industryterm:social media platforms

  • How owning an Instagram-famous pet changes your politics.
    https://www.salon.com/2019/06/23/how-owning-an-instagram-famous-pet-changes-your-politics

    Ici on apprend que...
    – l’acquisition de followers instagram est big business
    – il faut une équipe composé de la star, du talent pour dessiner, photogrphier, écrire, entretenir des relations, gérer les finances ...
    – une mission et un message clair qui touchent un naximum d’intéressés
    – ne pas souffrir d’une allergie contre toute forme de commercialisation.

    –> les petits enfants et les animaux domestiques ou vivant en groupes familiales constituent le contenu de base idéal.
    #fcknstgrm #seenthis-pour-les-nuls

    Owners of social media–famous animals say the experience has shaped their politics and beliefs

    Matthew Rozsa, June 23, 2019 11:30PM (UTC)

    I must begin this article with a confession: If it weren’t for my fiancee, I never would have gotten so deep into the world of Instagram-famous pets.

    To say that they give her joy is an understatement. Many restful slumbers have been disrupted by her random exclamations of unbridled happiness, followed by her pressing an iPhone against my face while cooing, “Look at the adorable dog!” or “Isn’t this the most beautiful pig in the world?”

    At first I affectionately teased her for her obsession, but then I began to dig a little deeper. What I soon learned — first from a trip to Canada last year to visit the famous Esther the Wonder Pig and then from my own research — is that animal social media stars are more than just cute pets. They are at the vanguard of a new way of viewing humanity’s relationship with other species — one that has left a positive impact on the larger world.

    “We raise awareness for the Toronto Humane Society and the Basset Hound Rescue of Ontario on our social media platforms through posts and live broadcasts,” Nathan Sidon, who along with Carly Bright co-owns Dean the Basset, told Salon by email. Incidentally, Dean the Basset has over 400,000 followers across social media platforms.

    “We also donate a significant portion of the account’s profits to these charities (over $5,000 in the last 12 months),” Sidon adds. “It’s hard to follow Dean’s account and not see how much love, attention and care he’s showered with daily.... It’s my hope that our greatest contribution to this cause is by setting an example to all pet owners and anyone considering getting a pet of how to be the best pet-owner you can be.”

    According to Sidon, he and Bright believe that “pets are a privilege and that animals in your care should be made a top priority.” He added, though, that “in our case we’ve gone so far that whether or not we’ve become Dean’s slaves is a legitimate question. I think this really shines through on Dean’s account. He’s calling the shots!”

    Salon also emailed Gemma Gené, whose social media presence includes not only pictures of her beloved pug Mochi, but also a comic series that colorfully depicts his ebullient personality.

    “I was working as an architect in my first big job in New York,” Gené recalled when asked about how she met Mochi. “It was my dream job at the time but unfortunately the hours were crazy. I used to finish work at night every day and I had to work most weekends. I missed my dog Mochi so much during work. I always liked comics and used comic as a journal. I started drawing little stories about Mochi on my subway commutes. I posted them on Instagram and eventually they become big enough that I was able to focus on my art work.”

    Now she says that she has 250,000 followers on Instagram, over 50,000 on Facebook and over a 100,000 visits every day.

    “We have participated in several campaigns,” Gené told Salon when asked about her animal rights work. “We were part of Susie’s Senior Dogs and Foster dogs NYC #famousfosters campaign where they pair people who have big audiences with a senior dog to foster. This is a great way to show how important fostering is. We fostered a little senior that we renamed Dorito and was adopted after a very few days.”

    Gené says that she donates her artwork to raise money for dog rescues — including pug rescues.

    “A cause that is very dear to our hearts is the ’Animals are not property’ petition the Animal Legal Defense Fund is working on,” Gené explained. “We try to use our influence to share this message to help change the laws on animals so they stop being considered an object and start having rights.”

    “A big part of our work presents Mochi as a little character with a big personality, much closer to a human than what most people think of dogs. We are trying to show the world that animals are much more than objects and that have many more similarities to us than what we think,” she adds.

    Salon also reached out to Steve Jenkins, who, along with Derek Walter, co-owns Esther the Wonder Pig. They told Salon that their various social media pages have roughly 2,000,000 followers and garner around 450,000 interactions every week.

    “Esther was supposed to be a mini-pig, we never had any intention of anything else,” Jenkins wrote to Salon. “By the time we realized Esther wasn’t what we thought she was, and that she would in fact be many hundreds of pounds, we had fallen in love with her and weren’t willing to give up. Technically having a family member like Esther was illegal where we lived, so we kept it quiet and opted to make a ’little Facebook page’ to show our more removed friends and family what was happening. The page went viral somehow, and all of a sudden we had thousands of people checking in every day to see what she was up to.”

    Their ownership of Esther soon caused them to become full-time animal rights activists, eventually purchasing a farm where they keep pigs, dogs, turkeys, horses and at least one (literally) strutting peacock.

    “We have been able to establish the Happily Ever Esther Farm Sanctuary, where we rescue abused and abandoned farm animals,” Jenkins explained. “We donated the largest CT scanner in the world to our local veterinary hospital. Until then, the didn’t have equipment large enough to properly get proper diagnostic images for an animal Esther’s size. We also established a fund called ’Esther Shares’ that we use to pay the medical bills for other sanctuaries and rescue organization. Last but not least, we use our pages to help people build a relationship with Esther, something that can have a deep and lasting impact on the person’s life because of their newfound love and respect for pigs.”

    Jenkins, like Gené and Sidon, also told Salon that he began to reevaluate how human beings view their relationship with animals.

    “We think everybody has a connection with animals, but we learn over time to love some animals differently than others,” Jenkins explained. “Esther really leveled that playing field in our mind, and elevated farm animals to the position we previously reserved for companion animals like cats and dogs. She ignited a passion within us that we didn’t know we had. It became a mission of our to help others see Esther the way did, and to bring her larger than life personality across in a way that people could relate to.”

    These arguments are what makes the social media movements so powerful — and why, I suspect, my fiancee is so enamored with them. It is easy to objectify animals, to view them as vessels for whatever immediate function they can provide human beings (food, clothing, recreation). Yet by presenting their animals online as hilarious personalities, with quirks and stories of their own worth following, these sites help us see animals as more than just tools of human beings. They become individuals — and, like all individuals, worthy of not just affection, but respect.

    Gené, Jenkins and Sidon also had heartwarming stories about how their social media work had improved the lives of the two-legged animals who visit them.

    “Through photos and videos requested by fans, Dean has helped a teenager ask a girl to prom, surprised a bride on her wedding day, been the theme of a 90 year old woman’s [birthday] party, and the list goes on,” Sidon told Salon. “We’ve also received hundreds of very personal messages from fans around the world telling us that Dean’s account has provided them with a much needed daily dose of positivity that’s helped them when they’re going through difficult times in their life. Suffice to say that Dean gets a lot of love from around the world and he hopes to give the love back!”

    Jenkins had a similar story about Esther.

    “My favorite message ever came from a young mother in the southern United States,” Jenkins recalled. “She was having a rough time emotionally, and found Esther’s page was becoming a bit of a crutch for her. She would check every day to see what we were up to, and engage with our posts as a way to take her mind off stuff. One day she sent a message to let us know that we had been the source of most of her smiles lately. She wanted to thank us for helping keep a positive attitude, and for helping her show her two small boys that it was ok to have two dads [Jenkins is in a same-sex relationship with Walter] and a turkey for a brother. A family is a family no matter what it looks like, and I still well up when I think about her message.”

    Gené discussed how lucky she is to “have a very loving audience,” telling Salon that “we get hundreds of messages a day telling us the impact our comic has on people and they really fuel us to keep going. Some of them particularly warm my heart like when people say that our comics make them smile when they are going through a difficult time, or when they bring back sweet memories of an animal they loved that passed away.”

    She added, “If one day we don’t post anything, we get messages of people checking up on us. That made us realize we have a community that look forward to our posts daily.”

    I should add, on a final personal note, that I do not write this article from a position of presumed moral superiority. Despite vowing to eliminate my meat consumption since I visited the Esther farm last year, I have only been able to somewhat reduce it, and aside from writing pieces like this I can’t claim to have done very much to advance the cause of animal rights in my own life. Sometimes I suspect the plaque which clogs my arteries is karmic, a punishment for sustaining my own life at the expense of those animals who have given theirs, and one that will likely shorten my own time in this world.

    The goal here is not to shame those who eat meat, or search for a firm distinction between companion animals and farm animals. The point is that social media’s animals stars have made more people think of animals as individuals — to start to see them as living souls. That isn’t enough to solve the problems facing our world today, but it’s the only place where we can start.

    #animaux #business #politique #morale #affaires #instagram #médias

  • Opinion | I Shouldn’t Have to Publish This in The New York Times - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/opinion/future-free-speech-social-media-platforms.html

    Une nouvelle de Cory Doctorow sur la régulation des plateformes : briser les monopoles, ou leur laisser le choix d’être eux-mêmes les régulateurs algorithmiques de l’expression de chacun.

    Editors’ note: This is part of a series, “Op-Eds From the Future,” in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write Op-Eds that they imagine we might read 10, 20 or even 100 years from now. The challenges they predict are imaginary — for now — but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today and prepare us for tomorrow. The opinion piece below is a work of fiction.

    I shouldn’t have to publish this in The New York Times.

    Ten years ago, I could have published this on my personal website, or shared it on one of the big social media platforms. But that was before the United States government decided to regulate both the social media platforms and blogging sites as if they were newspapers, making them legally responsible for the content they published.

    The move was spurred on by an unholy and unlikely coalition of media companies crying copyright; national security experts wringing their hands about terrorism; and people who were dismayed that our digital public squares had become infested by fascists, harassers and cybercriminals. Bit by bit, the legal immunity of the platforms was eroded — from the judges who put Facebook on the line for the platform’s inaction during the Provo Uprising to the lawmakers who amended section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in a bid to get Twitter to clean up its Nazi problem.

    While the media in the United States remained protected by the First Amendment, members of the press in other countries were not so lucky. The rest of the world responded to the crisis by tightening rules on acceptable speech. But even the most prolific news service — a giant wire service like AP-AFP or Thomson-Reuters-TransCanada-Huawei — only publishes several thousand articles per day. And thanks to their armies of lawyers, editors and insurance underwriters, they are able to make the news available without falling afoul of new rules prohibiting certain kinds of speech — including everything from Saudi blasphemy rules to Austria’s ban on calling politicians “fascists” to Thailand’s stringent lese majeste rules. They can ensure that news in Singapore is not “out of bounds” and that op-eds in Britain don’t call for the abolition of the monarchy.

    But not the platforms — they couldn’t hope to make a dent in their users’ personal expressions. From YouTube’s 2,000 hours of video uploaded every minute to Facebook-Weibo’s three billion daily updates, there was no scalable way to carefully examine the contributions of every user and assess whether they violated any of these new laws. So the platforms fixed this the Silicon Valley way: They automated it. Badly.

    Which is why I have to publish this in The New York Times.

    The platforms and personal websites are fine if you want to talk about sports, relate your kids’ latest escapades or shop. But if you want to write something about how the platforms and government legislation can’t tell the difference between sex trafficking and sex, nudity and pornography, terrorism investigations and terrorism itself or copyright infringement and parody, you’re out of luck. Any one of those keywords will give the filters an incurable case of machine anxiety — but all of them together? Forget it.

    If you’re thinking, “Well, all that stuff belongs in the newspaper,” then you’ve fallen into a trap: Democracies aren’t strengthened when a professional class gets to tell us what our opinions are allowed to be.

    And the worst part is, the new regulations haven’t ended harassment, extremism or disinformation. Hardly a day goes by without some post full of outright Naziism, flat-eartherism and climate trutherism going viral. There are whole armies of Nazis and conspiracy theorists who do nothing but test the filters, day and night, using custom software to find the adversarial examples that slip past the filters’ machine-learning classifiers.

    It didn’t have to be this way. Once upon a time, the internet teemed with experimental, personal publications. The mergers and acquisitions and anticompetitive bullying that gave rise to the platforms and killed personal publishing made Big Tech both reviled and powerful, and they were targeted for breakups by ambitious lawmakers. Had we gone that route, we might have an internet that was robust, resilient, variegated and dynamic.

    Think back to the days when companies like Apple and Google — back when they were stand-alone companies — bought hundreds of start-ups every year. What if we’d put a halt to the practice, re-establishing the traditional antitrust rules against “mergers to monopoly” and acquiring your nascent competitors? What if we’d established an absolute legal defense for new market entrants seeking to compete with established monopolists?

    Most of these new companies would have failed — if only because most new ventures fail — but the survivors would have challenged the Big Tech giants, eroding their profits and giving them less lobbying capital. They would have competed to give the best possible deals to the industries that tech was devouring, like entertainment and news. And they would have competed with the news and entertainment monopolies to offer better deals to the pixel-stained wretches who produced the “content” that was the source of all their profits.

    But instead, we decided to vest the platforms with statelike duties to punish them for their domination. In doing so, we cemented that domination. Only the largest companies can afford the kinds of filters we’ve demanded of them, and that means that any would-be trustbuster who wants to break up the companies and bring them to heel first must unwind the mesh of obligations we’ve ensnared the platforms in and build new, state-based mechanisms to perform those duties.

    Our first mistake was giving the platforms the right to decide who could speak and what they could say. Our second mistake was giving them the duty to make that call, a billion times a day.

    Still, I am hopeful, if not optimistic. Google did not exist 30 years ago; perhaps in 30 years’ time, it will be a distant memory. It seems unlikely, but then again, so did the plan to rescue Miami and the possibility of an independent Tibet — two subjects that are effectively impossible to discuss on the platforms. In a world where so much else is up for grabs, finally, perhaps, we can once again reach for a wild, woolly, independent and free internet.

    It’s still within our reach: an internet that doesn’t force us to choose between following the algorithmically enforced rules or disappearing from the public discourse; an internet where we can host our own discussions and debate the issues of the day without worrying that our words will disappear. In the meantime, here I am, forced to publish in The New York Times. If only that were a “scalable solution,” you could do so as well.

    Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) is a science fiction writer whose latest book is “Radicalized,” a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an M.I.T. Media Lab research affiliate.

    #Cory_Doctorow #Régulation_internet #Plateformes #Liberté_expression #Monopoles

  • Token Underground 0x2: wtf is Mithril’s ‘social mining’?
    https://hackernoon.com/token-underground-0x2-wtf-is-mithrils-social-mining-753df728804a?source=

    Token Underground 0x2: WTF is Mithril’s ‘Social Mining’?We went in depth on #Mithril Token with this one goal: to lay down some pain points of the existing token model for the Mithril team and the #blockchain community at large, and prompt further discussion and feedback.Token Underground is back with the next chapter of our ‘token bullsh*t filter’ journey.This time we review the economic model of MITH — a native token of Mithril decentralized social media platform. Our choice was affected by the recent rumor swirling around Facebook and Telegram launching crypto tokens, and more general thoughts on implications of introducing a token into social media platforms of all sorts. We’re also coming from an odd observation that Mithril has long been sitting in CMC top-100 without any comprehensive (...)

    #token-economy #web3

  • Explained : The #snax Trustless Authentication Protocol
    https://hackernoon.com/snax-trustless-authentication-protocol-f925216ae7d2?source=rss----3a8144

    The fundamental #technology that allows Snax to operate is the binding of the #blockchain transactions together with accounts on the social media platforms such as Twitter, Reddit and so on.Snax blockchain allows you to send transactions to any account name on any public platform integrated into Snax without prior invoicing from the recipient (we call those Social Transactions).You can be certain that the transaction will reach the recipient without having to rely on a centralized third party (apart, of course, from the social platform itself). This article will explain how Snax Trustless Authentication Protocol works using the example of authentication of the Twitter account.Don’t trust. But Verify.This is the main principle of building an open cryptographic system, including blockchain (...)

    #social-network #social-media

  • Newspapers help to radicalise far right, says UK anti-terror chief
    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/20/newspapers-help-radicalise-far-right-uk-anti-terror-chief-neil-basu

    Britain’s counter-terrorism chief has said far-right terrorists are being radicalised by mainstream newspaper coverage, while also criticising the hypocrisy of outlets such as Mail Online, which uploaded the “manifesto” of the gunman in the Christchurch terror attack.

    Neil Basu, one of Britain’s top police officers, said it was ironic that while newspapers have repeatedly criticised the likes of Facebook and Google for hosting extremist content, sites including the Sun and the Mirror rushed to upload clips of footage filmed by the gunman as he attacked two mosques in New Zealand.

    “The same media companies who have lambasted social media platforms for not acting fast enough to remove extremist content are simultaneously publishing uncensored Daesh [Islamic State] propaganda on their websites, or make the rambling ‘manifestos’ of crazed killers available for download,” Basu said in an open letter to the media on how to report terrorism.

    • He cited the 2017 terror attack in Finsbury Park in London as an example of where a man was “driven to an act of terror by far-right messaging he found mostly on mainstream media”.

  • Body politics: The old and new public health risks of networked health misinformation
    https://points.datasociety.net/body-politics-the-old-and-new-public-health-risks-of-networked-h

    There are clear parallels between the tactics used to spread health disinformation and political content. For instance, in 2018, researchers found that large networks of bots and trolls were spreading anti-vaccination rhetoric to sow confusion online and amplify the appearance of an anti-vaccination community. The anti-vaccination tweets often referenced conspiracy theories, and some accounts almost singularly focused on the U.S. government. As a result, real-life users and orchestrated networks of bots are engaged in a feedback loop. Recently, political public figures have used their platform to amplify vaccination misinformation, such as tweeting that measles can help fight cancer. There is a long history of people using influence to sway public opinion about vaccines—particularly among celebrities.

    These are symptoms of a larger societal crisis: disinformation campaigns aimed to undermine social institutions.

    The search and recommendation algorithms that underpin our information retrieval systems are other modern tools mediating access to health information. When a user enters an inquiry into a search engine, they receive curated results. As so many people rely on search engines for health information, they are another important mechanism that is susceptible to manipulation. For instance, the websites of some crisis pregnancy centers—which are designed to look and sound like those of clinics that provide abortion care, but instead give misleading information about the negative effects of abortion to visitors—are optimized results for Google searches often made by women seeking abortion information.

    Similarly, recommendation systems on popular social media platforms, particularly Facebook and YouTube, create easy entry points for problematic content. For example, a mother joining a generic parenting group on Facebook may subsequently receive recommendations for anti-vaxx groups. Bots, search engine optimization, and gaming of recommendation systems are foundational tools used by various actors to influence public health discourse and skew public debates — often blurring the line between medical mistrust and larger political ideologies and agendas.

    #Information_médicale #Santé_publique #Vaccination #Complotisme #Médias_sociaux #Algorithmes

  • #facebook Coin : A Necessary Evil ?
    https://hackernoon.com/facebook-coin-a-necessary-evil-3a9ad3414abe?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3--

    UnsplashSeemingly, Facebook has transcended beyond the negative notions surrounding the cryptosphere. Not long back, in January 2018, Facebook imposed a blanket ban on the promotion of digital currencies and ICOs on its social media platforms. However, recently, the news of Facebook launching its own #cryptocurrency in the first half of 2019 took the #blockchain industry by a storm. The announcement received a mixed reaction from the crypto community. Some are sceptical of the launch while others, excited.Much before this news came out, there was already a buzz about Facebook rapidly expanding its blockchain and crypto team, since its commencement in May 2018. Its website still has a number of job openings for its blockchain team. Amidst all this, what wasn’t anticipated was that Facebook (...)

    #bitcoin #facebook-coin

  • #chatroulette (without the dicks) was the “Healthy” Social Media
    https://hackernoon.com/chatroulette-without-the-dicks-was-the-healthy-social-media-c7ec09ed2307

    There’s little doubt that today’s most popular social media platforms have some undesirable side effects, many of which affect behavior on these platforms as well as the mental health of users more generally. While, it’s incredibly difficult to quantify the potential negative effects of specific platforms, there is a growing litany of studies attempting to do so. Commonly discussed themes include increased anxiety, stress, loneliness, depression, addiction, envy, lower quality sleep, strained relationships, and lower self-esteem. Sadly, it’s not difficult to imagine why heavy use of Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, or others would elicit such physiological responses.One of my favorite comedians, Bo Burnham, poignantly addressed the genesis of social media in his 2016 Netflix Special (...)

    #chatroulette-social-media #social-media #hackernoon-top-story #mental-health

  • Delete your account : leaving Facebook can make you happier, study finds
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/01/facebook-mental-health-study-happiness-delete-account

    New study from Stanford and NYU finds logging off causes ‘small but significant improvements in wellbeing’ Despite all the scandals of the past year, here we are, still on Facebook, a couple of billion of us spending about an hour a day in its iron grip. Now a new study suggests it’s making us feel bad. That’s in part because we may be addicted. Want to feel better ? Delete Facebook. As some experts have said, the system of rewards set up by Facebook and other social media platforms is akin (...)

    #Facebook #addiction

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b6e8f2374460895563793f4a9aaf99a4e2e3d5f5/0_173_5184_3110/master/5184.jpg

  • Tech Therapy Check-Ins
    https://hackernoon.com/your-technology-therapy-3-quick-check-ins-1d43292f4849?source=rss----3a8

    Over the past few months, I have been called upon several times to play the role of #technology therapist — a role that is sure to be more and more necessary for future generations as technology becomes more intertwined with our daily lives. When talking to my “patients,” I find myself asking these core questions:When did you start using a smart phone?How many apps do you currently monitor?How many times do you check your phone daily?How often is your smart phone at your side?How has social media influenced your relationships?Do you feel anxiety when someone doesn’t respond to you right away?Do you feel judged on the content you share online or pressured to share specific content on social media?Which social media platforms do you currently use?Have you ever taken a hiatus from social media? (...)

    #tech-therapy-checkins #social-media #therapy-check-ins #tech-therapy

  • For The Love of #gif
    https://hackernoon.com/for-the-love-of-gif-644b7305bf3a?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

    GIF Source from Reaction GifsI was talking with a guy named Jason yesterday in the pixEOS Telegram channel and it was a weird moment when I realized we both use GIFs to express our emotions more than any other medium, even talking face-to-face with people.message with JasonHe also told me he quit all the other social media platforms, so Telegram was his remaining way of communicating with people and he said he uses GIFs A LOT. I can’t exactly recall when my own GIF addiction started, but it’s been strong for a while now. There are a number of reasons why I think GIFs are such a big part of my life and why I think they are important.Do You Speak (...)

    #do-you-speak-gif #art #love-of-gif #pop-culture

  • #Facebook: The global censor - World Socialist Web Site
    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/29/pers-d29.html

    Facebook: The global censor
    29 December 2018

    The year 2018 has seen a vast intensification of internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Twitter, transforming them from tools for exchanging information and communicating around the world into massive censorship dragnets for policing what their users say, do and think.

    In August 2017, the World Socialist Web Site published an open letter to Google charging that the company, in collusion with the US government, was working to shape political discourse by manipulating search results. The open letter warned that Google’s actions set a dangerous precedent for subverting constitutional protections of freedom of speech and demanded that the company cease what the WSWS called “political blacklisting” of left-wing sites.

    Sixteen months later, the central argument of the open letter—that Google and its peers are carrying out political censorship—is undeniable. The regime that Google pioneered through its search engine has been expanded to all major US social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

    #censure #réseaux_sociaux

  • How to Skyrocket Your #pinterest #traffic with a Few Simple Strategies
    https://hackernoon.com/how-to-skyrocket-your-pinterest-traffic-with-a-few-simple-strategies-9f5

    You’ve done all that you can to get people to visit your site and buy your products. But somehow, it’s not working as well as you’d expected it to.Well, that’s what we’re here for. To help you drive traffic to your website via Pinterest.A lot of people out there don’t understand how amazing Pinterest is, nor do they know how to use it to help expand their business.HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:15 Hashtag Campaigns That Maximized the Brands’ ReachHow to Monetize Instagram to Earn a FortuneWhich is why we are here to tell you how easy it is to get Pinterest to work to your advantage.Sound good?Let’s begin.Advantages of Driving Traffic from PinterestPinterest plays nice with most of the other social media platforms:Were you aware of the fact that Pinterest is and can be linked to other social media (...)

    #marketing-strategies #hacks #social-media-marketing

  • Here’s why this media scholar changed her mind and now thinks there’s a ’very strong’ case Russia won the 2016 election for Trump | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-media-scholar-changed-her-mind-and-now-thinks-theres-very-strong

    I originally thought that the idea that the Russians could have used social media to create a substantial impact on the election was absurd. I started to change my mind when I saw the first release of Russian social media and troll campaign ads and messaging during the U.S. Senate hearings in October and November of last year. These ads were a coherent plan and understanding of the presidential election which was consistent with Donald Trump’s political needs.

    If acted on systematically, these ads would have produced a communication effect that on the margins could have affected enough votes to change the outcome of the election in his favor. If the Russians didn’t have a coherent theory of what it took for Donald Trump to win — or what it would take to make it more likely that Hillary Clinton would lose — then all their machinations would not have mattered. But the Russians knew who to mobilize.

    The Russians were trying to mobilize evangelicals and white conservative Catholics. The Russians also knew that they needed to mobilize veterans and military households. The Russians knew they had to demobilize Bernie Sanders supporters and liberals, especially young people. The Russians were also attempting to shift the voters they could not demobilize over to Jill Stein.

    You add that together with demobilizing African-American voters with messaging that Hillary Clinton is bad for the black community, and then Clinton’s whole messaging strategy is at risk. If Hillary Clinton can’t mobilize the black vote at levels near Barack Obama’s, although not the same level, then she is in trouble.

    I then started to examine where the Russians and their trolls spent their time and attention. They were spending more of it on trying to demobilize African-American voters by emphasizing things that group may not like about Hillary Clinton. When a person casts a vote they are not thinking about every detail or issue relative to a candidate. Voters make decisions based on what is most important in that moment of time, what is on the top of their mind.

    So if you remind voters who are African-American that at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency there was a very high level of increased incarceration of African-Americans on drug charges then an African-American voter may say, “Maybe I should think about Hillary Clinton differently.”

    If you remember her “superpredator” comment and take it to be about black people in general and not about gangs specifically, then you as an African-American voter may be less likely to support her.

    By featuring these types of messages, the Russians were increasing the likelihood that while you may not be likely to cast a vote for Donald Trump, you are more likely to stay home and not vote for Hillary Clinton.

    I then started to wonder whether maybe there was enough troll activity that was addressed to the right constituencies to have impacted the margins of the vote. The question then becomes, did the Russians and their trolls target the right voters in the right places? We still don’t know that.

    The social media platforms know the answer, but they have not released the information. The trolls alone could have swung the electorate. But in my judgment the WikiLeaks hacks against the DNC is a much stronger case. There we see a clear effect on the news media agenda. We know from decades of communication scholarship that if you change the media agenda you then change the criteria that people vote on. The shift in the media agenda from October forward was decisively against Hillary Clinton. And the questions in the presidential debates which were based on information stolen by WikiLeaks and the Russians disadvantaged Clinton and, looking at the polling data, predicted the vote.

    President Trump is better at commanding the agenda than he is at any other single thing that he as a communicator does. The press has been an accomplice in the process of ceding agenda control to him by virtue of his tweeting — and having the press respond immediately, as if every tweet is presumed to be newsworthy. Donald Trump has the capacity to get whatever he wants the public to focus on by directing the cable news agenda. We really should ask: Aren’t there other things we ought to be paying more attention to? How often are we being distracted from something that Trump does not want us to pay attention to? Being distracted by his effective use of tweets to set an alternative agenda.

    Fox News is de facto Trump’s state-sponsored media. How does this impact American political culture?

    We are increasingly going into ideological enclaves to get our news. To the extent that people find the news compatible with what they already believe, that means they are not being exposed to alternative interpretations of reality and alternative points of view. What is unprecedented about the relationship between Fox News and the president of the United States is the extent to which what is said and shown on Fox News appears to influence what is said and featured by the president of the United States. The traditional model of agenda-setting is that the president sets the agenda and the news media follows. This reversal with Donald Trump and Fox News is something new.

    #Politique #Médias_sociaux #USA #Trump

  • How Russia Hacked U.S. Politics With Instagram Marketing – Foreign Policy
    https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/17/how-russia-hacked-us-politics-with-instagram-marketing

    The Internet Research Agency took to the photo-sharing network to boost Trump and depress voter turnout.

    Donald Trump as U.S. president, Kremlin operatives running a digital interference campaign in American politics scored a viral success with a post on Instagram.

    The post appeared on the account @blackstagram__, which was in fact being run by the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked troll farm that U.S. authorities say orchestrated an online campaign to boost Trump’s candidacy in 2016. It racked up 254,000 likes and nearly 7,000 comments—huge numbers for the Kremlin campaign.

    But oddly, the post contained no political content.

    Instead, it repurposed an ad for a women’s shoe, with a photo of women of different skin tones wearing the same strappy high heel in different colors. The caption pitched the shoes as a symbol of racial equality: “All the tones are nude! Get over it!

    While the message itself was not aimed at swaying voters in any direction, researchers now believe it served another purpose for the Russian group: It boosted the reach of its account, likely won it new followers, and tried to establish the account’s bona fides as an authentic voice for the black community.

    That advertising pitch was revealed in a report released Monday by the Senate Intelligence Committee and produced by the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge. The report provides the most comprehensive look to date at the Kremlin’s attempt to boost Trump’s candidacy and offers a surprising insight regarding that campaign: Moscow’s operatives operated much like digital marketers, making use of Instagram to reach a huge audience.

    By blending marketing tactics with political messaging, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) established a formidable online presence in the run-up to the 2016 election (and later), generating 264 million total engagements—a measure of activity such as liking and sharing content—and building a media ecosystem across Facebook and Instagram.

    That campaign sought to bring Russian political goals into the mainstream, exacerbate and inflame divisions in American society, and blur the line between truth and fiction, New Knowledge’s report concludes.

    Amid the intense discussion of Russian interference in the 2016 election, investigators probing that campaign had devoted relatively little attention to Instagram until now. But following their exposure in 2016 and early 2017, the IRA’s operatives shifted resources to Instagram, where their content often outperformed its postings on Facebook. (Instagram is owned by Facebook.)

    Of the 133 Instagram accounts created by the IRA, @blackstagram__ was arguably its most successful, with more than 300,000 followers. Its June 2017 ad for the shoe, made by Kahmune, was the most widely circulated post dreamed up by the Kremlin’s operatives—from a total of some 116,000. (The shoe continues to be marketed by Kahmune. Company officials did not respond to questions from Foreign Policy.)

    The authors of the report believe @blackstagram__ served as a vehicle for Kremlin propaganda targeting the American black community, skillfully adopting the language of Instagram, where viral marketing schemes exist side by side with artfully arranged photographs of toast.

    As Americans streamed to the polls on Nov. 8, 2016, @blackstagram__ offered its contribution to the Kremlin’s campaign to depress turnout, borrowing a line from a Michael Jackson song to tell African-Americans that their votes didn’t matter: “Think twice before you vote. All I wanna say is that they don’t really care about us. #Blacktivist #hotnews._

    Special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of investigators have secured indictments against the Internet Research Agency’s owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and a dozen of its employees.

    While the effect of the IRA’s coordinated campaign to depress voter turnout is difficult to assess, the evidence of the group’s online influence is stark. Of its 133 Instagram accounts, 12 racked up more than 100,000 followers—the typical threshold for being considered an online “_influencer” in the world of digital marketing. Around 50 amassed more than 10,000 followers, making them what marketers call “micro-influencers.”

    These accounts made savvy use of hashtags, built relationships with real people, promoted merchandise, and targeted niche communities. The IRA’s most popular Instagram accounts included pages devoted to veterans’ issues (@american.veterans), American Christianity (@army_of_jesus), and feminism (@feminism_tag).

    In a measure of the agency’s creativity, @army_of_jesus appears to have been launched in 2015 as a meme account featuring Kermit the Frog. It then switched subjects and began exclusively posting memes related to the television show The Simpsons. By January 2016, the account had amassed a significant following and reached its final iteration with a post making extensive use of religious hashtags: “#freedom #love #god #bible #trust #blessed #grateful. ” It later posted memes comparing Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to Satan.

    The Internet Research Agency operated like a digital marketing agency: develop a brand (both visual and voice), build presences on all channels across the entire social ecosystem, and grow an audience with paid ads as well as partnerships, influencers, and link-sharing,” the New Knowledge report concludes. “Instagram was perhaps the most effective platform.

    Monday’s report, which was published alongside another by researchers at the University of Oxford and the network analysis firm Graphika, is likely to increase scrutiny of social media platforms. The New Knowledge report accuses technology firms of possibly misleading Congress and says companies have not been sufficiently transparent in providing data related to the Russian campaign.

  • Event Review: Youth Movements and Political Participation in Saudi Arabia - Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy

    http://jmepp.hkspublications.org/2018/11/09/saudi-arabia-mbs-youth-movements-political-participation

    As home to one of the world’s youngest populations, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has in recent years seen a remarkable surge in youth movements that are especially visible online. At an October 26th discussion at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Dr. Kristin Smith Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, argued that this uptick in online political engagement does not necessarily translate to increased political participation.

    To demonstrate the significance of recent political and social shifts within the Kingdom, Diwan provided an overview of Saudi Arabia as it has functioned since its founding in 1932. She emphasized the Kingdom’s dynastic monarchal system, wherein power is largely decentralized and shared among the royal family. Local and global forces are converging to reveal cracks in a few key areas: the Kingdom’s diffuse power structure has hindered decision-making, unstable oil supplies have fostered economic anxiety, and demographic changes have forced a reevaluation of conservative religious movements within the Kingdom. Additionally, as the royal family grows older, King Salman has made a number of moves toward empowering a new generation of leaders by elevating his son, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), to the position of Crown Prince. It is this generational shift in the Kingdom’s leadership that Diwan underlined as she set out to demonstrate that the Kingdom’s shifting power structure, along with its emerging youth movements, are creating a new political environment.

    While the average Saudi king comes into power around age sixty-four, seventy percent of the Kingdom’s population is less than thirty years old. This stark generational divide, coupled with ready access to new technologies and social media platforms, has led to a surge in virtual social movements among Saudi Arabia’s youth. Online communities and artistic collectives have become especially important in Saudi Arabia because they are less bound by the strict standards of behavior that regulate physical public spaces.. Outlets like Twitter and YouTube are essential platforms for youth movements, and Diwan pointed to satirical comedy as a noteworthy medium for political criticism. MBS and his new government have made concerted efforts to capture the energy of these youth movements, enlisting popular comedians and artists to participate in his transition team and engage in cultural diplomacy around the world.

  • Beijing’s Big Brother Tech Needs African Faces
    https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/24/beijings-big-brother-tech-needs-african-faces

    Zimbabwe is signing up for China’s surveillance state, but its citizens will pay the price. Daily life in China is gated by security technology, from the body scanners and X-ray machines at every urban metro station to the demand for ID numbers on social media platforms so that dangerous speech can be traced and punished. Technologies once seen as potentially empowering the public have become tools for an increasingly dictatorial government—tools that Beijing is now determined to sell to the (...)

    #ZTE #algorithme #CCTV #biométrie #facial #surveillance #vidéo-surveillance #CloudWalk #Hikvision (...)

    ##discrimination

  • Je crois qu’il se passe quelque chose d’important par ici :
    https://twitter.com/jack/status/1026984242893357056
    Pas seulement parce que le patron de twitter explique pourquoi #twitter ne va pas clôturer le compte de #Alex_Jones ni de #Infowars, contrairement à la plupart des autres réseaux sociaux, mais parce qu’il réaffirme le besoin de confronter les opinions et surtout de contrer les fausses informations de manière visible, chose que peut se permettre un twitter où les commentaires sont beaucoup plus lus qu’ailleurs...

    If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction. That’s not us.
    Accounts like Jones’ can often sensationalize issues and spread unsubstantiated rumors, so it’s critical journalists document, validate, and refute such information directly so people can form their own opinions. This is what serves the public conversation best.

    Je suis tombée là dessus grâce à un tweet de #Olivier_Tesquet qui fait un article super complet pour telerama sur la descente aux enfers des #GAFAM de Alex Jones :

    La “Big Tech” à l’épreuve du roi des conspirationnistes

    En privant Alex Jones, conspirationniste en chef de l’extrême-droite américaine, de ses comptes Facebook, Spotify ou Youtube, les géants de l’Internet prennent le risque d’ouvrir un débat sur la privatisation de la liberté d’expression.

    https://www.telerama.fr/medias/la-big-tech-a-lepreuve-du-roi-des-conspirationnistes,n5756062.php

    #liberte_d_expression #conspirationnisme #complotisme #extreme_droite ...

  • Why the Cambridge Analytica Scandal Is a Watershed Moment for Social Media - Knowledge Wharton
    http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/fallout-cambridge-analytica

    “We’re experiencing a watershed moment with regard to social media,” said Aral. “People are now beginning to realize that social media is not just either a fun plaything or a nuisance. It can have potentially real consequences in society.”

    The Cambridge Analytica scandal underscores how little consumers know about the potential uses of their data, according to Berman. He recalled a scene in the film Minority Report where Tom Cruise enters a mall and sees holograms of personally targeted ads. “Online advertising today has reached about the same level of sophistication, in terms of targeting, and also some level of prediction,” he said. “It’s not only that the advertiser can tell what you bought in the past, but also what you may be looking to buy.”

    Consumers are partially aware of that because they often see ads that show them products they have browsed, or websites they have visited, and these ads “chase them,” Berman said. “What consumers may be unaware of is how the advertiser determines what they’re looking to buy, and the Cambridge Analytica exposé shows a tiny part of this world.”

    A research paper that Nave recently co-authored captures the potential impact of the kind of work Cambridge Analytica did for the Trump campaign. “On the one hand, this form of psychological mass persuasion could be used to help people make better decisions and lead healthier and happier lives,” it stated. “On the other hand, it could be used to covertly exploit weaknesses in their character and persuade them to take action against their own best interest, highlighting the potential need for policy interventions.”

    Nave said the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposes exactly those types of risks, even as they existed before the internet era. “Propaganda is not a new invention, and neither is targeted messaging in marketing,” he said. “What this scandal demonstrates, however, is that our online behavior exposes a lot about our personality, fears and weaknesses – and that this information can be used for influencing our behavior.”

    In Golbeck’s research projects involving the use of algorithms, she found that people “are really shocked that we’re able to get these insights like what your personality traits are, what your political preferences are, how influenced you can be, and how much of that data we’re able to harvest.”

    Even more shocking, perhaps, is how easy it is to find the data. “Any app on Facebook can pull the kind of data that Cambridge Analytica did – they can [do so] for all of your data and the data of all your friends,” said Golbeck. “Even if you don’t install any apps, if your friends use apps, those apps can pull your data, and then once they have that [information] they can get these extremely deep, intimate insights using artificial intelligence, about how to influence you, how to change your behavior.” But she draws a line there: “It’s one thing if that’s to get you to buy a pair of shoes; it’s another thing if it’s to change the outcome of an election.”

    “Facebook has tried to play both sides of [the issue],” said Golbeck. She recalled a study by scientists from Facebook and the University of California, San Diego, that claimed social media networks could have “a measurable if limited influence on voter turnout,” as The New York Times reported. “On one hand, they claim that they can have a big influence; on the other hand they want to say ‘No, no, we haven’t had any impact on this.’ So they are going to have a really tough act to play here, to actually justify what they’re claiming on both sides.”

    Golbeck called for ways to codify how researchers could ethically go about their work using social media data, “and give people some of those rights in a broader space that they don’t have now.” Aral expected the solution to emerge in the form of “a middle ground where we learn to use these technologies ethically in order to enhance our society, our access to information, our ability to cooperate and coordinate with one another, and our ability to spread positive social change in the world.” At the same time, he advocated tightening use requirements for the data, and bringing back “the notion of informed consent and consent in a meaningful way, so that we can realize the promise of social media while avoiding the peril.”

    Historically, marketers could collect individual data, but with social platforms, they can now also collect data about a user’s social contacts, said Berman. “These social contacts never gave permission explicitly for this information to be collected,” he added. “Consumers need to realize that by following someone or connecting to someone on social media, they also expose themselves to marketers who target the followed individual.”

    In terms of safeguards, Berman said it is hard to know in advance what a company will do with the data it collects. “If they use it for normal advertising, say toothpaste, that may be legitimate, and if they use it for political advertising, as in elections, that may be illegitimate. But the data itself is the same data.”

    According to Berman, most consumers, for example, don’t know that loyalty cards are used to track their behavior and that the data is sold to marketers. Would they stop using these cards if they knew? “I am not sure,” he said. “Research shows that people in surveys say they want to maintain their privacy rights, but when asked how much they’re willing to give up in customer experience – or to pay for it – the result is not too much. In other words, there’s a difference between how we care about privacy as an idea, and how much we’re willing to give up to maintain it.”

    Golbeck said tools exist for users to limit the amount of data they let reside on social media platforms, including one called Facebook Timeline Cleaner, and a “tweet delete” feature on Twitter. _ “One way that you can make yourself less susceptible to some of this kind of targeting is to keep less data there, delete stuff more regularly, and treat it as an ephemeral platform, _ ” she said.

    Mais est-ce crédible ? Les médias sociaux sont aussi des formes d’archives personnelles.

    #Facebook #Cambridge_analytica

  • As towns lose their newspapers, disease detectives are left to fly blind
    https://www.statnews.com/2018/03/20/news-deserts-infectious-disease

    Epidemiologists rely on all kinds of data to detect the spread of disease, including reports from local and state agencies and social media. But local newspapers are critical to identifying outbreaks and forecasting their trajectories.

    On the map, Majumder saw every county without a local newspaper as a community where health officials and disease researchers could be flying blind.

    “We rely very heavily on local news. And I think what this will probably mean is that there are going to be pockets of the U.S. where we’re just not going to have a particularly good signal anymore,” said Majumder, a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Majumder is a computational epidemiology research fellow at HealthMap, a 12-year-old disease detection project run by researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital. The website uses nontraditional data sources — reports from local news outlets and social media platforms among them— to track global infectious disease activity in real time.

  • USA Are Foreign-Influenced Social Media Campaigns Part of the New Political Playbook? - Pacific Standard
    https://psmag.com/news/are-foreign-influenced-social-media-campaigns-part-of-the-new-political-playb

    On the first day of November of 2017, the Senate Judiciary Committee grilled contrite representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google about their companies’ roles in the Russian meddling during the 2016 presidential election. The senators spent nearly three hours chastising the social media platforms for their dereliction. In between the grandstanding, the senators expressed genuine concern about how foreign nations used these platforms, and whether media companies would be able to stop the next country from copying the Russian scheme. But even as lawmakers reflect on the Russian interference, new foreign influence campaigns are already underway.

    This time, rather than trying to choose a president, the campaigns sought to affect President Donald Trump and America’s reaction to the Qatar diplomatic crisis, which began on June 5th, when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and established an air, sea, and land blockade around the country.

  • 4 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in clashes over Trump decision on Jerusalem
    Dec. 15, 2017 8:09 P.M. (Updated: Dec. 15, 2017 8:13 P.M.)
    http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=779639

    18-year-old Muhammad Amin Aqel al-Adam succumbed to his wounds on Friday evening after he was shot multiple times by Israeli forces

    BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Four Palestinians have been declared dead by the Palestinian Health Ministry in the West Bank and Gaza, after a day of violent clashes with Israeli forces on Friday across the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and besieged Gaza Strip.

    The ministry reported that 18-year-old Muhammad Amin Aqel al-Adam succumbed to his wounds on Friday evening after he was shot multiple times by Israeli forces in the central West Bank town of al-Bireh, after an alleged stabbing attempt against soldiers.

    Al-Adam was a resident of the town of Beit Ula in the western Hebron district of the southern West Bank

    In the Jerusalem area town of Anata, in the central West Bank, 29-year-old Bassel Mustafa Muhammad Ibrahim succumbed to his wounds shortly after being shot in the chest by Israeli forces during clashes in the town.

    In the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces killed two Palestinians and injured hundreds others during clashes that broke out along the border between the besieged coastal enclave and Israel.

    Yassir Sokhar , 31, a resident of the al-Shujaiyya neighborhood of eastern Gaza City was shot during clashes and declared dead by the ministry of health in Gaza.

    The fourth slain Palestinian was identified by the ministry as Ibrahim Abu Thurayya , 29, who was shot in the head during clashes.

    Ibrahim Abu Thurayya

    Tributes to Abu Thurayya — who was wheelchair-ridden after losing both his legs during Israel’s offensive on the Gaza Strip in 2008 — popped up across social media, as Palestinians widely circulated a video of him calling on Palestinians to protest against US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

    Hundreds of Palestinians across the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza had been injured with live ammunition and rubber-coated steel bullets on Friday during clashes with Israeli forces in protest of Trump’s decision last week.

    Friday’s events brought the death toll over the past week to 10 — six Palestinians had previously been killed by Israeli forces over the past week, four in airstrikes and two in clashes.

    Palestinians have vowed to continue protesting Trump’s unprecedented decision, which Palestinian and Arab leaders warned would cause instability and unrest in the region.

    #Palestine_assassinée

    • Quatre Palestiniens tués par balles lors de heurts sur Jérusalem
      AFP / 15 décembre 2017 20h15
      https://www.romandie.com/news/ZOOM-Quatre-Palestiniens-tues-par-balles-lors-de-heurts-sur-Jerusalem/873320.rom

      Quatre Palestiniens ont été tués vendredi dans des heurts avec les forces israéliennes, lors d’une nouvelle journée de mobilisation contre la reconnaissance par Donald Trump de Jérusalem comme capitale d’Israël, ont indiqué les secours palestiniens.

      Ibrahim Abou Thouraya , âgé de 29 ans et amputé des deux jambes, et Yasser Sokar, 32 ans, ont été tués par les balles de soldats israéliens dans la bande de Gaza alors qu’ils participaient avec des centaines de Gazaouis à des manifestations violentes près de la barrière de béton et de métal qui ferme hermétiquement les frontières de l’enclave palestinienne avec Israël.

      Mohammed Aqal , 29 ans, a poignardé un policier israélien à la sortie de Ramallah, en Cisjordanie occupée, et a été abattu, a indiqué la police israélienne. Le policier a été légèrement blessé.

      Selon des photos de l’AFP, Mohammed Aqal portait autour de la taille un dispositif ressemblant à une ceinture d’explosifs. La police israélienne a dit enquêter pour savoir si le Palestinien portait effectivement un tel dispositif et si ce dernier était authentique ou pas. Aucune confirmation indépendante de l’authenticité ou non de cette ceinture n’avait pu être obtenue dans la soirée.

      Bassel Ibrahim , 24 ans, a été tué par balles lors de heurts à Anata, une localité entre Jérusalem et la Cisjordanie occupée.

      Même si elle n’a pas déclenché la spirale de violence redoutée, la décision américaine et les violences qu’elle a suscitées ont causé la mort de huit Palestiniens depuis le 6 décembre.

    • Un Palestinien handicapé parmi les victimes des soldats israéliens à Gaza
      Areeb Ullah | 15 décembre 2017

      Ibrahim Abu Thuraya, qui a perdu ses jambes et un œil en 2008 lors de l’offensive israélienne à Gaza, est décédé aujourd’hui sous les balles israéliennes alors qu’il manifestait pour la défense de Jérusalem


      http://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/reportages/un-palestinien-handicap-parmi-les-victimes-des-soldats-isra-liens-gaz

      (...) Connu pour assister régulièrement aux manifestations dans l’enclave palestinienne, Thuraya est devenu célèbre après avoir perdu ses deux jambes et son œil lors de l’opération israélienne « Plomb durci », durant laquelle les forces israéliennes ont tué 1 400 personnes en 22 jours.

      Il était connu pour escalader des poteaux électriques et brandir des drapeaux palestiniens pendant les manifestations. Ibrahim décrivait ses actions comme une façon de « résister malgré son handicap ».

      Deux jours avant sa mort, des militants avaient filmé Ibrahim en train de se déplacer dans la zone tampon sans son fauteuil roulant.

      Dans la vidéo, il appelait ses compatriotes palestiniens à se joindre à l’appel demandant que les États-Unis « retirent » leur déclaration reconnaissant Jérusalem comme la capitale d’Israël.

      « Cette terre est notre terre. Nous n’abandonnerons pas. L’Amérique doit retirer la déclaration qu’elle a faite », déclarait Ibrahim.(...)

    • Israel Drops Investigation of Murdered Disabled Palestinian Ibrahim Abu Thuraya
      May 19, 2019 11:37 AM
      https://imemc.org/article/israel-drops-investigation-of-murdered-disabled-palestinian-ibrahim-abu-thura

      According to the Palestinian Information Center, the Israeli military has closed its investigation into the murder of disabled Palestinian, Ibrahim Abu Thuraya , 29, who was shot and killed by Israeli snipers at a protest near Gaza’s eastern border with Israel, in December 2017.

      The Israeli paper Haaretz reported that the Israeli army’s ‘criminal investigation division’ claimed they found no evidence that Abu Thuraya was killed by direct Israeli army fire.

      Eyewitnesses reported that Abu Thuraya was shot in the head, and the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported gunshot wounds sustained in his upper body.

      The army had said that Israeli forces use “riot dispersal measures” against the Palestinian protesters with live fire being directed at the lower limbs of the protesters.

      Social media platforms showed the young Abu Thuraya, shortly before he was shot, waving a Palestinian flag, sitting in his wheelchair, posing no threat to the armed soldiers.

      Abu Thuraya, from al-Boreij refugee camp, was wounded in a 2008 Israeli airstrike on Gaza. Both his legs had to be amputated as a result, but he continued to resist.

  • What Would You Pay to Keep Your Digital Footprint 100% Private?
    https://hbr.org/2017/12/what-would-you-pay-to-keep-your-digital-footprint-100-private

    In an age when we spend a bigger proportion of our waking life online than offline, we are producing a sea of personal data, making hacking and cybersecurity bigger obsessions than ever. Where the concept of “personal” once meant “private”, this distinction no longer holds true, as so many of our personal and intimate interactions (and the data they generate) now exist online, an increasingly public domain. Even when nobody is watching, we are rarely alone.

    What if you were given the chance to buy back all the data you left behind, from the first minute you ever spent online to this very moment? What would you pay for it? How much would you give to keep it 100% secure? Before you think of the answer, you may want to consider the following costs:

    The challenge therefore isn’t so much a question of logistics, but rather the psychological issue of the intangibility of our data and its perceived value. For most of us, the “free” services we use online enable us to fulfill a specific need: to connect with others. Whether through email, group chats or social media, the data we generate through our interactions are not only intangible, but their value is also hard for the average consumer to grasp and quantify. While most people may shudder at the idea of a stranger coming into their house to rummage through all their photo albums, bank statements, and personal diaries, many of us don’t bat an eyelid when comparable infringements take place online, perhaps because the violation and its consequences are somewhat less visible. In fact, it may only be when we are confronted with a concrete scenario such as a data breach (the leaking of credit card details or private photos) that we recognize the real-world implications of our online activities.

    When it comes to social media platforms, even when people are made aware of the risks, their privacy concerns rarely appear to translate into protective behaviors. People increasingly bemoan the creeping infringement of their privacy, but they still engage in uncensored public self-disclosure and allow companies unprecedented access to their data, resulting in a “privacy paradox”. In short, people’s behaviors suggest they don’t care as much about privacy as they say. Although they like the idea of privacy, they don’t seem to value their data enough to take concrete steps to protect it. To be fair, though, this disconnect between attitudes and behaviors has been found in every area of life. For instance, most people value their health and relationships a great deal yet they still engage in behaviors that put those at risk on a regular basis, even when they are conscious about the potential consequences.

    There can also be a flip side of course — for instance, when you start receiving ads across different platforms (from social media feeds, to on-demand TV and digital radio) for something you searched for but didn’t realize was being tracked. This “creepy factor” — the feeling that your every move, both public and private, is being watched, tracked, followed, analyzed and capitalized on — can create a significant cost known as “psychological reactance”. If we feel that our freedom has been lost or threatened, the motivation to regain that freedom can lead people to resist the social influence of others, resulting in a sense of violation in the user, and a tarnished reputation for those companies that might hope to use personalization to increase their revenues.

    #Vie_privée #Médias_sociaux

  • Who’s Afraid of George Soros? – Foreign Policy (10/10/2017) http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/10/whos-afraid-of-george-soros

    BUCHAREST, Romania — Last winter, in the middle of anti-corruption demonstrations, a television broadcaster accused George Soros — the Hungarian-born, Jewish-American billionaire philanthropist — of paying dogs to protest.

    The protests in Bucharest, sparked by dead-of-night legislation aimed at decriminalizing corruption, were the largest the country had seen since the fall of communism in 1989. Romania TV — a channel associated with, if not officially owned by, the government — alleged the protesters were paid.

    “Adults were paid 100 lei [$24], children earned 50 lei [$12.30], and dogs were paid 30 lei [$7.20],” one broadcaster said. 

    Some protesters responded by fitting their dogs with placards; others tucked money into their pets’ coats. One dog stood next to a sign reading, “Can anyone change 30 lei into euro?” Another dog wore one that read: “#George_Soros paid me to be here.”

    “The pro-government television, they lie all the time. In three sentences, they have five lies,” investigative journalist Andrei Astefanesei told Foreign Policy outside a gyro shop in Bucharest. “I told you about that lie, that Soros paid for dogs. ‘If you bring more dogs in the street, you get more money.’” He laughed.

    Romania TV was fined for its false claims about Soros. But the idea — that roughly half a million Romanians, and their dogs, came to the streets because Soros made them do it — struck a responsive chord. It’s similar to the idea that Soros is personally responsible for teaching students about LGBTQ rights in Romanian high schools; that Soros manipulated the teenagers who led this year’s anti-corruption protests in Slovakia; and that civil organizations and what’s left of the independent media in Hungary wouldn’t exist without Soros and his Open Society Foundations.

    The idea that the 87-year-old Soros is single-handedly stirring up discontent isn’t confined to the European side of the Atlantic; Soros conspiracies are a global phenomenon. In March, six U.S. senators signed a letter asking Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s staff to look into U.S. government funding going to Soros-backed organizations.

    “Our skepticism about Soros-funded groups undermining American priorities goes far beyond Eastern Europe,” said a spokesperson for Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who led the initiative, when asked if there was some specific piece of evidence of Soros-funded activity in Eastern Europe that prompted the letter or if concerns were more general.

    Soros has even been linked to former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality. “Congrats to Colin Kaepernick for popularizing the hatred of America. Good work, bro,” Tomi Lahren, a conservative commentator, tweeted during the controversy. “Your buddy George Soros is so proud. #istand.”

    On Twitter, Soros has also been held responsible for the recent Catalan independence referendum and the mass shooting in Las Vegas.

    But one of the places in which suspicion of Soros is most obvious is Central and Eastern Europe. There, Soros is not unlike the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter, except that while the fictional mirror shows what the viewer most desires, Soros reflects back onto a country what it most hates.

    In Romania, where the head of the ruling party said Soros wants to do evil, the billionaire is not to be trusted because he’s Hungarian. In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has reportedly declared that Soros will be a main campaign theme in next year’s general election, he’s a traitor. And everywhere, he is Jewish, his very name a nod to the anti-Semitism that runs deep throughout the region.

    Now, Soros’s effectiveness as a bogeyman for conservative governments will be put to the test, literally. This week, Hungary is holding a “national consultation,” essentially a referendum designed to condemn Soros and his views on immigration. The government-funded questionnaire will be open to the country’s adult citizens and is meant to solicit their views on the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor.

    “George Soros has bought people and organizations, and Brussels is under his influence,” Orban said in a radio interview Friday in the run-up to the consultation. “They want to demolish the fence, allow millions of immigrants into Europe, then distribute them using a mandatory mechanism — and they want to punish those who do not comply.”

    Soros declined an interview for this article, but a spokesperson for the Open Society Foundations, the main conduit for Soros’s philanthropic efforts, chalked up the backlash to his outspokenness. “He’s a man who stands up for his beliefs,” Laura Silber, a spokeswoman for the foundation, told FP. “That’s threatening when you’re speaking out against autocrats and corruption.”

    Blame and hatred of Soros are, to borrow from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, a specter haunting Central and Eastern Europe. But how did an 87-year-old billionaire thousands of miles away become the region’s most famous ghost?

    #conspirationnisme

    • George Soros lègue 18 milliards de dollars à sa fondation
      http://www.latribune.fr/economie/international/george-soros-legue-18-milliards-de-dollars-a-sa-fondation-754607.html

      Open Society Foundations (OSF) a reçu 18 milliards de dollars (15,2 milliards d’euros) de ce grand donateur du parti démocrate américain, a indiqué à l’AFP une porte-parole. « Cette somme reflète un processus en cours de transfert des actifs » de M. Soros, « qui prévoit de laisser la vaste majorité de sa fortune à Open Society Foundations », a-t-elle souligné.

      Cette donation fait d’Open Society Foundations la deuxième plus riche ONG aux Etats-Unis après la Fondation Bill et Melinda Gates, qui dispose de 40 milliards de dollars pour promouvoir les problématiques de santé publique et de développement à travers le monde, d’après la National Philanthropic Trust.

      L’OSF est un réseau de 39 entités aux opérations interconnectées à travers le globe et fait la promotion de ses valeurs dans plus de 120 pays. La première a ouvert ses portes en 1984 en Hongrie, pays d’origine de M. Soros. La dernière a vu le jour en 2016 en Birmanie. George Soros en est le président et ses fils Alexander et Jonathan sont membres du conseil d’administration. D’autres de ses enfants sont également impliqués.

      Le milliardaire américain d’origine hongroise, connu pour ses paris financiers risqués, avait donné jusqu’à ce jour 12 milliards de dollars (10,2 milliards d’euros) de sa fortune à des oeuvres caritatives. Depuis des décennies, il donne environ entre 800 et 900 millions de dollars à des associations chaque année d’après des chiffres mentionnés par le New-York Times. C’est en 1979 que le financier avait fait son premier don en attribuant des bourses d’études à des élèves noirs sud-africains en plein Apartheid, rappelle OSF sur son site internet. Selon le président de la Ford Foundation, Darren Walker interrogé par le quotidien américain :

      "il n’y a aucune organisation caritative dans le monde, y compris la Ford Foundation, qui a plus d’impact que l’Open Society Foundations durant ces deux dernières décennies. [...] Parce qu’il n’y a aucun endroit dans le monde où ils ne sont pas présents. Leur empreinte est plus importante et plus conséquente que n’importe qu’elle organisation de justice sociale dans le monde".

      v/ @hadji

    • Soros turns antisocial: Billionaire says Facebook & Google manipulate users like gambling companies
      https://www.rt.com/news/417065-soros-social-media-blame

      Soros, whose investment fund owned over 300,000 shares in #Facebook until last November, said social media platforms are deliberately engineering “addiction to the services they provide.” Facebook and Google deceive their users by “manipulating their #attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes,” he said.

      In this respect, online platforms have become similar to gambling companies, Soros asserted. “#Casinos have developed techniques to hook gamblers to the point where they gamble away all their money, even money they don’t have.

      “Something very harmful and maybe irreversible is happening to human attention in our digital age,” he said. Social media companies “are inducing people to give up their autonomy,” while the power to shape the public’s attention “is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies.”

      The billionaire financier, whom the Hungarian government has labeled a “political puppet master,” then struck an even gloomier tone by offering a full-on dystopian conspiracy theory.

      In future, there could be “an alliance between authoritarian states and these large, data-rich IT monopolies,” in which tech giants’ corporate surveillance would merge with “an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance,” he said.

      That “may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined,” he said, referring to the British authors of two famous dystopian novels.

      Last year, some tech corporations fell out of favor with Soros when his investment fund sold 367,262 shares in Facebook, although he chose to keep 109,451 of the network’s shares. Soros’ fund also offloaded 1,700 shares in Apple and 1.55 million in the owners of Snapchat. It also reduced its stake in Twitter by 5,700 shares, while still holding 18,400 shares in the social media service.

      Soros was not the only Davos speaker to launch a verbal attack on Big Tech. American entrepreneur and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on Tuesday that Facebook should be regulated just like a tobacco company.

      “I think you’d do it exactly the same way you regulate the cigarette industry. Here’s a product, cigarettes, they are addictive, they are not good for you,” Benioff said. “Maybe there is all kinds of different forces trying to get you to do certain things. There are a lot of parallels.”

  • Lev Manovich - Instagram and Contemporary Image
    http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/instagram-and-contemporary-image

    Une analyse d’Instagram et de la photographie populaire dans le monde entier par Lev Manovitch.
    La version pdf du livre est accessible depuis ce site. Gros travail qui mèle le regard de l’auteur et l’analyse statistique de millions d’images.

    Millions of people around the world today use digital tools and platforms to create and share sophisticated cultural artifacts. This book focuses on one such platform: Instagram. It places Instagram image culture within a rich cultural and historical context, including history of photography, cinema, graphic design, and social media, contemporary design trends, music video, and k-pop. At the same it uses Instagram as a window into the identities of first truly global generation connected by common social media platforms, programming languages, and visual aesthetics. The book demonstrates how humanistic close reading and computational analysis of large datasets can work together by drawing on the work in Manovich’s Cultural Analytics Lab with 16 million Instagram photos shared in 17 large cities worldwide since 2012.

    #Images #Lev_Manovitch #Instagram