#this remains a monster rights advocacy blog

[tyrannuspitch]

just finished watching the girl with all the gifts. joining the war on cordyceps on the side of the cordyceps. Melanie Did Nothing Wrong

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Facebook algorithm boosts pro-Facebook news

Facebook is a rotten company, rotten from the top down, its founder, board and top execs are sociopaths and monsters, committers of non-hyperbolic, no-fooling crimes against humanity. They lie, they cheat, they steal. They are some of history’s greatest villains. Because Facebook is a terrible company run by terrible people, it periodically erupts in ghastly scandal. Sometimes whistleblowers or reporters reveal historic crimes, including (but not limited to) deliberately helping to foment genocide.

Sometimes, the scandals are contemporary: either Facebook blithely announces it’s going to do something terrible, or we learn of some terrible thing underway from leaks or investigations.

Thanks to a history of anticompetitive mergers — Whatsapp, Instagram, Onavo and more — based on fraudulent promises to antitrust regulators, Facebook has grown to nearly three billion users — except FB doesn’t have users, really — it has hostages.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/dont-believe-proven-liars-absolute-minimum-standard-prudence-merger-scrutiny

As Facebook’s own internal memos show, the company doesn’t just buy up competitors so users have nowhere to flee to, it also engineers in high “switching costs” to make it more painful to leave the system.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

For example, Facebook’s internal memos show that the manager for its photo products set out to seduce users into entrusting FB with their family photos, because that way quitting Facebook would mean abandoning your memories of your kids, departed grandparents, etc.

Everybody hates Facebook, especially FB users. The point of high switching costs, after all, is to increase the pain of leaving so that FB can dole out more abuse to its users without fearing that they’ll quit the whole enterprise.

FB’s mission is to increase the size of the shit-sandwich they can force you to eat before you walk away. But they’re not mere sadists: shit-sandwiches have a business model: the more hostages they take, the more they can extract from advertisers — their true customers.

The polite term for what FB has is a “two-sided market” (selling advertisers to users and users to advertisers). The technical term is “a monopoly and a monoposony” (a monopsony is a market with a single buyer).

The colloquial term?

“A racket.”

A scam. A bezzle. A blight.

Facebook gouges advertisers on rate cards, then lies about the reach of its ads (like when it lied about the popularity of video, evincing a media-wide “pivot to video” that bankrupted dozens of news- and entertainment-sites).

Facebook didn’t set out to destroy journalism by price-fixing ads, lying to advertisers and media outlets.

FB set out to acquire a monopoly and extract monopoly rents from advertisers and publishers, with a pathological indifference to how these frauds would harm others.

Having shown a willingness to destroy journalists and media outlets to extract a few more billions for its shareholders, Facebook has attracted a lot of enemies in the media.

If you’re a whistleblower with a story to tell, there’s a journalist whose editor will allocate the resources to report your story out in depth. The combination of a rotten company and a lot of pissed off journalists produces a lot of bad ink for the company.

But the fact remains that FB has a vast pool of hostages, billions of them, and it gets to decide what they see, when and how. I used to joke with my human rights activist friends that the best use for Facebook was showing people why and how to leave Facebook.

FB’s response was predictable. As Ryan Mac and Sheera Frenkel write in the New York Times, FB’s Project Amplify is a Zuckerberg-led initiative to systematically promote positive coverage of FB and its founder — including articles that originate with FB itself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/technology/zuckerberg-facebook-project-amplify.html

That is, FB staffers are charged with writing puff pieces about how great the company is, and FB’s algorithm will push these ahead of reporting by actual journalists who present detailed, factual, multi-sourced accounts of the company’s fraudulent and depraved conduct.

Project Amplify marks a pivot from FB’s longstanding policy of issuing insincere apologies for its scandals. Company sources told the reporters that everyone figured out these don’t convince anyone, so the company turned to pushing happy-talk quackspeak instead.

One of the leaders of this project is Alex Schultz, “a 14-year company veteran who was named chief marketing officer last year,” but the major impetus comes from Zuck himself, one of the most hated men on the planet.

Amplify is just one of FB’s strategies for distorting the discourse about itself. In July, it neutered Crowdtangle, an widely used analytics tool that showed that FB’s top posts were unhinged far-right disinformation and conspiracies.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/15/three-wise-zucks-in-a-trenchcoat/#inconvenient-truth

And Facebook has declared all-out legal warfare (accompanied by a disinformation campaign) to kill Adobserver, an NYU project that tracks paid political disinformation on the platform.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck

By shutting down Crowdtangle and Adobserver, FB hopes to control the academic findings about the company’s role in disinformation, hate, and harassment. The company runs its own research portal where academics are expected to access data about the platform.

But as with the journalists who report on it, FB has heaped abuse on the academics who research it.

Its portal data was bad, leaving PhD and masters’ theses are at risk of retraction. Mid-dissertation researchers have been set back to square one.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/2020-election-misinformation-distortions#facebook-sent-flawed-data-to-misinformation-researchers

In retrospect, Facebook’s decision to game its own algorithm to push pro-company quackspeak seems inevitable. It’s not just that no one believes the company’s apologies anymore (if they ever did) — it’s that the company seems incapable of hiring competent spin doctors.

Take the WSJ’s blockbuster “Facebook Files,” a series of reports detailing the company’s willingness to harm children, commit fraud, and allow millions of favored, powerful people to violate its rules with impunity.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-09-16/facebook-s-promised-to-gain-the-public-s-trust

FB’s response was genuinely pathetic. In a perfunctory blog post, its top flack — the widely despised British politician Nick Clegg, paid millions to front FB on the global stage — vilified the WSJ’s reporting without producing any factual rebuttals.

https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/what-the-wall-street-journal-got-wrong/

It’s the kind of ham-fisted policy advocacy that Facebook is (in)famous for. Who can forget the absolute shitshow in India over its Internet Basics program, when it bribed telcos to exempt FB and the services it hand-picked from their data-caps?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/12/facebook-free-basics-india-zuckerberg

This Net-Neutracidal maneuver, falsely billed as a way to bring the internet to poor people (something is absolutely does not do), was the subject of a consultation by India’s telco regulators.

FB pushed deceptive alerts to millions of its Indian users, tricking them into sending a flood of form-letters to the regulator urging it to leave Internet Basics intact.

But whoever drafted the form letter didn’t bother to check whether it addressed any of the questions the regulator was consulting on. That made these millions of letters non-responsive to the consultation, so the regulator ignored them.

FB lost! It’s almost as though people who are good at fighting policy battles don’t want to work for Facebook, and the only talent they can attract are the kinds of opportunistic blunderers that no one takes seriously and everyone hates.

Weird, that.

[marymosley]

“Giant Warning”: Iowa State Professor Attempts To Ban Students Who Question Black Lives Matter, Abortion, Or Other Forms Of “Othering”

Iowa State University is embroiled in a controversy this week that involves two of the favorite subjects of this blog academic freedom and freedom of speech.  At the center of the controversy is ISU English Professor Chloe Clark who issued a syllabus for her English 250 class that banned students from expressing opposing to Black Lives Matter, abortion, same sex marriage or other causes or groups. She warns students that they will be dismissed and “I take this seriously.” Iowa State has intervened after an outcry and forced Clark to remove the language.

The syllabus reportedly contained that following warning (not just a warning actually, but a “GIANT WARNING”):

“GIANT WARNING: any instances of othering that you participate in intentionally (racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, [sic], sorophobia, transphobia, classism, mocking of mental health issues, body shaming, etc) in class are grounds for dismissal from the classroom… You cannot choose any topic that takes at its base that one side doesn’t deserve the same basic human rights as you do (ie: no arguments against gay marriage, abortion, Black Lives Matter,etc). I take this seriously.”

Sidenote: I could not find a good definition for “sorophobia” as a form of “othering.” I did find this reference to a work on  “sorophobia” on the differences among women in literature and the need  to stop “the process of destructive ‘othering’ and … to continue the process of recognizing difference while refusing to re-create negative images of otherness.” If anyone has a good definition, let us know. Notably, Clark participates in an online publication called “Cotton Xenomorph” which explains its “no creeps” policy as “anything with language of oppression. That means: prejudice, racism, xenophobia, classism, sexism, ableism, serophobia, fat-shaming, intolerance of religion, homophobia, etc.”  “Serophobia” is a fear of people with HIV or contracting HIV. The Iowa State Daily did explain how Clark led a “Feminist Friday” focus group that discussed her use of “monster theory” to combat “othering,” or judging those who are different.

Putting nomenclature aside, Iowa State did take a stand for free speech and issued the following statement through a spokesperson:

“The syllabus statement as written was inconsistent with the university’s standards and its commitment to the First Amendment rights of students. After reviewing the issue with the faculty member, the syllabus has been corrected to ensure it is consistent with university policy . . . Moreover, the faculty member is being provided additional information regarding the First Amendment policies of the University . . . Iowa State is firmly committed to protecting the First Amendment rights of its students, faculty, and staff. With respect to student expression in the classroom including the completion of assignments, the university does not take disciplinary action against students based on the content or viewpoints expressed in their speech.”

That is a strong and commendable statement for those who are concerned about a rising orthodoxy and intolerance on our campuses. Of course, the “giant warning” of Professor Clark will remain a giant concern of students over her tolerance for opposing views even without the express speech bans.

Notably, like many academics who incongruously oppose free speech and free though, Professor Clark seems to display the very bias that she says she loathes.  “Otherism” has been defined as “the exclusion of a person based on their perceived diversions from an acceptable norm.” That would seem precisely what Clark is doing in silencing those who depart from her own acceptable norm.

The controversy is reminiscent of another recent controversy (out of LSU) where Professor Alyssa Johnson asked her colleagues for the names of any students who they believe espouse hateful views so she could ban them from her classes.  There is a sense of entitlement among such academics today in the enforcement of an ideology or orthodoxy.  It is a view that comes from a cultural shift on our faculties not just in terms of ideology but pedagogy.

Recently, the American Association of University Professors gave an award to a controversial academic in recognition for work that “transcends the division between scholarship and activism that encumbers traditional university life.” I have no problem with the award or the professor’s advocacy. Indeed, I have defended the right of faculty on the left and right to speak freely on social media and in support of political causes. However, the idea that the division between scholarship and activism “encumbers traditional university life” was startling. There is a role for such a separation of our roles as advocates outside of the classroom and our role as academics inside the classroom. Our students come to learn not to be indoctrinated by our personal political and ideological bias.  Professor Clark is the inevitable result of the erosion of that distinction.  It is the difference between pedagogy and orthodoxy.

  “Giant Warning”: Iowa State Professor Attempts To Ban Students Who Question Black Lives Matter, Abortion, Or Other Forms Of “Othering” published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/