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bao3bei4 · 4 years ago

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i have basically covered the material in this post several times on my twitter. but this is, in my opinion, the only s*xy t*mes with w*ngxian take you need.

(cw transphobia, transphobic slurs, antiblack racism, mentions of csa and bestiality in fiction)

edit 6/10/21: hi! i’m realizing people are still reading this! this was written in response to aja romano’s vox article on the fic that was published in late february of this year. i had been frustrated with how their article seemed to miss the point in many ways, because they never talked about the substance of the fic. which, i mean, fair. i wouldn’t want to read a 1million word fic either.

but i already had, so i thought i’d write about some things that i believed needed to be part of the conversation. namely, that its author wasn’t a harmless troll, but a person i genuinely disliked who i believed should be deplatformed.

i think virtual1979 is a bad person.

i think a lot of people mainly know about sexy times the phenomenon more than they do sexy times the fic itself. i have the dubious honor of being one of the few people who has actually read large portions of the million word fic, and that’s why i wanted to write this meanspirited hit piece.

the fic is down right now and the author’s notes and comments have both been deleted, which is why i cannot provide screenshots. however, these are all quotes i have saved from when the fic was online, and i’m happy to talk with anyone if you feel any of these quotes are mischaracterizations of the fic.

i also want to be clear this is not a “callout post” and i’m not trying to “cancel” them or whatever. i am just explaining why i don’t like them, why i don’t feel bad they’re being harassed, and why i do not find them sympathetic at all, and perhaps why you should also adopt these stances.

let’s start with transphobia.

sexy times with wangxian is transphobic. this much is apparent from the tags. virtual1979 tagged the following: F*tanari, d*ckgirl, Sh*male. they use this language in the chapters that include a character with both a vagina and a penis.

they refer to this character (wei wuxian) with the pronouns “he-she.” the following excerpt is a fair representation of how this wei wuxian is referred to in the chapters where wei wuxian has a vagina and a penis.

[Lan Zhan] would never be turned on by a female, and he would actually be turned off by a drag queen - but this… this Wei Ying, it’s Wei Ying, and he-she looks [...]

i know these words are common in porn categories, but they are also slurs. virtual1979 also uses hermaphrodite to refer to this set of anatomy, which is not strictly a slur, but definitely a stigmatizing choice of language.

they have repeatedly made clear they are not open to criticism. they have also since removed the comment section. making an intersex character for the express purpose of using transmisogynistic language towards them in your million word porn fic isn’t annoying the way their tags are, it’s actively fucked up.

fanfiction has a transphobia problem, and if we’re talking about sexy times with wangxian in any capacity, we must be clear: sexy times with wangxian is part of that problem too.

secondly, virtual1979 is also complicit in ao3’s racism problem.

i think the way they write about chinese characters and settings is annoying and racist, but they are a malaysian chinese person, so i do have some sympathy for them. i am committed to having some patience for people who are annoying if they themselves are working through the prejudice they have faced.

they’ve commented as much:

Not gonna lie, this fic has been a steep learning curve for me despite my roots being Chinese as well, but I have absolutely zero knowledge in some of these aspects!

and i’m happy on some level they can get in touch with their roots. who among us has not been cringe and diaspora. any criticisms i have of their portrayal of chinese people will stay private and be made to other people of color.

i’m going to be clear here i don’t think the actual comment they made makes them super evil or anything. but this essay IS clearly in response to That Article, which did mention racism in fandom. so.

i think we have all seen the infamous karen comment they made, in which they compared people who criticized their tagging with “Karens,” equating antiblack state violence to... mean comments on ao3? and “SJWs,” which, eye roll. no ageism but you’re 41 why the hell are you complaining about sjws

anyway. i am deeply frustrated by the co-option of the word karen. a stand-in for a particular type of racist violence white women specifically can and do inflict has become fused with that reddit-type mommy issue “can i speak to the manager” internecine white resentment.

so their trivialization of antiblack racism is another reason i don’t like them. again i KNOW it’s petty to point this out here, but this to me shows that virtual is afflicted with the same kind of fandom brainrot that aja is, where everything comes back to that same sort of self-centered bullshit.

sorry for that jab. julian told me that aja thought that cql was about callout culture and all i could think was “wow! just like virtual thinking that--” because i also have spent too much time on twitter this week.

this is just like. part of this ongoing pattern i’ve noticed with virtual, where they’re aware enough of real problems to acknowledge they exist (police violence, accessibility issues caused by their tagging) but are determined to double down on their minor relative persecution as king, shittily drawing parallels between like... real problems and fandom problems. equating the two or allowing the second to take priority over the former is like... par for the course for this type of person!

third, this is just another clarification on more parallels between ao3 discourse and sexy times that went completely unremarked on by That Article.

i would rather DIE than get into discourse. but why did they write this sentence:

Lan Zhan’s rational mind finally broke with a tsunami of pedophilic lusts [...]

by the way that is the start of a 430 word sentence. and yes this fic does contain hundreds of thousands of words of aged down wei wuxian. make of that what you will.

also why would you make wei wuxian teach baby chickens how to sexually pleasure him. do you hate these characters. what’s going on. i think mxtx should be able to sue virtual for that one.

there’s a very obvious connection between mainstream ao3 discourse and sexy times that went completely unremarked on in That Article. sexy times contains multitudes and some of those multitudes are bestiality and explicit childfucking.

this is not unrelated to fannish culture, they are not unfamiliar with fannish norms, blah blah blah. this is just normal fandom. they’re not subverting shit, they’re just a normal fan who unlike 99% of fanfiction writers on twitter, spends more time writing than posting. this has taken their fannish tendencies to cartoonish heights.

finally, they don’t care about mdzs or wangxian. they’re literally just horny and spiteful that’s it. this isn’t a question of like... “ohh they were a good faith participant in fandom until they went joker mode” and the REAL villain is society/ao3. like no they wanted to write shitty porn, and when they found out they were annoying people, they decided to double down because they could be the main character of the mdzs ao3 tag every time they found a spare hour to write.

here are some select receipts on that topic:

they do not care about canon:

MDZS has quite a complicated and expansive plot and history, and enough content that one can choose to tune out certain parts and still get to the end of the story in one piece. Also, because of its source, some fans may not fully realize the nuances, cultural aspects (ooh, cultural appropriation is another triggering topic) or the full breadth and depth of the source material, such as a person like me, who is half-baked in terms of knowing what the canon universe is all about. So I end up playing with characters and settings technically borrowed from the story, and make them do things that would otherwise run counter to the original source material - and that draws quite some flak from those opinionated people I mentioned just now. It's part of what makes the fandom toxic. It's like they're the self-appointed guardians of the source material and they act like they own the rights to question such questionble fanworks, and dare I say, try to take down those that cross certain lines too.

they are just horny:

After that giddines of extra drunken Lan Wang Ji scenes at the beginning, I'm blessed with Lan Wang Ji (Wang Yibo's, actually) fuzzy nips! Bless Bless Bless, and Amen! muahs the nips on the screen

anyway they did get nuked over wishing covid on people.

so yeah. i want to be really clear. this is my thesis: i do not feel bad for them. you should not either. i do not like them. you should not either. that’s ALL!!!!

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prorevenge · 6 years ago

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my sexist teacher who humiliated and insulted her students gets what she deserves

TL;DR at the bottom.

So this is my first post on this subreddit, and one of my first on reddit in general, so please forgive me for formatting errors. If rslash is reading this, it's an incredible honor and I love your videos! And this is a super long one so buckle up, and let's get on with the story.

So this story happened a few years ago, when I was about 14-15 years old, during my freshman year of high school (Grade 9). If you talk to my friends now, and even if you talked to them back then, and asked them what my favorite subject in school was, it would always be English (Literature, reading, writing). [I'm in the american school system lol]. Anyways, I met my horrible teacher on my first day of high school, which we'll call Ms. Z. Ms. Z seemed like a nice, caring, normal teacher. How wrong I was.

She would give us projects sometimes, as English teachers do, and would give us specific instructions, and she even called herself "the queen of directions". My classmates and I thought that it was simple enough to follow them, and we did. We even double checked out project twice. However, when it was time to turn it in, Ms. Z started screaming at us about not following the directions, even though we had followed the directions exactly. We didn't think much of it, and just fixed whatever little reason that she called us out on, which happened to be not writing the character analysis although it was literally RIGHT under where she was looking. We wrote another one and went on our way. This seemed to happen at every single project that we did in in her class.

The next incident was her refusing to let us say, "Hey guys!" in the classroom because apparently, "It doesn't include girls". So we had to say, "Hey y'all" or "Hey guys and girls!" which was really annoying. I am a girl, and don't really care when somebody acknowledges the group with "hey guys!", and several of my female friends agreed that it was really stupid. She also was extremely sexist, and preferred the girls in my class over the guys, and more guys were called out in class for simply being guys. They hadn't done anything wrong.

Yet another incident happened after class was over. I had her for the last class of the day before we all went home, so of course everybody was antsy during the last few minutes of class. She always made us say, "Thank you Ms. Z for teaching us today" after class was over in this stupid musical tone. We forgot to say it one time because we all had different activities to go to, and she actually made us stay for thirty minutes after school to "teach us a lesson". Try explaining to your parents why you were late to your VERY EXPENSIVE TUTORING LESSON.

Then there was this other time when we had written and turned in essays. After grading them, she walked up to the front of the class, and proclaimed that "our essays were HORRIBLE", and that "I wanted to puke on them as I was reading them," and that "(other teacher's name)'s students had written better essays then you guys". She hadn't taught much about writing during the year, and I was thinking, 'woman, if you had taught us how to write essays they would be much better, but you haven't taught us anything!'. It was at that point when one of my good friends said, "Well maybe it's because (other teacher's name) actually teaches her students how to write!" I watched as her face fell, and the bell to end the day rang then. We hastily stammered out a "thank you Ms. Z for teaching us today" and rushed out the door. I still chuckle about this to this day.

Then there was this last incident, which still makes my blood boil. My friend had been walking home from school when a car hit her. She had been in the hospital for about two weeks recovering, and when she came back, Ms. Z had the nerve to ask her "Why didn't you do your homework?" and all I could think of as I watched my friend on the verge of tears was, 'Lady, when was she supposed to do her homework? Under anesthesia? She doesn't even have the book!'

She has also singled me out on several occasions, specifically for not "following the directions given by 'the queen of directions'", and for forgetting to bring a pencil this one time.

It got so bad that I started to hate English, and would hear my heartbeat in my ears whenever I walked into her classroom. Everyone in my class hated her as well.

Yeah, it was pretty much the end of the school year but I was done. REVENGE STARTS NOW. I waited until we had a substitute teacher one day (she was at a meeting or something), and collected statements from each of my classmates. I asked them to write down exactly what they thought about Ms. Z, and what had done to them. I then typed up each of the statements (so that Ms. Z wouldn't recognize their handwriting),and sent them to my counselor and assistant principal. I then walked into their respective offices the next day and told them everything that I had witnessed in class, and encouraged them to read the file that I had sent them. I talked with my parents, and I set up a meeting with Ms. Z, my teacher, my assistant principle, my parents, and I.

The day of the meeting arrives. Ms. Z has set up chairs arranged in a circle. She sits at one end, this stupid grin on her face as the rest of us take our seats. I sit on the chair opposite of her, so I can see her face. Ms. Z starts about how she was an amazing of a teacher, how her students were amazing, bla, bla, bla. She stops talking and looks at me. My counselor says, "(my name), what do you have to say?" I notice that we all have copies of my classmate's statements except for Ms. Z. I hand Ms. Z an extra copy of the statements, and I start to speak.

I talk about what I had seen her do in the classroom, and how she affected my classmates. I talked about how English was my favorite subject, and how she had almost ruined it for me. I talked about she was the first teacher that had made me cry. Aren't you supposed to go crying to your teachers instead of crying because of them? I talked about how unfair she was. I presented the evidence, aka all of the above incidents, and after I finished talking, I smirked a little as Ms. Z's face turned from a grin to a look of absolute horror. I looked at my counselor and assistant principal. They had faces of absolute shock. My assistant principal said, "(My name), thank you for bringing this to our attention. You and your parents may leave now." As I'm leaving with my parents, my counselor says, in an ice-cold tone, "Ms. Z, please come to the office with us". I don't know exactly what went down, but she was surprisingly nice the next day. But I wasn't done yet.

After a quick google search, I found Ms. Z's facebook, twitter, personal website and youtube videos. Apparently she was trying to be this comedian, and her husband hosted this pretty bad tv show. I texted my friends in her class the links, and told them to spam the pages with what she had done to them, and how bad of a teacher she was. I also told them to pass it on to students in her other classes.

At this point, there were only two weeks of class left before school let out for the summer, and we all watched as her mood dampened day after day of strings and strings of comments from angry students in every class. I remember her on the last day of school, her lips looking like she sucked a lemon and as pale as death, trying to keep it together. I internally laughed, knowing that that monster deserved it.

During that summer, all of my friends texted me that I was a hero, and that we had finally put an end to Ms. Z's reign of terror. Now, the my school's administration was not supposed to disclose information about what exactly happened to Ms. Z, but all of us are pretty sure that she was fired because it's been a few years and her room has been given to a more pleasant and understanding teacher.

I've had more patient, understanding, kind, amazing english teachers since then, and I love the subject more then ever. I'm usually an understanding and patient person, but I do have a limit. I may look harmless, but you should not underestimate the lengths that I will go to to make sure that you get proper punishment for your wrongdoings.

TL;DR: my sexist english teacher was horrible, insulted, and belittled all of her students. Took statements from classmates, called a meeting with her,counselor, assistant principal and parents and got her fired.

(source) story by (/u/seiza_is_a_dork)

#prorevenge #by /u/seiza_is_a_dork #pro revenge #revenge stories #pro revenge stories #pro #revenge #last10

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eat-sleep-eat-repeat1-blog · 6 years ago

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Politics with Social Media...

Political campaigns on social media have grown more and more over the past 10 years as parties try to understand what engages people on the internet. Social media can push campaigns and specific political figures into a positive position as they attempt to convey their message, yet on the other hand it can also ruin some one’s career/reputation in the blink of an eye.

At this current point in time my favourite political social media trend has to be #eggboy. I mean look how good that crack is.

Image sourced from https://imgur.com/gallery/p3gC28l

Watching this for the first time had me in STITCHES!!! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, I didn’t know why it happened but I knew I loved it. So onto Facebook I went and what do you know, there it was...EVERYWHERE.

After the horrific Christchurch attack the Senator made some very disagreeable comments regarding his opinion on muslims and there faith....then, out of no a hero emerged. Egg Boy went VIRAL, he has been seen as a light to this tragedy. Senator Fanning how ever has only received backlash. Since releasing his statement more then 1 million Australian’s have signed a petition to have him removed from parliament, in other words, career = over.

I believe social media has a big influence on people’s political opinion, I’m not home for the 6:00pm news most nights so scrolling down a page like reddit, or as I have recently discovered #Auspol on twitter keeps me updated. I think we all know that we can always count on Trump having some kind of opinion...that’s always interesting, knowing Australian politics I’ll be reading about ScoMo on Monday and then a new Prime Minister on Tuesday.

Sourced from https://www.reddit.com/r/AusMemes/comments/9ylqn8/scomo_demonstrates_his_razor_sharp_perception/

In the real world (not on my phone), I am not one to bring up politics with my mates, but...on my MANY social media platforms I would 10000% fall into the category of ‘Digital Citizenship’. Like majority of people in this day and age, I have the skills and knowledge to effectively use digital technologies to participate in society, communicate with others and create and consume digital content. In saying this, I won’t say to my friend ‘wow the Liberal Party’s video about blah blah blah was really interesting’, my political engagements revolve more around how much of a lol it is that Fraser Anning got egged by a 17 year old.

Before social media and politics found each other we had The Herald Sun cartoon artist Mark Knight, you could basically call his work the meme of the newspaper; now we just go to Trump’s Twitter feed and try to figure out what the heck COVFEFE means...still haven’t figured that out btw.

#covfefe

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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Quest for Hollywood Fame Splits Redditors at Heart of Market Frenzy Late on Wednesday, a moderator of the popular Reddit message board WallStreetBets posted several screenshots on the chat app Discord. They showed that other moderators had quietly started talking among themselves about landing a movie deal. “What’s our cut?” one of the moderators had asked in a Discord chat, according to the screenshots. By Thursday morning, that quest for Hollywood riches had exploded into an ugly battle, giving a glimpse into the unruly nature of a suddenly famous Reddit community. That was when the WallStreetBets moderators who were considering the film deal began booting out other moderators who had questioned them for secretly trying to profit from the forum’s success. Eventually, employees at Reddit weighed in to try to quell the unrest. “Can you all discuss with me what is going on?” a Reddit employee with the screen name sodypop asked, according to screenshots of the conversation shared with The New York Times. The WallStreetBets fight is the latest twist in the saga of an online army of investors who have roiled Wall Street over the past 10 days. Fueled by posts on the message board, where participants urged one another to buy the stock of the video-game retailer GameStop, the company’s shares went on an extraordinary run. The market frenzy entrapped hedge funds that had bet against GameStop’s stock, a populist move that soon captured mainstream imagination. GameStop’s shares have since gyrated wildly. On Thursday, the stock plunged 42 percent. The chaos has put a spotlight on WallStreetBets, which has been on Reddit since 2012 and which millions use to trade stock tips and chat about specific investments. Once the GameStop mania began last month, millions more joined the message board. At one point, the forum’s settings were set to private — meaning that posts could not be publicly viewed — because it was so overwhelmed by the flood of attention. GameStop vs. Wall Street Let Us Help You Understand By Thursday afternoon, WallStreetBets had over 8.5 million members, the vast majority of whom had joined in the wake of GameStop. “It’s definitely huge,” Nick Cormier, 35, a Los Angeles resident who has been a regular lurker on WallStreetBets for most of the last four years, said of the influx of new users and attention. “The amount even this past week has been astronomical.” Moderators, who handle the day-to-day management of the online community, are central to all Reddit boards. On a volunteer basis, they sift through thousands of comments, bar users who break the rules and draft guidelines. Some moderators also build custom technology, such as automated bots, to help the group run more smoothly. The number of WallStreetBets moderators has fluctuated over time, but in recent weeks there have been a few dozen. Reddit did not immediately have a comment. WallStreetBets was founded in 2012 by Jaime Rogozinski, 39, an information technology consultant in Mexico City. “I was looking for a community, a place for people to talk about high-risk trades in an unapologetic way for people to make some short-term money with disposable income,” he told TMZ last month. But by early last year, Mr. Rogozinski was struggling to remain in control. He became embroiled in a controversy over ties to a trading group that had sponsored an event for the message board, leading to accusations of insider trading and biased stock promotion. Last April, Mr. Rogozinski and his allies in the community were ousted. Now WallStreetBets is struggling to deal with the sudden publicity over the GameStop saga. Over the last week, several top moderators, who have administrative control of the message board, met in a private chat room on Discord to discuss the business opportunities arising from their sudden fame. One moderator said he was in touch with Ben Mezrich, an author of books like “The Social Network,” who last week secured deals to write a book and help with a movie about the GameStop saga, according to screenshots from the forum shared with The Times. “Oof we gotta go fast i think,” another moderator wrote back. “While the studios are competing.” None of the six moderators The Times interviewed were willing to give their real names, but The Times verified the people were in control of the board’s moderator accounts. The conversation heated up after Mr. Rogozinski announced that he had sold the rights to his own story to a movie studio this week. Mr. Rogozinski did not respond to requests for comment. One longtime moderator of the group, known as zjz, saw the conversation and took issue. He posted images of the conversation in a broader chat room for all the moderators. “We suddenly find out these formerly inactive moderators are trying to *literally* sell the story of how they built the subreddit and undermine us,” zjz wrote in an email to The Times. In a post to WallStreetBets on Wednesday night, which was quickly removed, zjz also wrote: “We’ve been taken hostage by the top mods. They left for years and came back when they smelled money.” That led to escalating recriminations and insults that soon went beyond a movie deal. Some began criticizing the top moderators for moves they had made to raise their profile, like creating a Twitter account and hiring a public relations representative. Some also made death threats. Late Wednesday and early Thursday, the top moderators began removing lower-ranking moderators who were asking questions. When reached on their new Twitter account, the top moderators said they wanted to strike a movie deal, but were planning to give any proceeds to charity. “Them trying to make it look like we are cash grabbing is so dishonest,” the moderators wrote. The top moderators said that the battle was also rooted in their desire to modernize the board, given all the new people who have begun using it. Opposing moderators like zjz, they said, wanted to keep the more homespun feeling of what WallStreetBets used to be. “It’s been his life’s work and he’s afraid it will change essentially,” the moderators said. On this, at least, the two sides were aligned. “This was our clubhouse with all our friends where we let loose and were honest about being in it for the money, but not being in it to sell each other anything,” zjz wrote by email. On Thursday afternoon, Reddit stepped in to remove the top WallStreetBets moderators. They put the moderators who had sided with zjz back in control, though zjz himself was not restored. Mr. Cormier, who has been unemployed since March when he lost his job in a shop specializing in the game Magic the Gathering, said he was dismayed by the fighting on WallStreetBets. He feared the forum would splinter, making it all but impossible to launch the kind of coordinated effort that had generated such a spectacular market reaction last week. “If they kill WallStreetBets, then it’s going to be really tough to restart this effort,” he said. Source link Orbem News #Fame #frenzy #heart #Hollywood #market #Quest #Redditors #splits

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heathertalks · 4 years ago

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Audience Analysis Blog #8: Media Fandom and Audience Subcultures

When we consume our media, whether it is watching our favourite TV series or movies, playing our video games, cheering for our sports teams, listening to our music, etc, we become fans of that particular media, whether we know about it. As fans, we invest in our favourite media and sometimes recommend or talk about it among our friends. Some of us would like to keep it simple in just consuming the media while others would go all out, such as buy T-shirts and other merchandise, create fansites, go to comic-conventions, etc. Just like creating our own media reception context, we create our own way of being fans.

Let us start this blog by asking what is a fan? How do you consider yourself to be one? Can you still be a fan if you did not have a certain trait? A fan is considered to be an audience member that shares a love of a certain type of media, whether it is a celebrity, TV / movie / video game franchise, sports team, etc. Fans are invested in their favourite media as they would examine the plots, characters and the texts’ messages. (Sullivan, pp 239) Fans would interact with one another in discussing the media text as they become part of an interpretive community. Texts created by fans in the form of fan fiction is used to suit their desires. Short for fanatic, the term was initially used to refer to someone belonging to a religious membership. The British would refer to media fan cultures as ‘cult media.’ It is interesting to note how the word ‘fan’ had an original religious meaning as people’s love for something could result in negative views of fandom as individuals would be looked upon as delusional.

Now, before we get into further detail about fandoms, let me tell you my experiences as a fan. I am a fan of many things, from sports to blockbuster films and TV series to gaming. I would often wear shirts / sweaters from my favourite teams, I have a couple of gaming T-shirts, I would attend sporting events. I would not really consider myself as hardcore as some people would describe themselves. Later on, in this blog, I will give out some examples of fandoms that tend to be a little too much.

There has been a debate on what fandom means among researchers with competitive agendas. Early studies concerning fans had an objective in disproving the negative stereotypes of fandoms. (Sullivan, pp 241) John Fiske explained that fans broke away from the negativity by creating ownership over the media texts by going into interpretive play with them. Early scholars were attracted to the notion that fan participation became a political resistance as it resulted in the idea of commodity audience being challenged. Through their own consumption of media, fans develop their own sense of identity. There was more to fandoms than sharing a love for a specific TV show or film series as it formed a pop culture interpretation that developed a sense of community. With a growing number of platforms and media products, the concepts of fan and fandom has broadened. There are different levels of engagement when it comes to passion in fandoms. In order, these levels are consumer, enthusiast, fan and producer.

Sometimes, fandoms can result in groups in the form of a subculture. It is usual for fan groups of a specific interest such as Star Trek and Star Wars to form. The selection of mainstream cultural aesthetics had the fans incorporating it into their personal lives as it would create a subculture. (Sullivan, pp 244) Fans who show their love of a certain franchise had a tendency to be looked down on by the status quo in their engagement. In some cases, fans tend to go a little overboard with their love of their franchise. What I am going to show is a WatchMojo clip of toxic fandoms and the extremes that they went when something goes wrong with their favourite franchises. The reason for me showing this is to demonstrate the lengths some fandoms would go to show their displeasure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMouE-raVGY

One franchise that I would like to talk about is Star Wars. I am an avid Star Wars fan, I have seen the original films multiple times, played some of the games when I was younger. So, you might say, I am a Star Wars nut. The fan base has a reputation for being toxic. When the first of the prequels came out, two of the actors, one who played Anakin Skywalker, Jake Lloyd and one who played Jar Jar Binks were not well-received. They got a ton of hate from the fans and it messed them up both bad. What I am going to show is a clip on how the fanbase resulted in Lloyd’s misfortunes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jO-H_1M0CQ

In addition, fans stated their dissatisfaction for one of the recent sequels, they started creating petitions to have The Last Jedi changed. I actually went on Facebook to say that they are being ridiculous, and Disney is just laughing their butt off over this. I got 1,300 reactions from that comment and managed to ruffle a few feathers over it. The reason for me writing it is how we have no control over the final product, and we should accept the movie for what it is and move on.

Star Wars is an example of fandoms who devote their love to their franchise. After the first film was released in 1977, it resulted in an explosion of fan enthusiasm. (Sullivan, pp 250) Will Brooker states that the original films are considered the official texts. The films would be considered the center of the Star Wars universe as several it branched out into several texts, such as a series of books, an NPR-broadcasted radio show in the 1980s, even a TV special featuring the fan favourite Ewoks that made their debut in Return of the Jedi. What adds fuel to the franchise is the fanbase. They wanted continuity from the original trilogy’s narrative in multiple texts. The community among Star Wars fans communicate with one another and share their interest among the texts. What distinguishes fans from simple viewers of the franchise is the ability to share their own unique interpretations.

One other example that would be worth discussing is fandom of the Netflix television series, Stranger Things. For those who are not familiar with the show, it is set in the 1980s in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana. The series revolves around supernatural events happening in the town, including the appearance of a mysterious girl with telekinetic abilities. Fan involvement with the show included social media usage which included Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and Fanfare. Post patterns consisted of plot, re-watching, para-social and fan art. Plot posts seem to appear in all four platforms as they feature questions concerning the new season, fan reactions to the show and observations. (Pouls, pp 5) Data showed that close to the second season, people watched the first season to get prepared. First-time posts occurred among people who completed the first season. In all social media platforms, fans posted about re-watching the first season. Re-watch posts is common before the second season is released. Twitter and Instagram featured countdown posts as they indicate the amount of time before the second season is released.

There are many things to describe ourselves as an audience, such as a simple viewer to an avid fan. As fans, we do more than consume our favourite content, we live in our fandom through a variety of things. They include wearing simple T-shirts, purchasing merchandise or novelties, take part in online discussions or just simply enjoying it. It is possible to be a fan of a variety of different media, such as TV shows, sports teams, bands, etc. While it is nice to be a fan of certain things, it is possible to get carried away with the fandoms, as I showed in the examples with the WatchMojo and Star Wars videos. It is worth looking at the creative ways that some fans show their love for their favourite franchise. The love is fueled through social media as we have discussed in Stranger Things. Furthermore, growing trends in new media help broaden fandoms in helping them demonstrate their identity.

Sources

1) Sullivan, J.L. (2020). Media Audiences: Effects, Users, Institutions, and Power. 237-263.

2) Pouls, S. & Gilpin, D. (2019). Socially Mediated Stranger Things: Audience Cultures and Full-Season Releases. Southwestern Mass Communication Journal. 34(2). 1-11.

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

Text

‘Frankenstein’s Monster:’ Images of Sexual Abuse Are Fueling Algorithmic Porn

Content warning: This article includes firsthand accounts of sexual abuse.

A collection of thousands of photographs of naked women that is being used to create machine learning-generated porn includes images from porn production companies that have been accused of lying to and coercing women to have sex on camera.

The dataset, which is circulating in deepfake porn creation communities online, includes images scraped from Czech Casting, a porn production company in the Czech Republic that police have accused of human trafficking and rape, as well as still images from videos produced by Girls Do Porn, which was ordered to pay almost $13 million to 22 women who appeared in its videos, and whose founder is currently a fugitive on the FBI's most wanted list.

Much like thispersondoesnotexist.com, which uses a machine learning algorithm and thousands of pictures of human faces to produce photorealistic images of people who don't exist, the dataset is being used to generate photorealistic images of nude women who aren’t real and don't look exactly like any one person. One person using the dataset is creating what he describes as "a Harem of millions of actresses" that can be inserted into deepfake porn, while another is using the dataset to create what he describes as "porn generated entirely by AI."

Motherboard has downloaded and viewed the dataset containing images from Czech Casting and Girls Do Porn, as well as several others being used to create machine learning-generated porn.

The people who anonymously use these datasets say that since the final algorithmically-generated images they create technically aren't of real people, they don't harm anyone. In fact, they argue that their creations are a step towards a future where porn will not require human porn performers at all. But legal experts, technologists, and women who are included in the datasets described these creations as uniquely dehumanizing.

Motherboard has written extensively about how deepfakes and internet platforms' inability to sufficently curtail the spread of nonconsensual pornography upends the lives of and continually traumatizes women. This new form of machine learning-generated porn and the datasets it relies on introduces a new form of abuse, where the worst moments of some women's lives, captured on camera, are preserved, decontextualized, and spread online in service of creating porn whose makers claim to feature people who don't actually exist.

Honza Červenka, a lawyer at McAllister Olivarius law firm who specializes in revenge porn and technology, is originally from the Czech Republic and has been following the case of Czech Casting, which is owned by Netlook, the country’s largest porn company. He told Motherboard that the idea that images are less harmful because they're run through an algorithm and "anonymized" is a red herring.

"It's mad science really, and completely and utterly re-victimizing to the victims of the Czech Casting perpetrators," he said.

"It feels unfair, it feels like my freedom is being taken away," Jane, a woman who said she was coerced into shooting a scene for Czech Casting, told Motherboard.

The casting couch trap

Jane, who asked to remain pseudonymous to speak about a traumatizing incident, remembers her hands shaking as she read over a contract for Czech Casting. She was there to support her friend, who needed money for rent. They'd answered an advertisement for a modeling gig, and decided to go together. They'd both just turned 18. They didn't know what kind of modeling it was; the ad was vague about details. Someone picked them up at a metro stop and took them to a house on the outskirts of Prague.

(In an interview with Czech bodybuilder Antonin Hodan posted to YouTube, a male performer in Czech Casting videos named Alekos Begaltsis admitted that the women who show up for shoots sometimes don't know what they're in for because of deceptive advertising.

"The girls get here through agencies as well with the help of private agents or through friends, anyone can recommend," Begaltsis said. "We can't control every piece of information in the advertising. It can happen that a girl gets here thinking she'll do an underwear photoshoot. Which sucks because we are powerless in these situations. We are trying to push them to write the truth [in the ads]. Unfortunately it's not always the case. But once she gets here, we inform her about everything.")

Once at the studio, a woman at the reception desk took Jane's ID.

"We sat in a waiting room and got up to leave two or three times, but someone would always come up and tell us to stay, to not be afraid," she said. "We were scared to leave so we stayed."

A woman called them one by one into a room with a white sofa where the filming would take place, and handed them a contract saying the videos wouldn't be accessible to anyone in the Czech Republic. This part of the arrangement is similar to the lie Girls Do Porn told women about how their videos were only going to be distributed to "collectors" in New Zealand. In reality, Girls Do Porn videos were published and sold in the U.S. and promoted on Pornhub.

Czech Casting does indeed block users trying to access it from the Czech Republic, Motherboard confirmed by trying to access the site using a virtual private network. But people within the country can also easily circumvent the block using a VPN, which is free and easy to set up. Additionally, as women who accused Czech Casting of wrongdoing have said, their families and friends quickly discovered their videos, which were reposted to popular free tube sites, where sometimes their real names were doxed.

"Weeks later I started getting messages…These were mostly from men saying how beautiful I was and if they could have sex with me," Jane said. "I got so many of these messages and keep getting them. I even changed my Facebook name because of this."

After she signed the contract, a man came in and asked her if she was a virgin. She said that she felt like she had no way out, and that she couldn't leave without her ID.

"After I said yes, he took the camera and told me to get naked," Jane said. "I was told they were going to film something soft. . .I was scared to speak out."

Jane said they put the money into her hands as she was leaving. She wasn't given a copy of the contract she signed, or any proof that she'd been there at all.

"My friend found the room we were in on a porn site," Jane said. "I realised this was a massive fuck-up. I kept thinking we should have left even if it means not having our IDs on us."

In another Czech Casting video, a woman, who Motherboard was able to confirm is included in the dataset, starts crying while having sex and asks the man to stop. The man stops, and the camera zooms in to show that she is bleeding. He hands her a towel and tells her to clean up the blood.

Jane's story about Czech Casting isn't unique. Multiple women have accused Czech Casting of coercing them into having sex on camera. Czech police have charged nine people involved with Netlook, the company behind Czech Casting, of human trafficking and rape. Daisy Lee, a woman who went on to a career in porn after her Czech Casting scene and who is now friendly with Begaltsis, said the site has ruined lives.

"I was 18 and didn't know what I was getting myself into. Most girls do not. The majority of them stay, but some leave. It ruins many lives," Lee told Motherboard.

In a statement published in July by the adult entertainment news site Xbiz, Netlook denied the accusations and said it is cooperating with the police. Netlook did not respond to Motherboard's request for comment.

GeneratedPorn

In September, four years after Jane shot her scene for Czech Casting, a PhD student opened a new forum to show off his latest personal AI project: algorithmically-generated porn.

The person making these videos goes by the username "GeneratedPorn," and named the r/GeneratedPorn subreddit to post about the technology (we'll refer to this user as "GP" in this story). He said he started the project because he wanted to improve his machine learning skills. Like some of the earliest deepfakes that were posted online in 2017, what he shared were glitchy, spasming facsimiles of the images they're trained on: thousands of porn videos and images. Unlike much deepfake porn, the images GP is producing wouldn't fool anyone into thinking they are real porn. The final result barely looks human, let alone like a specific person.

Do you have experience with “casting couch” producers, or knowledge of how non-consensual porn spreads online? We’d love to hear from you. Contact Samantha Cole securely on the messaging app Signal at +6469261726, direct message on Twitter, or by email: [email protected]

But much like early deepfakes, they're rapidly improving in realism. GP has posted several experiments in the past few weeks featuring increasingly accurate naked human bodies, and even some slightly animated images, showing that convincing "porn generated entirely by AI" is not impossible.

"This all started as a quest for me to learn how all of this cool tech worked but then I ended up pivoting into the porn generation stuff as I thought it was a cool concept, especially after watching the movie Her," GP said in an email to Motherboard.

GP explained his process to Motherboard over email, as well as in detail on Reddit, posted in the popular r/MachineLearning community. He used a Stylegan2 model that's available on Github as open-source code, but loaded it with datasets of porn. It's similar to how any other face-swapping deepfake is made, but instead of using a dataset consisting of many expressions of one person's face, he pulled from multiple datasets found online.

To create the videos, GP trained the algorithms using datasets from around the web, including one that primarily consists of images ripped from Czech Casting. The datasets, which are hosted and are free to download from popular file sharing sites, are compiled by users experimenting in deepfakes and other forms of algorithmically generated images. GP found the Czech Casting dataset on one of these file sharing websites, but said that if he didn't he would have written a web scraper to collect the images from Czech Casting.

This is because of the scope and uniformity of the porn that Czech Casting has created.

A censored sample of the Czech Casting dataset.

Creating algorithmically generated videos of a full, naked body requires many images and videos of real, nude people, and it's hard to imagine a more suitable resource for the task than Czech Casting.

Czech Casting, much like Girls Do Porn, specialized in casting couch-style porn, and has posted thousands of videos of women over the years. Its production style was almost algorithmic to begin with: Each video of a woman also comes with a uniform set of photographs. Each set includes a photograph of the woman holding a yellow sign with a number indicating her episode number, like a mugshot board. Each set also includes photographs of the women posing in a series of dressed and undressed shots on a white background: right side, left side, front, back, as well as extreme close ups of the face, individual nipples, and genitalia. In recent years, Czech Casting also started including 360-degrees photographs of the women, where they pose for interactive VR-style content.

"The main reason people opt for a data source like this, is that the generative adversarial models (GAN) people use, are trying to learn a general structure of an image for the class of objects you're trying to generate," GP said. "If your images are structurally similar, the model can learn more about the finer/granular details of the item class, like dimples or freckles on a face. Which leads to a higher quality result."

GP sent Motherboard a sample of the dataset he's using, which also included images from Girls Do Porn videos. Other datasets that GP is using, which Motherboard has viewed, include images that appear to be scraped from across the internet, including other porn sites, social media, and subreddits where users post selfies, like r/roastme, a subreddit where people post images of themselves for other people to judge.

Gigabytes of questionably-sourced images

In a post to the r/MachineLearning subreddit explaining how his algorithmically generated porn works, GP pauses halfway through the explanation to address "a potential ethical issue."

"I wasn't sure what to do with it, other than it being this cool thing I'd created… I'd contemplated making an OnlyFans and offering personalised AI generated nudes that talk to people," he wrote. "But someone I knew frowned upon this idea and said it was exploitative of Males who might need companionship. So I decided not to go down that route in order to avoid the ethical can of worms."

He also noted in that post that training dataset ethics is something he's concerned about. "Are the images we are training on ethical or have the people in the images been exploited in some way[?]" he wrote. "I again can't verify the back story behind hundreds of thousands of images, but I can assume some of the images in the dataset might have an exploitative power dynamic behind them," noting that some of the images are from Girls Do Porn. "I'm not sure if it's even possible to blacklist exploitative data if it's been scraped from the web. I need to consider this a bit more."

These questions didn’t stop GP from building the project in public, on social media platforms, which means he’s perpetrating harm regardless of whatever ethical quandaries he says he may have. Much of the most harmful nonconsensual content is spread on the internet through surface-level platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, OnlyFans, and tube sites like XVideos and Pornhub.

"So many mainstream porn websites host child pornography and nonconsensual pornography, and does depict rape, and profit from those through ad sales," Červenka said.

When Motherboard contacted Reddit for comment, a spokesperson said Reddit's site-wide policies "prohibit involuntary pornography, which applies to all content, including deepfakes." Reddit banned deepfakes in 2017. Both r/GeneratedPorn and r/AIGeneratedPorn were shut down after Motherboard's request for comment.

Generated Porn's user profile on Pornhub was also taken down after Motherboard contacted Pornhub. A spokesperson for Pornhub declined to comment.

Porn tube site xHamster took down GP's user profile pending further review: "These new types of content are indeed grey areas and we will need to review with our own machine learning team and TOS team to determine how to evaluate and where necessary prevent," a spokesperson for xHamster said.

XVideos, another free tube site, directed Motherboard to a content removal form.

OnlyFans did not respond to a request for comment. Patreon, where GP was asking for people to fund his project with little success, told Motherboard that while funding nonconsensual sexual content isn't permitted on the platform, if an account does contain nonconsensual porn, the platform works with the creator to bring the account within its terms of use. The project was taken down from Patreon as of Monday.

Twitter directed Motherboard to its nonconsensual nudity policy and rules for sensitive media.

"Now somebody walks up and uses those images to create a baseline for computers to use, potentially for decades to come, to use for computer generated images?”

In an email to Motherboard, GP expressed another ethical concern: that the algorithm might produce something that is recognizable as a real human—a result that would negate the whole point of his project: anonymity.

"It's quite possible for the algorithm to reproduce fake people who resemble real people, but it wouldn't be a 1-to-1 replication of the data it has trained on," he said. "This presents an ethical problem I'm trying to navigate around, which is identifying the rare situations where it does replicate a person from the ~7,500 images it's learning from. It's something that plagues generative networks… It's possible and I'm not quite sure how to 100% avoid the possibility of this happening. But I really do want to avoid this. I'm not interested in deep-faking anyone, even by accident, it's a bit scummy imho!"

GP is far from alone in this type of project. The creator of the first deepfakes told Motherboard almost the same thing in 2017: that he wasn't a professional researcher, just a programmer with an interest in machine learning who “just found a clever way to do face-swap,” he said.

These Nudes Do Not Exist and a subsequent project from the same creator called "Harem" most likely draws its data from Czech Casting—the images come out looking unmistakably similar, but the creator of that project hasn't responded to requests for comment on where the images in their dataset come from. Another abandoned project at r/AIGeneratedPorn did the same.

The real ethical issue plaguing this project is not the risk of parting lonely men from their money. It would take one search online of Czech Casting, and some basic awareness of the concept of pirated content being harmful to creators, to recognize the datasets these non-existent women are built from are comprised of gigabytes of questionably-sourced porn, some of it potentially depicting sexual assault.

On Monday, the night before this story was published and after his Patreon account was suspended, GP told Motherboard that he “decided to shut down the project.”

"It certainly should be illegal"

Jane told Motherboard that she was hoping her video would get lost among so many others online, and no one would find it. "But there is always someone who manages to fish it out from the depths of the internet," she said.

Červenka, the lawyer at McAllister Olivarius law firm who specializes in revenge porn and technology, told Motherboard that because some of the Czech Casting videos were allegedly edited to look consensual from the start, they have always been deceptive and harmful—and churning them through the meat grinder of machine learning algorithms doesn't make them less so.

"Now somebody walks up and uses those images to create a baseline for computers to use, potentially for decades to come, to use for computer generated images? It's awful, on a personal level, and it certainly should be illegal," Červenka said.

Even for professional porn performers, stolen content is an issue that plagues the industry. Adult performer Leah Gotti, whose images are part of the datasets GP is using without her consent, told me that the problem of stolen content isn't just disrespectful—it's dangerous. She's currently working to stop a stalker-fan from creating fake Instagram accounts of her and targeting her family by stealing her content and reposting it.

"It just goes back to, no one truly respects sex workers," Gotti told me. "All those things are pirated, and that's supposed to be against all the rules, but because we're having sex on camera they're like, well, she asked for it."

Earlier this year, a rumored OnlyFans leak of a database of stolen porn threatened to put sex workers on that platform in danger of being harassed or doxed.

Daisy Lee, the performer who started with Czech Casting when she was 18 but continued working in the adult industry after, told Motherboard that she blames herself for thinking that the videos wouldn't go viral worldwide.

"They don't put it on Czech servers but people download it and re-upload it everywhere," Lee said. "Every girl that goes in thinks it won't be visible to their friends and family… 14 days later [my] video was everywhere. It destroyed my reputation and spread around my home town within hours. But nobody forced me to do anything, no drugs, nothing like that."

Many of the women who were targeted by Girls Do Porn also blame themselves for believing the company’s lies claiming that the videos would stay in a certain region—in that case, in private New Zealand collections, on DVD. But the entire system of porn online, and all content online for that matter, is set up to spread videos and photos the harder one tries to remove it. Algorithms are driven by what people feed them. One Czech Casting model lost her teaching job after students found her episode online, and when she spoke out about feeling victimized by the company, people sought her video out more.

Collage by Seth Laupus

"The researcher in me feels like 'if it's been published online it's open source and fair game' however the budding capitalist in me feels like that violates IP in some sense," GP said. "I'm a bit conflicted. I've personally accepted that any data I ever create as an individual will be used by others for profit or research."

GP also said that he thinks the type of abuse Czech Casting has been accused of is "horrible," but that it's difficult to screen for this kind of abuse when creating or using datasets.

"There is no such thing as ethical use of an AI that uses database images without consent”

"Now that the abuse is present I can opt to not use that data and source data from elsewhere," GP said. "Others in the area may not care and may decide to use it anyway. It's quite difficult to screen for this data completely. Doing a google image search for 'female standing nude' gives you a bunch of Czech Casting images. Throwing on the flag '-"czech"' catches a lot of them, but some still get through the cracks."

While GP said that he could choose not to use images produced by Girls Do Porn and Czech Casting, he didn't say that he would, nor is it clear if his project and others similar to it could function without those images. GP also suggested that his project could also somehow help these women.

"I feel bad for the victims of this abuse and I can't say anything that may make them feel better," he said. "My only hope is that technology such as the tech I'm working on, now and in the future, leads to a reduction in harm to others. By making it an economical and technologically inferior choice to commit abuse."

Červenka said that even after three years of deepfakes panic and decades more of nonconsensual porn online, the laws to stop them haven't caught up. Victims could make a legal claim that they've been portrayed in a false light or defamed, especially when content is edited deceptively to make it look consensual. But that's often not enough.

"These laws have been around for a long time, and we are just trying to use them in the current context, because we don't have anything else," Červenka said "The legislature is unable to truly grapple with what people do online, and how to regulate harmful effects of what people do online."

It also becomes harder to go after anyone hosting the content if they're hosting it anonymously, all over the world, where every legal system is different. Even in the U.S., where some states have enacted deepfakes-specific laws, it differs from state to state.

When the content is buried inside a dataset, the problem is that much more difficult.

Is ethical AI porn possible?

The abuses the women in Czech Casting and Girls Do Porn endured happened in the real world, but the videos spread online made it worse. Some Girls Do Porn victims were forced to change their names, move states, drop out of school, and lost their careers or relationships with family and friends. Czech Casting victims have similar stories.

Revenge porn victims—as well as professional and amateur adult performers—spend hours sending takedown requests to websites that host their images. Often, those requests are ignored. And when it comes to datasets used to create more porn, it's hard to know where your images live on, unless you can locate where it's hosted and download a huge set of files, then sort through them to find yourself. Their worst moments are enshrined forever among gigabytes of others.

There have been efforts in recent years to create machine learning datasets that are fully consensual. After the privacy failures of MS-Celeb-1M, a dataset of 10 million photos from 100,000 individuals collected from the internet, ranging from journalists to musicians and activists, there's more awareness than ever toward ethical uses of people's faces. In 2019, for its "Deepfakes Detection Challenge," Facebook launched a dataset consisting of 100,000 videos of paid actors, for researchers to use. One of the sponsors of that challenge was data science community site Kaggle. One of the datasets Generated Porn used is hosted on Kaggle, and appears to be largely stolen, scraped porn content.

If machine learning engineers interested in creating AI porn wanted to start a fully-ethical project, they would do something similar to what Facebook did with its challenge dataset.

"They would get consent from people who want to be nude models, and say this is what we're going to build it for, and everything's on the up and up," Rumman Chowdhury, data scientist and founder of ethical AI firm Parity, told Motherboard. "And maybe even [models] would get royalties, [engineers] would go build their AI, sell it as a porn, and they would actually do pretty well." But doing things the right way costs money, and when you're tinkering with porn as a side project, it's usually money you don't have. r/AIGeneratedPorn's project died because renting server time and running the training was too expensive, according to a post in that subreddit before it went down.

"There is no such thing as ethical use of an AI that uses database images without consent," Chowdhury said.

"How can a tech that at its core has rape videos be anything but a perpetuation of rape culture?" Červenka said. "I don’t think I would sleep well at night if I were [GP], because he's relying on images of abuse to create a Frankenstein's monster."

‘Frankenstein’s Monster:’ Images of Sexual Abuse Are Fueling Algorithmic Porn syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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ellenlucasonlinedatingblog · 4 years ago

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Racial Preferences in Online Dating, Explained

“No Blacks.” “No Asians.” It’s not uncommon to see phrases like these on sex and dating apps, in which people categorically exclude entire racial groups from consideration.

Many have referred to this as a form of “sexual racism,” with the idea being that these comments are rooted in implicit or explicit racial biases. However, not everyone agrees with this take. I recently read an article on Medium in which the author argued that the “biological nature of mate selection…gives rise to the phenomenon of racial preference in mate selection.”

The author went on to talk about how we tend to be attracted to similar others—including others of the same race/ethnicity—and that this has roots in biology and evolution. Essentially, he argues that race-based attractions are “wired” in us and that it is therefore “misplaced” to assume that racism is what underlies racial preferences that we might see expressed on dating apps.

I don’t buy this idea that race-based attractions are primarily or exclusively a function of our biology or evolutionary history, though. Instead, they seem to have quite a lot to do with our culture, and also with the local environment in which dating occurs. Let me explain.

If we were all hardwired to be attracted to persons of the same race/ethnicity, you’d probably expect to see that, in our sexual fantasies, we’d all be fantasizing mostly about people of the same racial/ethnic group as us, right? However, that’s not what we see at all.

For example, in the survey of 4,175 Americans’ sexual fantasies I conducted for my book Tell Me What You Want, I found that Whites were actually the only group that predominately fantasized about members of their own racial group. Specifically, about 85% of White people fantasized about other White people.

No other racial group showed such a strong ingroup preference in their fantasies. In fact, most other groups showed a strong outgroup preference. Notably, Asian Americans fantasized about White partners at about the same rate that White participants did.

A majority of Hispanic/Latino(a) and Black adults also reported that they primarily fantasize about persons from other racial groups.

In short, Whites mostly fantasized about Whites, and racial minorities in general were more likely to fantasize about Whites than anyone else. It’s difficult to explain findings like this through the lens of anything other than culture.

Culture sends strong messages about standards of beauty and attractiveness, and in American culture, Whites have historically had the most power to shape these standards. This has established a racial hierarchy of attractiveness that appears to have crept into our sexual fantasies.

At a broad level, culture helps to shape who and what we find attractive—however, our local environments also play a big role. Social psychologists have long written about the propinquity effect, or the idea that we’re most likely to begin relationships with people we encounter frequently.

This makes sense because when we encounter people often, it can establish a sense of familiarity, safety, and comfort.

This effect helps to explain, in part, why interracial dating and marriages were historically rare in the United States—people lived in very ethnically segregated communities, so the people you encountered most often tended to be from the same ethnic group. Of course, there were also explicit legal and social prohibitions banning interracial marriages for quite a long time, too, which obviously played a big role in terms of why dating across races was rare. Believe it or not, it wasn’t until 1991 (less than 30 years ago) that more Americans approved than disapproved of interracial marriage for the very first time [1].

As racial stratification has decreased in the US and social acceptance of interracial relationships has increased, more Americans have begun to date outside of their own race. In fact, the percentage of interracial marriages in the US has increased from 3% to 17% since the 1960s.

Part of the rise in interracial dating is also attributed to the rise of online dating. Online dating creates a “virtual propinquity effect,” which allows us to encounter a much wider and more diverse range of potential partners than the ones we would encounter in person only. Consistent with this idea, the rate of interracial marriages has increased at a steeper rate as online dating has become more popular [2].

Research also shows that couples who meet online are more likely to be interracial than those who meet in person [3], which suggests that as online dating continues to gain in popularity, we’re only likely to see this rise even further.

Putting all of this together, it seems clear that racial preferences for dating partners are shaped in a major way by our culture and by our environment. Thus, attempts to explain them as biologically “hardwired” are suspect. Also, while sexual racism appears to be prevalent in the world of online dating, it’s also the case that online dating appears to be leading us toward a more integrated society.

Want to learn more about Sex and Psychology ? Click here for previous articles or follow the blog on Facebook (facebook.com/psychologyofsex), Twitter (@JustinLehmiller), or Reddit (reddit.com/r/psychologyofsex) to receive updates. You can also follow Dr. Lehmiller on YouTube and Instagram.

[1] Gallup, G., Jr., & Newport, F. (1991). For the first time, more Americans approve of interracial marriage than disapprove. The Gallup Poll Monthly, 311, 60-61.

[2] Ortega, J., & Hergovich, P. (2017). The strength of absent ties: Social integration via online dating. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.10478.

[3] Thomas, R. J. (2020). Online exogamy reconsidered: Estimating the Internet’s effects on racial, educational, religious, political and age assortative mating. Social Forces, 98(3), 1257-1286.

Image Source: Photo by Yogas Design on Unsplash

You Might Also Like:

Where Do Our Sexual Attractions Come From?

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cryptoquicknews-blog · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published here https://is.gd/nX5IS8

From Mar-a-Lago to Coinbase, Dubious Claims Follow Doc.com Token Sales

This post was originally published here

A health startup tied to a public cryptocurrency is using overstated language about some of its industry relationships and its affiliation with crypto exchange Coinbase as it seeks to sell tokens to investors, a CoinDesk investigation has found.

Mexico City-based Doc.com, which offers an app that provides healthcare and psychology consulting to underprivileged communities, also features a built-in wallet for the startup’s cryptocurrency, MTC. The venture-backed startup raised over $1.8 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2018, then integrated MTC into its app in July of that year as part of a rewards program meant to incentivize users to sell their health data for tokens.

Yet, Doc.com has continued to sell its tokens – $49 million worth in total – even after its ICO at events like the Wall Street Conference at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, held on January 15. The startup said it plans to release these tokens in an airdrop to the public before April when the company switches to a proprietary blockchain called Lifechain.

At Mar-a-Lago, Charles Nader, CEO of Doc.com, pitched token investment opportunities to hedge fund representatives and family offices gathered to hear from notable entrepreneurs like Brock Pierce, showing a pitch deck that included at least two claims that have been substantially debunked by further CoinDesk inquiries.

Most notable is the inclusion of Mozilla CEO John Lilly and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman on a page of advisors and mentors.

Lilly told CoinDesk he doesn’t have any relationship with Doc.com, while Hoffman’s venture capital firm Greylock Partners told CoinDesk Hoffman has no formal advisory relationship with Doc.com, though Nader was a student of a Stanford course taught by him.

Positioned as a means to provide free healthcare to people who might otherwise be unable to access it, the Doc.com project has attracted interest from organizations like the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime as well as private investors.

But the way the platform functions has raised questions about its token rewards and the security of its users’ health data.

Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation, told CoinDesk: “This project deserves a lot of scrutiny and has a lot of red flags.”

On Telegram and Instagram, Nader has also released vague statements about “support” from organizations like Coinbase and Forbes México, which refers to the company as Docademic in a recent cover story about the startup.

Yet in a private message to CoinDesk, Nader clarified there haven’t been any formal discussions about listing the token on Coinbase and that Doc.com is just a custody customer of the exchange. Being a custody customer of the exchange simply means the startup pays for Coinbase to support custody options for its assets.

Coinbase declined to issue a public comment for this story.

Further, on the company’s social media channels users have been actively discussing a potential listing on Coinbase, which Nader and his team have not responded to despite engaging directly with fans about numerous other topics.

Brand-name partnerships?

Some market observers, such as Gladstein, believe Doc.com has come to encapsulate many of the ethical complexities involved with token sales, suggesting that the dynamics behind the 2017 crypto market boom haven’t faded along with the market itself.

Nader said MTC tokens can be used to buy access to healthcare data from more than 141,000 people who already downloaded the startup’s app. Users are said to be paid small amounts of MTC to anonymously release their healthcare data for resale.

Plus, Nader has also said his startup is partnering with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to combat recidivism by expanding its free psychology consultations and other services to Kenya by April.

“We are planning to collaborate with Doc.com, with their new technology to be able to provide free healthcare in Africa,” Wambui Kahara, who described herself as a United Nations Offices on Drugs and Crime advisor, told CoinDesk. “And also to be able to use research to inform governments and others on how to better prevent diseases.”

The UNODC did not respond to an independent inquiry about this initiative.

“We monetize that data and sell it to governments and pharmaceutical companies,” Nader told CoinDesk, adding that users can spend MTC on the app to pay for specialist services beyond the free, basic sessions.

Others in the non-profit community, however, are wary of such initiatives. For example, Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation told CoinDesk he is deeply troubled by the structure of of Doc.com’s token economy.

“There are serious concerns about companies buying medical data from vulnerable populations,” Gladstein said in interview. “If the security model isn’t super strong, there’s potential for abuse.”

Gladstein went on to describe Doc.com as a hotbed of “red flags.” One such concern is that Doc.com has not yet published technical documentation for the upcoming Lifechain ecosystem on open source sites like GitHub.

Nader told CoinDesk there were plans to audit the code “at some point,” without specifying concrete plans with any firm or group.

Warning signs

Another “red flag” noted by Gladstein is that conversations in the company’s social channels are primarily focused on the startup itself and the asset’s trading potential, not app users.

Cryptocurrency promoter John McAfee is listed as one of the startup’s advisors and has been encouraging his Twitter followers to support MTC adoption since last February. One such tweet claimed the tokens could soon sell for $10 each, while another dubbed it the “King of Crypto” assets.

The company’s pitch deck presented at Mar-A-Largo promised investors the likelihood Doc.com tokens would increase in value “is much higher” than bitcoin because the tokens “are used to view healthcare data and linked to real users in the platform that need it.”

Nader also told CoinDesk the value of this token would rise as “demand for the data goes up.” However, the Mexico City-based team isn’t concerned that U.S. regulators could see MTC as an unregistered security even though the company claims to have roughly 20,000 app downloads in Florida.

“It’s a utility token, it’s not a dividend,” Diaz told CoinDesk. “It’s a representation of the data that is being processed on the blockchain.”

Although it’s not clear that any users of the company’s app are posting comments about Doc.com on social media, there are some user reviews of the Doc.com mobile app. However, it’s hard to say how many of the user reviews related to the mobile app are genuine since many are anonymous. And in one instance, CoinDesk identified that Doc.com CTO Arturo Diaz left a positive user review of the app on Google Play without disclosing his involvement in the project.

Beyond technical infrastructure, the Human Rights Foundation’s Gladstein said that paying the participants in local fiat currency or bitcoin would alleviate some of his concerns about the token’s usability.

Otherwise, he said, users are trusting the startup to control this token’s inflation so they can actually afford to buy medical services with their token rewards, regardless of external trading.

While CTO Diaz says the new Lifechain system will offer some form of built-in inflation control, Gladstein said he was still “very concerned” that users may not “actually understand what is going on.”

Gladstein added:

“They [Doc.com] are able to do this because for every person who knows what happened with ICOs, there’s 100 who haven’t learned yet.”

More blockchains

Still, Doc.com believes it has answers to these questions.

The in-house blockchain system Lifechain, which Diaz said his team developed from scratch over the past few months, would be responsible for safeguarding the privacy and consent dynamics of selling users’ healthcare data.

“All the information that you put in the application is encrypted into our health records database,” Diaz said. “You cannot share information from patients without their consent. This [for enterprises] is mostly statistical data, like how many cases of flu happened around this area for males or females.”

So far, Diaz said he’s not familiar with concrete plans to run mining operations or nodes, which will purportedly be powered by proof-of-work, a system wherein any participants are responsible for contributing computing power to ensure record-keeping for the decentralized ecosystem.

“We’re going to look for whoever wants to be the main nodes,” Diaz said, adding that he assumes there is someone at Doc.com speaking to organizations about nodes and mining, because they don’t plan to run that aspect of the infrastructure themselves. “That [mining] is something that I don’t think we are going to get into right now.”

Nader said they are pursuing a relationship with a mining company, plus he believes other miners and node operators will organically rise up from the “community” on Telegram, Twitter and Reddit. But Nader also could not name any specific partners committed to helping run the network scheduled for imminent launch.

“This system is currently much more secure, transparent and vastly better than what is currently available,” he said. “Patients are even getting paid for their data, unlike almost all of the world’s healthcare system.”

Diaz said there are currently around 9,000 MTC addresses and that app users are directly provided with both public and private keys to control their own token rewards. Still, after reviewing the privacy policy on the app, even two tech-savvy MTC traders from Naos Blockchain Capital told CoinDesk they weren’t quite sure whether the startup was already selling their healthcare data.

“You don’t have to think about it as your data, you can think about it as macro data,” Naos Blockchain Capital co-founder Abraham Cobos Ramírez told CoinDesk. “We believe that Doc.com is one of the few crypto projects today with a social mission that already has a working prototype.”

Support from the United Nations, and the prospect of a future listing on Coinbase gave these Naos Blockchain Capital investors confidence in the lucrative potential of this startup’s crypto asset. And, thanks to Coinbase, institutional investors can now hold MTC with a regulator-approved custodial service.

Speaking to Doc.com’s global expansion beyond Latin America, Kahara said:

“The data that is collected goes specifically to research that will benefit these populations…We hope within one year we will be able to cover most countries in Africa.”

Image of (left to right) billionaire Sandro Salsano, Doc.com CEO Charles Nader and Forbes Latin America Chairman Mariano Menéndez at Mar-a-Lago via Doc.com

#crypto #cryptocurrency #btc #xrp #litecoin #altcoin #money #currency #finance #news #alts #hodl #coindesk #cointelegraph #dollar #bitcoin View the website

New Post has been published here https://is.gd/nX5IS8

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harrisjv · 6 years ago

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ViralSiteXpress Review Should We Get It

ViralSiteXpress Review - Are you looking for even more knowledge concerning ViralSiteXpress? Please go through my sincere evaluation concerning it before selecting, to evaluate the weak points as well as staminas of it. Can it be worth your time and effort as well as cash?

ViralSiteXpress Evaluation & Review

Developer: Seun Ogundele

Item: ViralSiteXpress

Release Day: 2019-Feb-06

Release Time: 10:00 EST

Front-End Rate: $22

Specific niche: Software

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Viral blogging just means that you compose some content which spreads out quickly online via site web links and also social sharing, and also is watched by a multitude of individuals.

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How much money can you make from a viral blog site?

In fact, I was making from $100 to $300 per day, which suggests $3000 to $9000 monthly. The bar graph listed below demonstrates my earnings over the twelve month of 2017. Several other people are making around $15,000 to $20,000 each month. I don't want to deceive you, but you will not make those numbers till you understand the whole process as well as follow the instructions that I am mosting likely to talk about later.

What is the expected price needed to develop a viral web site?

There are some needed points you have to spend for, such as:

A domain

This will certainly cost you $12 paid every year.

Webhosting

This will cost you $12--$100 paid each month.

WordPress motif

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#ViralSiteXpress #ViralSiteXpress review #ViralSiteXpress reviews #ViralSiteXpress bonus #ViralSiteXpress discount

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yung-fox · 6 years ago

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The Gillette News Cycle: How False Controversy Hinders Socially Conscious Marketing

If you ever click a news story about a “widespread controversy,” do yourself a favor and verify the claims inside. If the only angry quotations in the article come from sources like Twitteruser573037, it’s not a story worth telling.

Look no further than Gillette, which recently released a new commercial decrying toxic masculinity. It was a play on the razor company’s long-standing tagline, “The Best A Man Can Get,” beginning with shots of young boys getting in fist-fights and older men grabbing at women’s bodies. “Is this really the best men can be?” the clip posited, riffing on gender studies talking points from “boys will be boys” to 2017’s #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. The powerful piece of socially conscious marketing immediately made an impact and inspired good discussion on social media, but only a specific reaction made headlines.

youtube

Typically, an advertisement like Gillette’s would only receive coverage from the likes of Adweek, Digiday, and AdAge. However, the social justice angle gave national publications a foothold. The brand was taking a stance on gender, which meant somebody was going to react negatively.

Several large news outlets published stories about the “controversy” it had kicked up. According to NPR, CNN, Business Insider, FastCompany, and Time, the internet was torn asunder by a widespread movement to boycott Gillette’s products, a siege led by untold numbers of men who felt insulted. Thing is, as journalist Agri Ismaïl pointed out on Twitter, the controversy was almost entirely fabricated.

A dude is presenting demands to end the boycott. The demands are the apology video and also that all male employees have to read some mra bullshit, like it’s mao’s little red pill.

So you click on the dude’s profile, wondering who he is and why he can make demands. pic.twitter.com/S6zvqstEGO

— Agri Ismaïl (@a9ri) January 15, 2019

I encourage you to investigate yourself. Click the links each news outlet provided as sources. Most of them are non-verified folks with fewer than 10 followers—users who make up what’s often referred to as “local Twitter,” or the people you went to high school with who still tweet things like, “Just enjoying a peanut butter #sandwich and watching #TheBachelor! #Yum!”

The angry customers who inspired so many articles weren’t organizing by the thousands outside Gillette’s corporate office; they were posting low-res photos of their toilet bowls, showing off the Gillette razors they tried to flush. The most high profile figure to complain about the Gillette ad online was Piers Morgan, noted conservative malcontent and beleaguered baby boomer. And man, Piers Morgan hates everything.

News outlets reporting on “controversies” by gathering three angry tweets is a toxic pattern. It’s fake news by definition, creating a story where there is none just to generate clicks. Entertainment outlets do it when they “report” on fan theories, and political pundits were guilty of commenting on a non-story like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez having danced once in college. You trace these stories back to their origin points and you find, well, nothing. Before long, once a few publishers create a narrative about a backlash, there’s a backlash to that backlash, and then we all have to spend weeks clicking through content that’s unproductive and misleading. It has to stop.

Publishers need to exercise caution when empowering individual Reddit and Twitter users, and treating them like experts. If you take a stance on any issue or topic, there will always be someone who disagrees. That quest for false balance is one of the reasons people have trust issues with the media. Think of it this way: If a media outlets like BBC had never labeled this a controversy, would Piers Morgan have even cared?

If there is a lesson for brands to learn here, it’s not to be afraid of backlash for socially conscious marketing. Advocating for a good cause, as long as it’s integral to your company��s mission, is important. If you get negative feedback, chances are you’re just hearing the voices of an angry minority that might not even be in your target audience.

As New York Magazine writer Jesse Singal wrote in 2017, “What risk-averse executives and social-media managers often fail to realize is that the subset of people who use social media do not represent the broader world, and further, that the subset of people who get extremely mad on social media don’t even represent the subset of people who use social media.” It’s all an illusion. And the more we expose the way this cheap trick works, the easier it’ll be for everyone to focus on what’s actually important.

from http://bit.ly/2S1TYln

#Online Marketing

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andrewuttaro · 4 years ago

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State of the Support (S2-Ep.2): Outside Help

State of the Support is a reoccurring series on American professional soccer written from a fan perspective. This series will follow the ups and downs of Soccer Support in Rochester, NY and the surrounding region in one of its most trying times in decades.

You don’t know what you got until it’s gone. Save for a few work stoppages in different pro leagues most of us have no memory of sports being called off at this scale. In the three months since the last State of the Support blog a lot has happened in the world. So much has happened in fact that it feels a bit crass to talk about soccer right now with any degree of urgency. Life has changed for a while.

This blog also affirms Black Lives Matter. I wrote a pretty extensive personal blog about the issues brought back into focus by the George Floyd murder and the resulting civil unrest. Its called Same Humans Different Worlds and its up on this same blog if you want to take a look.

As I try to talk about soccer in the world as it is right now I’m thankful to say there are uncorroborated new developments. In the three months since we last shared this blog we’ve also seen ROC City Boom put a footprint down in spite of their season being delayed due to COVID19. On one hand nothing new has truly happened on the Rhinos front but on the other hand several things seem to be evolving in Rochester Soccer right now including something with the Rhinos. Let’s start with the Rhinos who may not be as long gone as we thought.

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There have been rumors that outside groups have been working with the Dworkins on the Rhinos situation since early 2019. Whether that be additional owners joining the group or just consulting firms helping with what seems to be an inevitable rebrand, the talk in the rumor mill has been consistent in the Post-Stadium part or this hiatus. At the beginning of the month a new Reddit user named Rocbucks commented on an old post of mine in the r/Rhinossoccer subreddit. After they didn’t respond to a reply to their comment I direct messaged them where they more readily communicated.

Rocbucks claims to be someone “…working for months to create a proposal drawing together local leaders in soccer and management of sport organizations that will redevelop pro soccer in Rochester.” One of this person’s initial claims was a 2022 return to play was in store for the Rhinos after marshalling community partnerships that would be “worth the wait.” Say what you will about how COVID19 changes the trajectory of soccer in this country, 2021 was the pre-existing expectation after Pat Ercoli’s August 2019 interview and David Dworkin’s December 2019 Statement. Specifically stating there was going to be another year-long lent some early credibility to Rocbucks’ claims.

Yes, I asked for some more details. Before we got into privileged information (which trust me is barely anything in addition to what I can tell you) This source confirmed they are not one of the Dworkins or anyone employed by the Rhinos nor are they the rumored NISA Rochester group. They claimed to have had several meaningful conversations with the Rhinos about that club going forward and that they were welcomed help. It’s also worth nothing Rocbucks insinuated they’re part of a larger group doing this consulting work. Moreover the group Rocbucks is a part of is one of three involved in the Rhinos’ situation who came together on this project once they realized how each of them could benefit from a revitalized pro soccer scene in Rochester.

The Rocbucks groups as I’ll call them have apparently been involved with the Rhinos case for a year now placing their arrival on this front in late May/early June 2019. That timeline tracks based on what we know about the hiatus timeline so far. That would’ve been about seven months after the Dworkins settled with the City to leave the downtown stadium. They would’ve been looking for some second opinions planning for this next chapter. Rocbucks was however tight lipped on any concrete plans except to say the Rocbucks groups will soon be moving into focus groups and other forms of community listening.

Upon further questioning Rocbucks confirmed they had also had contact with Jake Edwards and the USL League Office. If Rocbucks is telling the truth than the groups we’re talking about here are fully engaged consulting firms or local businesses that stand to gain from pro soccer making a comeback here. I cannot confirm that however and its important to note no such group has been revealed by the Dworkins or anyone in the USL League Office. I cannot independently verify any of this but if these things are true Rocbucks leads me to believe some big developments with the Rhinos are due this calendar year.

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On the fully confirmed front of Soccer in Rochester: the ROC City Boom have had an interesting few months since their January unveiling. Even in the face of a global pandemic it seems the new UPSL amateur soccer team is doing all the right things to work their way into the hearts of Rochesterians. Pausing their social media output for a month and a half, they began tweeting again at the end of April hoping that when UPSL returns their place in the Downtown stadium would allow for some fans properly socially distanced.

At the end of May the amateur side announced their hiring of General Manager Isaac Kissi. Kissi was an MLS draftee in 2010 and played for the Rhinos from 2010-2012. An injury ended his soccer career, but he has since gone into medicine now finding himself on the front lines of the Coronavirus battle working the ICU in Buffalo and COVID testing in Rochester. Kissi immediately became part of the Rochester Soccer community on social media. On June 20th, the Boom tweeted a shoutout video from former USMNT and MLS player Freddy Adu, a string one can assume Kissi was able to pull for soccer fans in Rochester.

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While the existence of an almost 14,000 seat soccer specific stadium in any City comes with the potential to attract pro and amateur soccer clubs alike, the downtown stadium here in Rochester has laid dormant more than anything else since the Rhinos went on hiatus. It’s been almost three years! If my uncorroborated source today is correct it will likely be almost five years before there is pro soccer again in Rochester. It’s somewhat morbidly funny to think about all that’s happened in that time. This got me thinking.

On Friday I will be posting the Rochester Rhinos Hiatus Timeline. The idea here is to recount the broad strokes of the hiatus in order to not only understand where it maybe going but also help out-of-towners understand the situation at hand. If we’re looking at five years without pro soccer in this City this hiatus will represent a whole phase of soccer’s history here in Rochester.

To anyone who may have information about or looking to be informed about soccer in Rochester, NY, feel free to reach me on twitter @Pastagut or Reddit at u/EternalRhino15. If you wish to share privileged information about yet-to-be announced soccer developments know that I will respect your identity with anonymity if you so desire. Also its fun just to talk in these crazy times. This blog is not just about Rochester soccer or even the sport in the larger surrounding region, it’s about building a community of supporters.

Thanks for Reading.

#rochester new york #ROC #rochester #soccer #USL #USL League One #UPSL

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click2watch · 6 years ago

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From Mar-a-Lago to Coinbase, Dubious Claims Follow Doc.com Token Sales

Most notable is the inclusion of Mozilla CEO John Lilly and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman on a page of advisors and mentors.

But the way the platform functions has raised questions about its token rewards and the security of its users’ health data.

Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation, told CoinDesk: “This project deserves a lot of scrutiny and has a lot of red flags.”

Coinbase declined to issue a public comment for this story.

Brand-name partnerships?

The UNODC did not respond to an independent inquiry about this initiative.

Nader told CoinDesk there were plans to audit the code “at some point,” without specifying concrete plans with any firm or group.

Warning signs

Another “red flag” noted by Gladstein is that conversations in the company’s social channels are primarily focused on the startup itself and the asset’s trading potential, not app users.

“It’s a utility token, it’s not a dividend,” Diaz told CoinDesk. “It’s a representation of the data that is being processed on the blockchain.”

Otherwise, he said, users are trusting the startup to control this token’s inflation so they can actually afford to buy medical services with their token rewards, regardless of external trading.

Gladstein added:

“They [Doc.com] are able to do this because for every person who knows what happened with ICOs, there’s 100 who haven’t learned yet.”

More blockchains

Still, Doc.com believes it has answers to these questions.

Speaking to Doc.com’s global expansion beyond Latin America, Kahara said:

“The data that is collected goes specifically to research that will benefit these populations…We hope within one year we will be able to cover most countries in Africa.”

Image of (left to right) billionaire Sandro Salsano, Doc.com CEO Charles Nader and Forbes Latin America Chairman Mariano Menéndez at Mar-a-Lago via Doc.com

This news post is collected from CoinDesk