick led 159 of the 293 laps.

Harvick tied Hall of Famers Junior Johnson and Ned Jarrett for 12th on NASCAR’s all-time wins list.

NASCAR’s elite Cup Series next races Wednesday night at Darlington, which is hosting three events in four days before the sport shifts to Charlotte.

May 18, 2020 at 06:24AM Kevin Harvick Wins at Darlington as NASCAR Returns to Racing from Blogger https://ift.tt/2Tj2HiO

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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Trump’s ‘chopper talk’ puts media on the defensive

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/trumps-chopper-talk-puts-media-on-the-defensive/

Trump’s ‘chopper talk’ puts media on the defensive

President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before boarding Marine One on Wednesday. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo

white house

Using Marine One as a backdrop, the White House has replaced formal briefings with impromptu chats where the president sets all the rules.

It was another bravura performance of “Chopper Talk.”

The latest iteration of President Donald Trump’s signature news conferences in front of a thwapping Marine One on Wednesday was a whirligig of boastfulness, slingshot attacks and public self-therapy — in other words, vintage Trump.

Story Continued Below

As reporters shouted dozens of questions above the din of the helicopter’s churning engines, Trump picked the ones he wanted — on Greenland, Russia, the Fed and background checks for gun sales — and brushed past those he didn’t.

Wednesday’s careening, impromptu 35-minute news conference may have looked bizarre to veteran observers of the White House, not to mention maddening to television pros accustomed to high-quality audio and video production values. But there’s a method to the seeming madness.

The “Chopper Talk” sessions, as comedian Stephen Colbert has dubbed them, serve multiple goals for Trump, reporters and White House insiders say. They allow him to speak more often in front of the cameras than his predecessors, yet firmly on his own terms. He scans the pack of reporters, seizing on questions he wants, while ignoring others. He makes headline-ready pronouncements and airs grievances for anywhere from a few minutes to a half-hour — and then walks away when he’s had enough.

Trump’s freewheeling Q&As have essentially replaced the formal White House press briefing, which hasn’t been held in more than five months. The traditional on-camera briefings, which were held regularly under press secretary Sean Spicer, became shorter and less frequent under Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and have been nonexistent under Stephanie Grisham, who took the reins in June.

Reporters say the shift from a formal process — in which the president or his press secretary call on reporters one-by-one, without knowing what will be asked, and where follow-up questions are expected — diminishes their ability to hold him accountable.

“If he was at a podium, we would be pressing him after he answers the question, we would be correcting him, we would be pointing out discrepancies in previous answers, and we’re not able to do that in the chaotic setting of a departure,” said CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang. “Many times I’ve tried to ask a follow-up question, but he’s already pointed to somebody else.”

Which is not to say the Marine One gaggles don’t make news. Trump has often used them to announce major developments, such as the departures of chief of staff John Kelly and Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta. He told reporters earlier this month how he received a “very beautiful” letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, though he declined to reveal the contents amid shouted questions. He’s even recently fueled conspiracy theories surrounding voter fraud and Jeffrey Epstein’s death.

Grisham said last week that Trump is “so accessible” that she doesn’t “know what any of the press could complain about.”

“President Trump communicates directly with the American people more than any President in history,” she said, when asked by POLITICO about Trump’s preference for Marine One pressers. “The fact that the White House press corps can no longer grandstand on TV is of no concern to us.”

In interviews with POLITICO, several White House reporters acknowledged that they are pleased with the near-daily access to the president but echoed Jiang’s complaint that the chaotic format doesn’t allow for substantive questions or follow-ups.

“They are actually a perfect encapsulation of him: quick hit questions, quick hit answers, lots of give and take,” said one White House reporter. “But they are terrible for reporters. It is impossible to hear, have a substantive dialogue, ask a follow-up question or do any serious pressing of the president. It is a fucking circus.”

Veteran New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker suggested Trump benefits from the on-camera frenzy. “There’s no question that it works to his advantage that we look unruly and disorderly,” he said. “It’s not like standing at a podium in the East Room or the briefing room, where you can have a civilized calling on people who raise their hands.”

Former President Barack Obama more often used formal news conferences — he did 24 solo ones to Trump’s eight in the first 30 months in office — and his administration conducted daily news briefings. Meanwhile, Trump has become his own de facto communications chief, setting policy and sparking controversies via Twitter and shifting the action from the staid briefing room to a roaring helicopter waiting on the South Lawn.

Trump has stopped 80 times for question-and-answer sessions in departing or returning to the White House aboard Marine One or on the tarmac before getting on or off Air Force One, according to CBS News White Housecorrespondent Mark Knoller, who keeps detailed records of the presidency. Knoller said he found only three occasions in which Obama stopped for such press availabilities in his eight-year tenure. And when Obama spoke to reporters in transit, he tended to use a podium, adding a dash of formality to the press scrum.

“There are times when Trump’s hair is blowing in the wind or his tie is blowing in the wind. He’s shouting,” said a former senior Obama White Houseofficial. “It’s just not conducive to the kind of presidential look that we often strove for.”

Yet Trump seems to relish the outside sessions, which have aired extensively on cable networks or snippets in news coverage throughout the day. Baker said he believes Trump prefers the natural light to the artificial lighting inside the White House. “He thinks that’s a better look,” he said, “and remember, he’s a TV guy, so he’s thinking about it in terms of how the television image is.”

A former senior Trump White House official said Trump “likes settings where the pace to a greater extent, the length of these engagements, is a little bit up in the air.”

At times, the former senior official said, White House aides discussed whether to urge Trump to not do Marine One Q&As on specific days, to draw less attention to news that was nothelpful to the president.

“Sometimes there was a topic which would go away if he doesn’t engage, but it could blow up if he does,” recalled the former senior official.

There is also more attention to details than the seemingly casual encounters suggest. If Trump is departing on Marine One in the late morning, “he always comes out of the Oval Office, even if he hasn’t been to the Oval Office, because it makes him look like he’s been working all day,” said a second White House reporter.

Trump’s love of the Marine One sessions has even become fodder for late-night and popular podcast hosts. CBS’ Stephen Colbert referred to Trump’s appearances as “chopper talk” in a CNN interview last week. Colbert said Trump might as well stand in front of “a margarita maker because it’s just the same noise.”

“You basically have a jet airplane parked on the South Lawn,” said former Obama White Houseofficial Tommy Vietor in describing the “genius” of Trump’s Marine One pressers on a recent episode of “Pod Save the World.”

“You can’t hear the questions — he ignores anything that he doesn’t like,” said Vietor. “He just literally screams idiotic things like ‘I know nothing about Russia’ to this gaggle of the press. And there’s nothing they can do about it.”

The frequent “chopper talk” is one of the reasons Trump has surpassed his five predecessors — Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan — in fielding questions from reporters during their first 30 months in office, according to the White House Transition Project. Those five presidents took questions at approximately one third of their public speaking events, while Trump does so at more than half of his.

The project’s director, Martha Joynt Kumar, said Trump also differs from his predecessors in that he rarely does policy speeches, and doesn’t hold evening news conferences in the East Room.

Even though Reagan took questions outside Marine One — amid speculation that he, too, benefited from the atmospherics of reporters shouting and looking unkempt — Kumar said Reagan would prepare at length with aides to respond to questions in formal settings, along with the administration providing daily briefings for reporters to go deeper into policy decisions.

“The presidency is more than just the president himself and what he’s thinking, but what is happening,” said Kumar, who stressed how news briefings traditionally gave the public a better understanding of the administration’s policies and howthey were crafted.

The helicopter presser is a very different setting. In trying to engage Trump, Baker said, questions need to be “straightforward, simple and to the point.”

“You can’t ask a question that has a predicate or a kind of complex construction because you’re shouting with all the other reporters like ‘Mr. President, what about Iran?’ or ‘Mr. President, they say you’re a racist,’” Baker said.

And the loud noise of the rotor blades whirring in the background gives Trump a convenient excuse to respond to a question as he interpretsit, instead of directly answering the question as it was phrased. Pacing from one end of the group to the other, Trump looks for familiar faces to call on and seizes on topics that he’s particularly energized about or aggravated by.

During Q&As last week, Trump ripped Democratic Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar (“very anti-Jewish,” “very anti-Israel”), CNN host Chris Cuomo (“a total out of control animal” who “spews lies every night”), and ex-White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci (“very much out of control” and a “nervous neurotic wreck”).

He pivoted off a question Sunday about an unfavorable Fox News poll to riff on commentators he doesn’t like (Juan Williams) and those he does (Sean Hannity), and to muse that there’s “something going on at Fox.” The president also suggested he “calls the shots” for the general election debates, which are overseen by a bipartisan commission,and didn’t respond to a direct question about whether he’d participate in them.

“He’ll just hear a word that catches his attention like ‘racism’ or ‘the squad’ or whatever the topic is, and he’ll just deliver what he’s probably already been tweeting about and what he already firmly believes so that can be difficult,” said Jiang.

Reporters also inquire about Trump’s Twitter activity, such as his sharing a tweet suggesting the Clintons were involved in the death of Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who was facing sex-trafficking charges.

“The retweet, which is what it was, just a retweet, was from somebody who is a very respected conservative pundit,” Trump told reporters in defending himself last week. Trump later said he had “no idea” whether the Clintons were involved in Epstein’s death, though used the gathering of reporters to offer a journalistic assignment.

“Did Bill Clinton go to the island?” Trump asked. “Epstein had an island that was not a good place as I understand it, and I was never there. So you have to ask, did Bill Clinton go to the island? That’s the question. If you find that out, you’re going to know a lot.”

Two days later, the president pushed a baseless claim that he lost New Hampshire in the 2016 election because “thousands of thousands of people” came into the state to vote from “locations unknown.” Trump claimed to know the “unknown” location, but when a reporter asked where he was referring to, he just ignored the question.

Trump has changed how the press covers other facets of the White House, including Cabinet meetings. In the past, there would typically be a short “pool spray,” in which a small pool of reporters and photographers cover the beginning of a meeting, getting a few images and perhaps asking a quick question or two before the doors closed. Trump, at times, has turned Cabinet meetings into quasi-news conferences with the cameras rolling.

Similarly, Trump’s arrivals and departures are now a priority for news organizations and reporters flock to them. Jiang said there can be “a lot of gymnastics” for correspondents trying to get close enough to the president. “I’ve ducked under tripods,” she said. “I’ve climbed under equipment because I’m trying to get as close to that line as possible.”

Unlike the briefing room, with its assigned seats, the makeshift news conferences have led to tensions on the White House grounds, especially when pool reporters responsible for providing information to the press corps as a whole found themselves out of earshot to cover the news.

Doug Mills, a veteran New York Times photographer and board member of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said he now has “a second job” trying to better facilitate access in this unusual media environment.

“This was a situation that certainly has come of age with Trump,” said Mills, who has covered the White House since the Reagan years. “Most presidents do not hold news conferences going and coming from the helicopter.”

Mills said there are now “guidelines,” not rules, for how journalists should congregate as Trump arrives and departs. They enter in groups, as at the airport, with the radio pool reporter followed by inhouse White House pool. Next come the correspondents, with a fourth group including additional still photographers.

Such conventions became necessary as this unconventional news conference became routine. “Your jaw drops when he walks past and just waves,” Mills said. “Everyone stands there, ‘He’s not going to talk?’”

#defensive #Foreign #media #Politics

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popularcultureshaman · 6 years ago

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the goose egg, the gander, the gosling on the fence

the goose egg, the gander, the gosling on the fence ryan gosling in the wedge i poured a two liter in my keg i did a keg stand for days i grandstand in the hedge the landscaper manuevers his segway around the mulberry bush four acres of chrysanthemum petals maximal kettles i shot skeet with a bird he gave me three lessons from the beak i effusively saunter with obtuse malarkey my toulouse-lautrec hand sander pool party it's easier than trying to plane a pinball slope or playing pinball on a plane floaties for the slobs, we tore the moat out the sand castle that's a profound macro apple my calico cat asks me to play old snapple commercials retired flavors, muckrakers, and paraffin wax puffins fly in the paragon of whittle stacks i wiffle bat any out-of-town conglomerate from the shoe wearing fabergé donkey to the monte cristo sandwich salesman more sliders than a par four curling course with no more amuse parkour on a moveable truck, to some degree iridescent pachinko machine i gleam knowledge from like immaculately paraphrasing allegories paragraphs that caramelize every molecule concrete pillar percy miller alabaster patio more ratios than solid gold dancer abacus enlightenment, with like 8 hohos a haberdashery waiting to happen action jackson in the supermarket at 4am trying on different fingerling potatoes this ones purple like the forest, like the see-thru crewneck, the vines wrap around the tree trunk like a damascus engine we rent out farm animals to mow your grass the carbon footprint is carbon fiber i'm johnny adzuki bean, karrueche's team my boomtown was a boon for boom mics looking to settle down in an angora stronghold strongmen at the circus eat lunch in a kalamazoo banquet room

my kite, yes, ninety feet of twine, sure 300 acres of palm trees in the desert attache case, no handle bulletin board, no cork, just a boring borage drill bit, some porridge for the bear that brought you grub hub from the forest point the fan on it fan the grapes fill the grape leaves with vineyard runoff musky bill belichick shirt collars salmon collars at the mollusk fair their shells make us pearls, we turn them into provincial combs to brush our hair

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theinvinciblenoob · 6 years ago

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Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg obsessed over the wrong bit of history. Or else didn’t study his preferred slice of classical antiquity carefully enough, faced, as he now is, with an existential crisis of ‘fake news’ simultaneously undermining trust in his own empire and in democracy itself.

A recent New Yorker profile — questioning whether the Facebook founder can fix the creation he pressed upon the world before the collective counter-pressure emanating from his billions-strong social network does for democracy what Brutus did to Caesar — touched in passing on Zuckerberg’s admiration for Augustus, the first emperor of Rome.

“Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace,” was the Facebook founder’s concise explainer of his man-crush, freely accepting there had been some crushing “trade-offs” involved in delivering that august outcome.

Zuckerberg’s own trade-offs, engaged in his quest to maximize the growth of his system, appear to have achieved a very different kind of outcome.

Empire of hurt

If you gloss over the killing of an awful lot of people, the Romans achieved and devised many ingenious things. But the population that lived under Augustus couldn’t have imagined an information-distribution network with the power, speed and sheer amplifying reach of the internet. Let alone the data-distributing monster that is Facebook — an unprecedented information empire unto itself that’s done its level best to heave the entire internet inside its corporate walls.

Literacy in Ancient Rome was dependent on class, thereby limiting who could read the texts that were produced, and requiring word of mouth for further spread.

The ‘internet of the day’ would best resemble physical gatherings — markets, public baths, the circus — where gossip passed as people mingled. Though of course information could only travel as fast as a person (or an animal assistant) could move a message.

In terms of regular news distribution, Ancient Rome had the Acta Diurna, A government-produced daily gazette that put out the official line on noteworthy public events.

These official texts, initially carved on stone or metal tablets, were distributed by being exposed in a frequented public place. The Acta is sometimes described as a proto-newspaper, given the mix of news it came to contain.

Minutes of senate meetings were included in the Acta by Julius Caesar. But, in a very early act of censorship, Zuckerberg’s hero ended the practice — preferring to keep more fulsome records of political debate out of the literate public sphere.

“What news was published thereafter in the acta diurna contained only such parts of the senatorial debates as the imperial government saw fit to publish,” writes Frederick Cramer, in an article on censorship in Ancient Rome.

Augustus, the grand-nephew and adopted son of Caesar, evidently did not want the risk of political opponents using the outlet to influence opinion, his great-uncle having been assassinated in a murderous plot hatched by conspiring senators.

The Death of Caesar

Under Augustus, the Acta Diurna was instead the mouthpiece of the “monarchic faction.”

“He rightly believed this method to be less dangerous than to muzzle the senators directly,” is Cramer’s assessment of Augustus’s decision to terminate publication of the senatorial protocols, limiting at a stroke how physical voices raised against him in the Senate could travel and lodge in the wider public consciousness by depriving them of space on the official platform.

Augustus also banned anonymous writing in a bid to control incendiary attacks distributed via pamphlets and used legal means to command the burning of incriminatory writings (with some condemned authors issued with ‘literary death-sentences’ for their entire life’s work).

The first emperor of Rome understood all too well the power of “publicare et propagare.”

It’s something of a grand irony, then, that Zuckerberg failed to grasp the lesson for the longest time, letting the eviscerating fire of fake news rage on unchecked until the inferno was licking at the seat of his own power.

So instead of Facebook’s brand and business invoking the sought-for sense of community, it’s come to appear like a layer cake of fakes, iced with hate speech horrors.

On the fake front, there are fake accounts, fake news, inauthentic ads, faux verifications and questionable metrics. Plus a truck tonne of spin and cynical blame shifting manufactured by the company itself.

There’s some murkier propaganda, too; a PR firm Facebook engaged in recent years to help with its string of reputation-decimating scandals reportedly worked to undermine critical voices by seeding a little inflammatory smears on its behalf.

Publicare et propagare, indeed.

Perhaps Zuckerberg thought Ancient Rome’s bloody struggles were so far-flung in history that any leaderly learnings he might extract would necessarily be abstract, and could be cherry-picked and selectively filtered with the classical context so comfortably remote from the modern world. A world that, until 2017, Zuckerberg had intended to render, via pro-speech defaults and systematic hostility to privacy, “more open and connected.” Before it got too difficult for him to totally disregard the human and societal costs.

Revising the mission statement a year-and-a-half ago, Zuckerberg had the chance to admit he’d messed up by mistaking his own grandstanding world-changing ambition for a worthy cause.

Of course he sidestepped, writing instead that he would commit his empire (he calls it a “community”) to strive for a specific positive outcome.

He didn’t go full Augustus with the new goal (no ‘world peace’) — but recast Facebook’s mission to: “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

There are, it’s painful to say, “communities” of neo-Nazis and white supremacists thriving on Facebook. But they certainly don’t believe in bringing the world closer together. So Facebook’s reworked mission statement is a tacit admission that its tools can help spread hate by saying it hopes for the opposite outcome. Even as Zuckerberg continues to house voices on his platform that seek to deny historical outrages like the Holocaust, which is the very definition of antisemitic hate speech.

“I used to think that if we just gave people a voice and helped them connect, that would make the world better by itself. In many ways it has. But our society is still divided,” he wrote in June 2017, eliding his role as emperor of the Facebook platform, in fomenting the societal division of which he typed. “Now I believe we have a responsibility to do even more. It’s not enough to simply connect the world, we must also work to bring the world closer together.”

This year his personal challenge was also set at “fixing Facebook.”

Also this year: Zuckerberg made a point of defending allowing Holocaust deniers on his platform, then scrambled to add the caveat that he finds such views “deeply offensive.” (That particular Facebook content policy has stood unflinching for almost a decade.)

It goes without saying that the Nazis of Hitler’s Germany understood the terrible power of propaganda, too.

More recently, faced with the consequences of a moral and ethical failure to grapple with hateful propaganda and junk news, Facebook has said it will set up an external policy committee to handle some content policy decisions next year.

But only at a higher and selective appeal tier, after layers of standard internal reviews. It’s also not clear how this committee can be truly independent from Facebook.

Quite possibly it’ll just be another friction-laced distraction tactic, akin to Facebook’s self-serving ‘Hard Questions’ series.

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 11: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Revised mission statements, personal objectives and lashings of self-serving blog posts (playing up the latest self-forged “accountability” fudge), have done nothing to dim the now widely held view that Facebook specifically, and social media in general, profits off of accelerated outrage.

Cries to that effect have only grown louder this year, two years on from revelations that Kremlin election propaganda maliciously targeting the U.S. presidential election had reached hundreds of millions of Facebook users, fueled by a steady stream of fresh outrages found spreading and catching fire on these “social” platforms.

How Russia’s online influence campaign engaged with millions for years

Like so many self-hyping technologies, social media seems terribly deceptively named.

“Antisocial media” is, all too often, rather closer to the mark. And Zuckerberg, the category’s still youthful warlord, looks less “harshly pacifying Augustus” than modern day Ozymandias, forever banging on about his unifying mission while being drowned out by the sound and fury coming from the platform he built to programmatically profit from conflict.

And still the young leader longs for the mighty works he might yet do.

Look on my works, ye mighty…

For all the positive connections flowing from widespread access to social media tools (which of course Zuckerberg prefers to fix on), evidence of the tech’s divisive effects are now impossible for everyone else to ignore: Whether you look at the wildly successful megaphoning of Kremlin propaganda targeting elections and (genuine) communities by pot stirring across all sorts of identity divides; or algorithmic recommendation engines that systematically point young and impressionable minds toward extremist ideologies (and/or brain-meltingly ridiculous conspiracy theories) as an eyeball-engagement strategy for scaling ad revenue in the attention economy. Or, well, Brexit.

Whatever your view on whether or not Facebook content is actually influencing opinion, attention is undoubtedly being robbed. And the company has a long history of utilizing addictive design strategies to keep users hooked.

To the point where it’s publicly admitted it has an over-engagement problem and claims to be tweaking its algorithmic recipes to dial down the attention incursion. (Even as its engagement-based business model demands the dial be yanked back the other way.)

Facebook’s problems with fakery (“inauthentic content” in the corporate parlance) and hate speech — which, without the hammer blow of media-level regulation, is forever doomed to slip through Facebook’s one-size-fits-all “community standards” — are, it argues, merely a reflection of humanity’s flaws.

So it’s essentially asking to be viewed as a global mirror, and so be let off the moral hook. A literal vox populi — warts, fakes, hate and all.

Zuckerberg created the most effective tool for spreading propaganda the world has ever known without — so he claims — bothering to consider how people might use it.

It was never selling a fair-face, this self-serving, revisionist hot-take suggests; rather Facebook wants to be accepted as, at best, a sort of utilitarian plug that’s on a philanthropic, world-spanning infrastructure quest to stick a socket in everyone. Y’know, for their own good.

“It’s fashionable to treat the dysfunctions of social media as the result of the naivete of early technologists who failed to foresee these outcomes. The truth is that the ability to build Facebook-like services is relatively common,” wrote Cory Doctorow earlier this year in a damning assessment of the Facebook founder’s moral vacuum. “What was rare was the moral recklessness necessary to go through with it.”

Even now Zuckerberg is refusing the moral and ethical burden of editorial responsibility for the content his tools auto-publish and algorithmically amplify, every instant of every day, using proprietary information-shaping distribution hierarchies that accelerate machine-selected clickbait through the blood-brain barrier of 2.2 billion-plus users.

These algorithmically prioritized comms are positioned to influence opinion and drive intention at an unprecedented, global scale.

Asked by the New Yorker about the inflammatory misinformation peddled by InfoWars conspiracy theorist and hate speech “preacher,” Alex Jones, earlier this year, Zuckerberg’s gut instinct was to argue again to be let off the hook. “I don’t believe that it is the right thing to ban a person for saying something that is factually incorrect,” was his disingenuous response.

It was left to the journalist to point out InfoWars’ malicious disinformation is rather more than just factually incorrect.

Facebook has taken down some individual InfoWars videos this year, in its usual case by case style, where it deemed there was a direct incitement to violence. And in August it also pulled some InfoWars pages (“for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies”).

But it has certainly not de-platformed the professional purveyor of hateful conspiracy theories who sells supplements alongside his attention-grabbing lies.

One academic study, published two months ago, found much of the removed InfoWars content had managed to move “swiftly back” onto the Facebook platform. Like radio and silence, Facebook hates a content vacuum.

The problem is its own platform also sells stuff alongside attention-grabbing lies. So Jones is just the Facebook business model if it could pull on a blue suit and shout.

“Senator, we run ads”

It’s clear that Facebook’s adherence to a rules-based, reactive formula for assessing speech sets few if any meaningful moral standards. The company has also preferred to try offloading tricky decisions to third-party fact checkers and soon a quasi-external committee — a strategy that looks intended to sustain the suggestive lie that, at base, Facebook is just a “neutral platform.”

Yet Zuckerberg’s business is the business of influence itself. He admits as much. “Senator, we run ads,” he told Congress this April when asked how the platform turns a profit.

If the ads don’t work that’s an awful lot of money being pointlessly poured into Facebook’s coffers.

At the same time, the risk of malicious manipulation of Facebook’s machinery of mass manipulation is something the company claims it simply hadn’t thought of until very, very recently.

That’s the official explanation for why senior executives failed to pay any mind to the tsunami of politically charged propaganda blooming across its U.S. platform, yet originating in Saint Petersburg and environs.

An astute political operator like Augustus was entirely alive to the risks of political propaganda. Hence making sure to keep a lid on domestic political opponents, while allowing them to let off steam in the Senate where a wider audience wouldn’t hear them.

Zuckerberg, by contrast, created the most effective tool for spreading propaganda the world has ever known without — so he claims — bothering to consider how people might use it.

That’s either radical stupidity or willful recklessness.

Zuckerberg implies the former. “I always believed people are basically good,” he wrote in his grandiose explainer on rethinking Facebook’s mission statement last year.

Though you’d think someone with a fascination for classical antiquity, and a special admiration for an emperor whose harsh trade-offs apparently included arranging the execution of his own grandson, might have found plenty to test that theory to a natural breaking point.

Safe to say, such a naive political mind wouldn’t have lasted long in Ancient Rome.

But Zuckerberg is no politician. He’s a new-age ad salesman with a crush on one of history’s canniest political operators — who happened to know the power and value of propaganda. And who also knew that propaganda could be deadly.

If you imagine Facebook’s platform as a modern day Acta Diurna — albeit, one updated continuously, delivered direct to citizens’ pockets, and with no single distributed copy ever being exactly the same — the organ is clearly not working toward any kind of societal order, crushing or otherwise.

Under Zuckerberg’s programmatic instruction, Facebook’s daily notices are selected for their capacity to emotionally tug at the individual. By design the medium agitates because the platform exists to trade attention.

It’s really the opposite of “civilization building.” Outrage and tribalism are grist to the algorithmic mill. It’s much closer to the tabloid news mantra — of “if it bleeds it leads.”

But Facebook goes further, using “free speech” as a cloaking mechanism to cross the ethical line and conceal the ugly violence of a business that profits by ripping up the social compact.

The speech-before-truth philosophy underpinning Zuckerberg’s creation intrinsically works against the civic, community values he claims to champion. So at bottom, there’s yet another fake: no “global community” inside the walled garden, just a globally scaled marketing empire that’s had raging success in growing programmatic ad sales by tearing genuine communities apart.

Here confusion and anger reign.

The empire of Zuckerberg is a drear domain indeed.

One hundred cardboard cutouts of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stand outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, April 10, 2018. Advocacy group Avaaz is calling attention to what the groups says are hundreds of millions of fake accounts still spreading disinformation on Facebook. (Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

Fake news of the 1640s

Might things have turned out differently for Facebook — and, well, for the world — if its founder had obsessed over a different period in history?

The English Civil War of the 1640s has much to recommend it as a study topic to those trying to understand and unpick the social impacts of the hyper modern phenomenon of social media, given the historical parallels of society turned upside during a moment of information revolution.

It might seen counterintuitive to look so far back in time to try to understand the societal impacts of cutting-edge communications technologies. But human nature can be surprisingly constant.

Internet platforms are also socio-technical tools, which means ignoring human behavior is a really dumb thing to do.

As the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, said recently of modern day anthropogenic platforms: “As we’re designing the system, we’re designing society.”

The design challenge is all about understanding human behaviour — so you know how and where to place your ethical guardrails.

Rather than, per the Zuckerberg fashion, embarking on some kind of a quixotic, decade-plus quest to chase a grand unifying formula of IFTTT reaction statements to respond consistently to every possible human (and inhuman) act across the globe.

Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker made a related warning earlier this year, when she called for humanities and ethics to be baked into STEM learning, saying: “One thing that’s happened in 2018 is that we’ve looked at the platforms, and the thinking behind the platforms, and the lack of focus on impact or result. It crystallised for me that if we have Stem education without the humanities, or without ethics, or without understanding human behaviour, then we are intentionally building the next generation of technologists who have not even the framework or the education or vocabulary to think about the relationship of Stem to society or humans or life.”

What’s fascinating about the English Civil War to anyone interested in current day Internet speech versus censorship ethics trade-offs, is that in a similar fashion to how social media has radically lowered the distribution barrier for online speech, by giving anyone posting stuff online the chance of reaching a large audience, England’s long-standing regime of monarchical censorship collapsed in 1641, leading to a great efflorescence of speech and ideas as pamphlets suddenly and freely poured off printing presses.

This included an outpouring of radical political views from groups agitating for religious reforms, popular sovereignty, extended suffrage, common ownership and even proto women’s rights — laying out democratic concepts and liberal ideas centuries ahead of the nation itself becoming a liberal democracy.

But, at the same time, pamphlets were also used during the English Civil War period as a cynical political propaganda tool to whip up racial and sectarian hatred, most markedly in the parliament’s fight against the king.

Especially vicious hate speech was directed at the Irish. And historians suggest anti-Irish propaganda helped fuel the rampage that Cromwell’s soldiers went on in Ireland to crush the rebellion, having been fed a diet of violent claims in uncensored pamphlet print — such as that the Irish were killing and eating babies.

For a modern day parallel of information technology charging up ethnic hate you only have to look to Facebook’s impact in Myanmar where its platform was appropriated by military elements to incite genocide against the minority Rohingya population — leading to terrible human rights abuses in the modern era. There’s no shortage of other awful examples either.

“There are genuine atrocities in Ireland but suddenly the pamphleteers realise that this sells and suddenly you get a pornography of violence when everyone is rushing to put out these incredibly violent and unpleasant stories, and people are rushing to buy them,” says University of Southampton early modern history professor, Mark Stoyle, discussing the parliamentary pamphleteers’ evolving tactics in the English Civil War.

“It makes the Irish rebellion look even worse than it was. And it sort of raises even greater levels of bitterness and hostility towards the Irish. I would say those sorts of things had a very serious effect.”

The overarching lesson of history is that propaganda is baked indelibly into the human condition. Speech and lies come wrapped around the same tongue.

Stoyle says pamphlets printed during the English Civil War period also revived superstitious beliefs in witchcraft, leading to an upsurge in prosecutions and killings on charges of witchcraft which had dipped in earlier years under tighter state controls on popular printed accounts of witch trials.

“Once the royal regime collapses, the king’s not there to stop people prosecuting witches, he’s not there to stop these pamphlets appearing. There’s a massive upsurge in pamphlets about witches and in no time at all there’s a massive upsurge in prosecutions of witches. That’s when Matthew Hopkins, the witchfinder general, kills several hundred men and women in East Anglia on charges of being witches. And again I think the civil war propaganda has helped to fuel that.”

If you think modern day internet platforms don’t have to worry about crazy superstitions like witchcraft and devil worship just Google “Frazzledrip” (a conspiracy theory that’s been racking up the views on YouTube this year which claims Hillary Clinton and longtime aide Huma Abedin sexually assaulted a girl and drank her blood). The Clinton-targeted viral “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory also combines bizarre claims of Satanic rituals with child abuse. None of which stopped it catching fire on social media.

Indeed, a whole host of ridiculous fictions are being algorithmically accelerated into wider view, here in the 21st (not the 17th) century.

And it’s internet platforms that rank speech above truth that are in the distribution saddle.

Stoyle, who has written a book on witchcraft and propaganda during the English Civil War, believes the worst massacre of the period was also fueled by political disinformation targeting the king’s female camp followers. Parliamentary pamphleteers wrote that the women were prostitutes. Or claimed they were Irish women who had killed English men and women in Ireland. There were also claims some were witches.

“One of these pamphlets describes the women in the king’s camp — just literally a week before the massacre — and it presents them all as prostitutes and it says something like ‘these women they revel in their hot blood and they deserve a hotter punishment’,” he tells us. “Just a week later they’re all cut down. And I don’t think that’s coincidence.”

In the massacre Stoyle says parliamentary soldiers set about the women, killing 100 and mutilating scores more. “This is just unheard of,” he adds.

The early modern period even had the equivalent of viral clickbait in pamphlet form when a ridiculous story about a dog owned by the king’s finest cavalry commander, prince Rupert, takes off. The poodle was claimed to be a witch in disguise which had invested Rupert with magical military powers — hence, the pamphlets proclaimed, his huge successes on the battlefield.

“In a time when we’ve got no pictures at all of some of the most important men and women in the country we’ve got six different pictures of prince Rupert’s dog circulating. So this is absolutely fake news with a vengeance,” says Stoyle.

And while parliamentarian pamphlet writers are generally assumed to be behind this particular sequence of Civil War fakes, Stoyle believes one particularly blatant pamphlet in the series — which claimed the dog was not only a witch but that the prince was having sex with it — is a doubly bogus hoax fake.

“I’m pretty certain now it was actually written by a royalist to poke fun at the parliamentarians for being so gullible and believing this stuff,” he says. “But like so many hoaxes it was a hoax that went wrong — it was done so well that most people who read it actually believed it. And it was just a few highly educated royalists who got the joke and laughed at it. And so in a way it was like a hoax that backfired horribly.

“A classic case of fake news biting the person who put it out in the bum.”

Of course this was also the prince’s dog pamphlet that got the most attention and “viral engagement” of the time, as other pamphlet writers picked up on it and started referencing it.

So again the lesson about clickbait economics is a very old one, if you only know where to look.

Fake news most certainly wasn’t suddenly born in 2016. Modern hoaxers like Jones (who has also been at it for far longer than two years) are just appropriating cutting-edge tech tools to plough a very old furrow.

Equally, it really shouldn’t be any kind of news flash that free speech can have a horribly dark side.

The overarching lesson of history is that propaganda is baked indelibly into the human condition. Speech and lies come wrapped around the same tongue.

The stark consequences that can flow from maliciously minded lies being crafted to move a particular audience are also writ large across countless history books.

So when Facebook says — caught fencing Kremlin lies — “we just didn’t think of that” it’s a truly illiterate response to an age-old problem.

And as the philosophical saying goes: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

That’s really the most important history lesson of all.

“As humans we have this terrible ability to be angels and devils — to use things for wonderful purposes and to use things for terrible purposes that were never really intended or thought of,” says Stoyle, when asked whether, at a Facebook-level scale, we’re now seeing some of the limits of the benefits of free speech. “I’m not saying that the people who wrote some of these pamphlets in the Civil War expected it would lead to terrible massacres and killings but it did and they sort of played their part in that.

“It’s just an amazingly interesting period because there’s all this stuff going on and some of it is very dark and some of it’s more positive. And I suppose we’re quite well aware of the dark side of social media now and how it has got a tendency to let almost the worst human instincts come out in it. But some of these things were, I think, forces for good.”

‘Balancing angels and devils’ would certainly be quite the job description to ink on Zuckerberg’s business card.

“History teaches you to take all the evidence, weigh it up and then say who’s saying this, where does it come from, why are they saying it, what’s the purpose,” adds Stoyle, giving some final thoughts on why studying the past can provide a way through modern day information chaos. “Those are the tools that you need to make your way through this minefield.”

via TechCrunch

#IFTTT #TechCrunch

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fmservers · 6 years ago

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What history could tell Mark Zuckerberg