industryterm:social media

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

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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

Trump claims Twitter is stopping him from getting more followers | The Independent
▻https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-twitter-followers-tweets-today-facebook-google-democrats-accoun

Donald Trump has accused Twitter of blocking followers from his account, despite lacking any evidence to support such a claim, in his latest complaint about how he is treated by social media companies.

The president wrote on Twitter that the site had “made it much more difficult for people to join @realDonaldTrump,” despite his account featuring the same, one-click follow button as any other profile. He also claimed the platform had “removed many names & greatly slowed the level and speed of increase,” suggesting Twitter had targeted him and other Republicans by reducing following counts. 

“Facebook, Twitter and Google are so biased toward the Dems it is ridiculous!” Mr Trump said Tuesday during a series of angry morning tweets. “_They have acknowledged-done NOTHING!”

Twitter and other major social media sites have spent the year purging millions of fake accounts and bots, with countless celebrities — including the president — and regular users alike seeing slight reductions in their followings due to the loss of false profiles.

The effort has been part of a response to criticism from Congress that companies have not been doing enough to combat efforts at election meddling such as those seen during the 2016 presidential race. In October, Twitter announced it had removed at least nine million accounts as part of an effort that had been underway since July. 

Facebook has also been steadily purging fake accounts throughout the year, and executives from all three platforms the president attacked on Twitter have testified before Congress in 2018 about their company’s responses to the spread of disinformation, Russian interference in the 2016 election and other issues. 

It was previously reported the president’s personal Twitter handle, @realDonaldTrump, was followed by millions of fake accounts and bots. During one purge in July, Mr Trump lost at least 300,000 followers.

Gallup conducted a survey in May that found nearly 15m — 29 per cent — of Mr Trump’s Twitter followings appeared to be fake accounts. 

The president has a Twitter following of 56.3m as of Tuesday, compared to his predecessor, Barack Obama, who has a following of 104m. 

The same Gallup survey found Mr Obama’s following to have a fake following of nearly 15 per cent. 

The tweets from the president come a day after a pair of reports were released by the Senate Intelligence Committee said Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election was more widespread than previously thought and aimed at dividing Americans.

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!”

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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.

Facebook isn’t a tech company — let’s stop calling it that - CNN
▻https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/15/perspectives/facebook-regulation-tech-company/index.html

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Sometimes it takes an old guy to call out a youngster. Hatch knew that it was time for us to stop referring to Facebook as a tech company. As his spokesman reportedly noted later, Hatch was just using “a common tactic used in Congressional hearings to make a point.”
Facebook runs ads based on the information it has collected about you. And it has used the imprimatur of “technology” to shift our attention so it — as well as Google — can operate under a different set of rules than all the other media companies that run ads. By clinging to its definition of being a technology company, Facebook and other social media companies enjoy protections under the Communications Decency Act that immunize them from being held liable for hate and other objectionable speech, libel and falsehoods in news stories and advertising that media companies do not.

To be sure, Facebook utilizes technology, but that doesn’t make it a tech company any more than Exxon Mobil (because it uses instruments to find oil) or Burlington Northern (because it’s based on the invention of the steam engine)."

David Dodson

For media companies that run ads, especially ones that use public networks, we tell them that they can’t lie or mislead, that it’s not okay to advertise cigarettes to children or push prescription drugs without including the risks. We have laws governing deceptive advertisements and Truth in Advertising laws. Companies that run ads can’t say a car gets 40 miles per gallon unless it’s true. They can’t say a movie won an Academy Award unless it did. If you say the wool comes from New Zealand, it must.
Technology companies invent cars that drive themselves, satellites that can identify a license plate from miles away, phones that can guide us through traffic jams, and machines that see inside our bodies. That’s what tech companies do.

To be sure, Facebook utilizes technology, but that doesn’t make it a tech company any more than Exxon Mobil (because it uses instruments to find oil) or Burlington Northern (because it’s based on the invention of the steam engine).
Zuckerberg’s genius was harnessing an already existing network and previously developed computer code to allow people to share words and pictures with one another. In return, he runs ads.

When nearly half of Americans get their news from Facebook, its newsfeed should be subjected to the same standards of fairness, decency and accuracy as newspapers, television and other media outlets.

For decades, CBS sold beer during weekend football games and toys during Saturday morning cartoons. Long before the internet, folks figured out that by targeting the right audience, they could charge a higher price for running ads. Facebook just does it better.

#Facebook #Médias_sociaux

The populist social media playbook : the battle for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/17/populist-social-media-playbook-who-is-best-facebook-twitter-instagram-m

When he received the phone call from the leader of the far-right League party, Edoardo Della Barbara knew he had won an elaborate Facebook contest. It was February – in the midst of Italy’s general election campaign – and Della Barbara was the latest follower to like the most posts by Matteo Salvini in the shortest amount of time. “I knew it was linked to building engagement through social media,” said Della Barbara, a 22-year-old university student from Milan. The prize was a 10-minute (...)

#Facebook #Instagram #Twitter #élections #manipulation

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» Israeli Court Sentences Mother of A Palestinian, Killed By The Army, To Eleven Months, For “Incitement”
IMEMC News - December 16, 2018 12:48 PM
▻http://imemc.org/article/israeli-court-sentences-mother-of-a-palestinian-killed-by-the-army-to-eleven-

An Israeli court sentenced, on Sunday morning, the mother of a Palestinian, who was killed by the army last year, to eleven months in prison for what the military prosecution described as “incitement on social media.”

Attorney Mohammad Mahmoud of the Palestinian Detainees’ Committee, said the court sentenced Susan Abu Ghannam to eleven months in prison, for posting statements on Facebook, after the death of her son.

The court deemed the posts as incitement, and passed its sentence on the woman, from at-Tur neighborhood, east of Jerusalem’s Old City.

She was taken prisoner last August, after dozens of soldiers and officers invaded her home, and conducted violent searches, leading to damage. (...)

▻https://seenthis.net/messages/616536

Epic shuts down Fortnite data miner
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-12-14-epic-shuts-down-fortnite-data-miner

FNBRLeaks deletes social media channels after receiving threat from the developer’s #Legal team

Gang Boss Who Kidnapped Nurses to Vaccinate the Poor Hailed as Modern-Day Robin Hood
▻https://www.newsweek.com/gang-boss-who-kidnapped-nurses-vaccinate-poor-hailed-modern-day-robin-hood

A Brazilian drug trafficker has been praised on social media as a modern-day Robin Hood after he kidnapped two nurses, stole vaccines and syringes and ordered the medical staff to inoculate residents in one of the poorest areas in the country’s southeast. Thomaz Viera Gomez has made headlines in the local press for acts of charity over the past year even as authorities have issued successive warrants for his arrest. His most recent gesture of generosity, to combat yellow fever, which has swept poverty-stricken areas of Brazil, has seen him lauded primarily as a hero rather than a villain. Source: Dans la (...)

How Do You Recover After Millions Have Watched You Overdose? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/us/overdoses-youtube-opioids-drugs.html

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The first time Kelmae Hemphill watched herself overdose, she sobbed. There she was in a shaky video filmed by her own heroin dealer, sprawled out on a New Jersey road while a stranger pounded on her chest. “Come on, girl,” someone pleaded.

Ms. Hemphill’s 11-year drug addiction, her criminal record, her struggles as a mother — they were now everybody’s business, splashed across the news and social media with a new genre of American horror film: the overdose video.

As opioid deaths have soared in recent years, police departments and strangers with cameras have started posting raw, uncensored images of drug users passed out with needles in their arms and babies in the back seats of their cars. The videos rack up millions of views and unleash avalanches of outrage. Then some other viral moment comes along, and the country clicks away.

But life is never the same for the people whose bleakest, most humiliating moments now live online forever. In interviews with The New York Times, they talked — some for the very first time — about the versions of themselves captured in the videos.

“Why bother saving her?” asked one YouTube commenter. “I would’ve let her die,” said another. Angry Facebook messages arrived months, even years, later, when strangers stumbled across the videos.

Addiction experts say the videos are doing little else than publicly shaming drug users, and the blunt horror of the images may actually increase the stigma against them. Users themselves disagree on whether the humiliation helped them clean up their lives.

“We’re showing you this video of them at the worst, most humiliating moment of their life,” said Daniel Raymond, deputy director of policy and planning at the Harm Reduction Coalition, an advocacy group. “The intent is not to help these people. The intent is to use them as an object lesson by scapegoating them.”

Mandy McGowan, 38, knows that. She was the mother unconscious in that video, the woman who became known as the “Dollar Store Junkie.” But she said the video showed only a few terrible frames of a complicated life.

As a child, she said, she was sexually molested. She survived relationships with men who beat her. She barely graduated from high school.

She said her addiction to opioids began after she had neck surgery in 2006 for a condition that causes spasms and intense pain. Her neurologist prescribed a menu of strong painkillers including OxyContin, Percocet and fentanyl patches.

As a teenager, Ms. McGowan had smoked marijuana and taken mushrooms and ecstasy. But she always steered clear of heroin, she said, thinking it was for junkies, for people living in alleys. But her friends were using it, and over the last decade, she sometimes joined them.

She tried to break her habit by buying Suboxone — a medication used to treat addiction — on the street. But the Suboxone often ran out, and she turned to heroin to tide her over.

On Sept. 18, 2016, a friend came to Ms. McGowan’s house in Salem, N.H., and offered her a hit of fentanyl, a deadly synthetic painkiller 50 times more potent than heroin. They sniffed a line and drove to the Family Dollar across the state line in Lawrence, where Ms. McGowan collapsed with her daughter beside her. At least two people in the store recorded the scene on their cellphones.

Medics revived her and took her to the hospital, where child welfare officials took custody of her daughter, and the police charged Ms. McGowan with child neglect and endangerment. (She eventually pleaded guilty to both and was sentenced to probation.) Two days later, the video of her overdose was published by The Eagle-Tribune and was also released by the Lawrence police.

The video played in a loop on the local news, and vaulted onto CNN and Fox News, ricocheting across the web.

“For someone already dealing with her own demons, she now has to deal with public opinion, too,” said Matt Ganem, the executive director of the Banyan Treatment Center, about 15 miles north of Boston, which gave Ms. McGowan six months of free treatment after being contacted by intermediaries. “You’re a spectacle. Everyone is watching.”

Ms. McGowan had only seen snippets of the video on the news. But two months later, she watched the whole thing. She felt sick with regret.

“I see it, and I’m like, I was a piece of freaking [expletive],” she said. “That was me in active use. It’s not who I am today.”

But she also wondered: Why didn’t anyone help her daughter? She was furious that bystanders seemed to feel they had license to gawk and record instead of comforting her screaming child.

She writes letters to her two teenage sons, who live with her former husband in New Hampshire. Her daughter, now 4, lives with the girl’s uncle. Ms. McGowan knows she will probably not regain custody, but hopes to develop a relationship with her and supplant the image embedded in her own mind of the sobbing girl in the pink pajamas.

“I know if I do the right thing, I can be involved in her life,” Ms. McGowan said. “It’s going to be a long road for me. You don’t just get clean and your life is suddenly all put back together.”

Still, the video lives on, popping up online almost constantly.

Ms. McGowan is bracing herself for the day when her daughter sees it, when her daughter lashes out at her for it, when she throws it back in her mother’s face when Ms. McGowan tries to warn her not to use drugs.

“That video is PTSD for my children,” she said. “The questions are going to come as my daughter gets older. And I have to be prepared for it. I did this. And it cost me my children.”

#Opioides #Vidéos #Médias_sociaux #Addiction #Traitements

How To Convert Traffic into #sales with Lead Conversion Strategy
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-to-convert-traffic-into-sales-with-lead-conversion-strategy-7293defb

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The primary goal for every marketer is to generate new leads. It is pretty obvious that marketers measure online success through website leads — this can take, however, a long time and may cause one to lose interest fast.Let’s investigate with Realomat what #marketing #automation is as well as how you can grow your following, traffic and leads on easily.So What Is Marketing Automation?You must have heard of this term before, but if not, don’t worry as we will go over it with you quickly.To put it simply, marketing automation is a software platform that helps you digitize your marketing and sales engagement to get you more leads, close more deals and measure marketing success better. Today, most businesses automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media and other web-based actions to make (...)

#marketing-strategies #business

The Chinese Social Network
▻https://hackernoon.com/the-chinese-social-network-bb282204af9c?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

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An origin story of Tencent and Chinese internet companiesSource: Fast CompanyTencent is among the largest technology companies in the world. According to The Verge, it is the most valuable company of any sort in Asia.Tencent owns WeChat, the “everything app” with almost 1 billion users — many of which are active for more than 4 hours a day. Bloomberg Businessweek says that’s more than the average time spent on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter combined.Tencent was founded by Ma Huateng (Pony Ma) with 4 of his friends in the city of Shenzhen during the late nineties. If you grew up or live in #china, the WeChat and QQ apps represent your social media, your teenage years, your wallet, your professional updates, your shopping sprees and your food-ordering experience all at once.The (...)

#asia #startup #chinese-social-network #unicorns

#Burundi: Inside the secret killing house

Burundi’s security services are running secret torture and detention sites to silence dissent, former government intelligence agents have told BBC Africa Eye.

Using cutting-edge reconstruction techniques, BBC Africa Eye examines one house in particular, which was filmed in a video posted on social media in 2016.

A red liquid, which looked like blood, was seen pouring from its gutter. We ask if Burundi’s repression of opponents has now gone underground?

The government has always denied any human rights violations, and declined to comment for this report.

▻https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-46428073/burundi-inside-the-secret-killing-house

#torture #services_secrets #vidéo #Bujumbura #torture #violence

October — visual and pseudonymous social network
▻https://hackernoon.com/october-visual-and-pseudonymous-social-network-63c297891132?source=rss--

October — visual and pseudonymous social networkThe place for creative conversation.A week ago I was invited to participate in a brand new social media app called October. Since the UI looked nice and the design philosophy seemed thoughtful, I decided to give it a try. After a few days of interacting with the community, I realized that this October thing actually had a lot of potential. It feels like a long lost sibling of Reddit and Twitter that’s had enough time to mature! In this article, I will explain what (I think) makes October unique and worth paying attention to.October is a new social network that combines pseudonymous posting with an attention economy based around coins. It is built by experienced economists, security researchers and mathematicians. The goal is to create 1) a (...)

#anonymous-network #social-media #technology #blockchain #token

Indie developers are unhappy with Steam’s new revenue sharing tiers
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-12-03-indie-developers-are-unhappy-with-steams-new-revenue-shari

Developers take to social media to voice concerns that Valve is pushing out indies as it courts AAA

#Publishing #Development

Founder Interviews : Victoria Repa of BetterMe
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-victoria-repa-of-betterme-9dbea654b264?source=rss----

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Learn how Victoria and the BetterMe team leveraged social media to go from 0 to 15 million downloads of their health & #fitness apps in under 2 years.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m the CEO of BetterMe, an ecosystem of health and fitness apps I co-founded in 2016 which currently offers guided workouts, meditation, yoga and walking.Our apps are used by millions of people who try to lead healthier and happier lives, and we specifically focus on “entry-level users,” helping them ease into the fitness world.We are already one of the largest and fastest-growing health & fitness app publishers in the US, and are planning to take the top spot within the next three years. Our goal is to have a family of apps that would alleviate all major pains for anyone (...)

#startup #founder-stories #davis-baer #founders

Someone hacked printers worldwide, urging people to subscribe to PewDiePie
▻https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/30/18119576/pewdiepie-printer-hack-t-series-youtube

The fight over who gets to have the most-subscribed channel on YouTube spilled into the real world months ago when Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg fans started campaigning to raise awareness of the Swedish star. The grassroots effort has, for the most part, been in good fun — but recently, people on social media have reported being hacked by someone who is urging them to subscribe to PewDiePie. Kjellberg has maintained his status as the top channel on YouTube for years now, but recently, his (...)

#YouTube #imprimante #hacking

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Right-wing groups are recruiting students to target teachers | Reveal
▻https://www.revealnews.org/article/right-wing-groups-are-recruiting-students-to-target-teachers

“The Only Good Red Is A Dead Red. Give that guy some helicopter therapy,” read one Facebook comment, a reference to a series of memes, popular in white nationalist circles, of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of throwing political enemies out of helicopters.

Ponce had no idea what had started the onslaught of hate speech and death threats. What, he asked himself, had he done to deserve this?

He had entered the nightmarish club of teachers and professors who have been singled out, berated and threatened with violence by anonymous trolls for performing their jobs. Ponce is one of dozens of educators – if not many more – who in the past two years have been featured in conservative media pieces, placed on watchlists and targeted by the internet outrage machine. Their offenses have ranged from lecturing on hot-button subjects such as race, gender or climate change to posting provocative comments and news articles on their social media accounts.

The recent rise in media maelstroms swirling around educators has raised important issues on the limits of academic freedom – and its distinction from freedom of speech – and the raging battle between the left and right on college campuses across the country. While political friction among teachers, administrators and the public is nothing new, the question of how universities should handle public outcry in the age of social media is a daunting new aspect of academia that morphs as quickly as people can type.

Who Will Fix #Facebook? – Rolling Stone
▻https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/who-will-fix-facebook-759916

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The flip side of being too little engaged is to have intimate relationships between foreign governments and companies involved in speech regulation.

In March this year, for instance, after the company had unknowingly helped spread a campaign of murder, rape and arson in Myanmar, Facebook unpublished the popular Palestinian news site SAFA, which had 1.3 million followers.

SAFA had something like official status, an online answer to the Palestine Authority’s WAFA news agency. (SAFA has been reported to be sympathetic to Hamas, which the publication denies.) Its operators say they also weren’t given any reason for the removal. “They didn’t even send us a message,” says Anas Malek, SAFA’s social media coordinator. “We were shocked.”

The yanking of SAFA took place just ahead of a much-publicized protest in the region: the March 30th March of the Great Return, in which Gaza Strip residents were to try to return to their home villages in Israel; it resulted in six months of violent conflict. Malek and his colleagues felt certain SAFA’s removal from Facebook was timed to the march. “This is a direct targeting of an effective Palestinian social media voice at a very critical time,” he says.

Israel has one of the most openly cooperative relationships with Facebook: The Justice Ministry in 2016 boasted that Facebook had fulfilled “95 percent” of its requests to delete content. The ministry even proposed a “Facebook bill” that would give the government power to remove content from Internet platforms under the broad umbrella of “incitement.” Although it ultimately failed, an informal arrangement already exists, as became clear this October.

That month, Israel’s National Cyber Directorate announced that Facebook was removing “thousands” of accounts ahead of municipal elections. Jordana Cutler, Facebook’s head of policy in Israel — and a former adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — said the company was merely following suggestions. “We receive requests from the government but are not committed to them,” Cutler said.

High score, low pay : why the gig economy loves gamification | Business | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/20/high-score-low-pay-gamification-lyft-uber-drivers-ride-hailing-gig-econ

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/e0dd320bc41c0cda02c61aca6302309bf2254519/156_780_2993_1795/master/2993.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&s=2583a89deeb34f63b0f978d48b4c630e

Using ratings, competitions and bonuses to incentivise workers isn’t new – but as I found when I became a Lyft driver, the gig economy is taking it to another level.

Every week, it sends its drivers a personalised “Weekly Feedback Summary”. This includes passenger comments from the previous week’s rides and a freshly calculated driver rating. It also contains a bar graph showing how a driver’s current rating “stacks up” against previous weeks, and tells them whether they have been “flagged” for cleanliness, friendliness, navigation or safety.

At first, I looked forward to my summaries; for the most part, they were a welcome boost to my self-esteem. My rating consistently fluctuated between 4.89 stars and 4.96 stars, and the comments said things like: “Good driver, positive attitude” and “Thanks for getting me to the airport on time!!” There was the occasional critique, such as “She weird”, or just “Attitude”, but overall, the comments served as a kind of positive reinforcement mechanism. I felt good knowing that I was helping people and that people liked me.

But one week, after completing what felt like a million rides, I opened my feedback summary to discover that my rating had plummeted from a 4.91 (“Awesome”) to a 4.79 (“OK”), without comment. Stunned, I combed through my ride history trying to recall any unusual interactions or disgruntled passengers. Nothing. What happened? What did I do? I felt sick to my stomach.

Because driver ratings are calculated using your last 100 passenger reviews, one logical solution is to crowd out the old, bad ratings with new, presumably better ratings as fast as humanly possible. And that is exactly what I did.

In a certain sense, Kalanick is right. Unlike employees in a spatially fixed worksite (the factory, the office, the distribution centre), rideshare drivers are technically free to choose when they work, where they work and for how long. They are liberated from the constraining rhythms of conventional employment or shift work. But that apparent freedom poses a unique challenge to the platforms’ need to provide reliable, “on demand” service to their riders – and so a driver’s freedom has to be aggressively, if subtly, managed. One of the main ways these companies have sought to do this is through the use of gamification.

Simply defined, gamification is the use of game elements – point-scoring, levels, competition with others, measurable evidence of accomplishment, ratings and rules of play – in non-game contexts. Games deliver an instantaneous, visceral experience of success and reward, and they are increasingly used in the workplace to promote emotional engagement with the work process, to increase workers’ psychological investment in completing otherwise uninspiring tasks, and to influence, or “nudge”, workers’ behaviour. This is what my weekly feedback summary, my starred ratings and other gamified features of the Lyft app did.

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that gamifying business operations has real, quantifiable effects. Target, the US-based retail giant, reports that gamifying its in-store checkout process has resulted in lower customer wait times and shorter lines. During checkout, a cashier’s screen flashes green if items are scanned at an “optimum rate”. If the cashier goes too slowly, the screen flashes red. Scores are logged and cashiers are expected to maintain an 88% green rating. In online communities for Target employees, cashiers compare scores, share techniques, and bemoan the game’s most challenging obstacles.
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But colour-coding checkout screens is a pretty rudimental kind of gamification. In the world of ride-hailing work, where almost the entirety of one’s activity is prompted and guided by screen – and where everything can be measured, logged and analysed – there are few limitations on what can be gamified.

Every Sunday morning, I receive an algorithmically generated “challenge” from Lyft that goes something like this: “Complete 34 rides between the hours of 5am on Monday and 5am on Sunday to receive a $63 bonus.” I scroll down, concerned about the declining value of my bonuses, which once hovered around $100-$220 per week, but have now dropped to less than half that.

“Click here to accept this challenge.” I tap the screen to accept. Now, whenever I log into driver mode, a stat meter will appear showing my progress: only 21 more rides before I hit my first bonus.

In addition to enticing drivers to show up when and where demand hits, one of the main goals of this gamification is worker retention. According to Uber, 50% of drivers stop using the application within their first two months, and a recent report from the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California in Davis suggests that just 4% of ride-hail drivers make it past their first year.

Before Lyft rolled out weekly ride challenges, there was the “Power Driver Bonus”, a weekly challenge that required drivers to complete a set number of regular rides. I sometimes worked more than 50 hours per week trying to secure my PDB, which often meant driving in unsafe conditions, at irregular hours and accepting nearly every ride request, including those that felt potentially dangerous (I am thinking specifically of an extremely drunk and visibly agitated late-night passenger).

Of course, this was largely motivated by a real need for a boost in my weekly earnings. But, in addition to a hope that I would somehow transcend Lyft’s crappy economics, the intensity with which I pursued my PDBs was also the result of what Burawoy observed four decades ago: a bizarre desire to beat the game.

Former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris has also described how the “pull-to-refresh” mechanism used in most social media feeds mimics the clever architecture of a slot machine: users never know when they are going to experience gratification – a dozen new likes or retweets – but they know that gratification will eventually come. This unpredictability is addictive: behavioural psychologists have long understood that gambling uses variable reinforcement schedules – unpredictable intervals of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback – to condition players into playing just one more round.

It is not uncommon to hear ride-hailing drivers compare even the mundane act of operating their vehicles to the immersive and addictive experience of playing a video game or a slot machine. In an article published by the Financial Times, long-time driver Herb Croakley put it perfectly: “It gets to a point where the app sort of takes over your motor functions in a way. It becomes almost like a hypnotic experience. You can talk to drivers and you’ll hear them say things like, I just drove a bunch of Uber pools for two hours, I probably picked up 30–40 people and I have no idea where I went. In that state, they are literally just listening to the sounds [of the driver’s apps]. Stopping when they said stop, pick up when they say pick up, turn when they say turn. You get into a rhythm of that, and you begin to feel almost like an android.”

In their foundational text Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers, Alex Rosenblat and Luke Stark write: “Uber’s self-proclaimed role as a connective intermediary belies the important employment structures and hierarchies that emerge through its software and interface design.” “Algorithmic management” is the term Rosenblat and Stark use to describe the mechanisms through which Uber and Lyft drivers are directed. To be clear, there is no singular algorithm. Rather, there are a number of algorithms operating and interacting with one another at any given moment. Taken together, they produce a seamless system of automatic decision-making that requires very little human intervention.

For many on-demand platforms, algorithmic management has completely replaced the decision-making roles previously occupied by shift supervisors, foremen and middle- to upper- level management. Uber actually refers to its algorithms as “decision engines”. These “decision engines” track, log and crunch millions of metrics every day, from ride frequency to the harshness with which individual drivers brake. It then uses these analytics to deliver gamified prompts perfectly matched to drivers’ data profiles.

To increase the prospect of surge pricing, drivers in online forums regularly propose deliberate, coordinated, mass “log-offs” with the expectation that a sudden drop in available drivers will “trick” the algorithm into generating higher surges. I have never seen one work, but the authors of a recently published paper say that mass log-offs are occasionally successful.

Viewed from another angle, though, mass log-offs can be understood as good, old-fashioned work stoppages. The temporary and purposeful cessation of work as a form of protest is the core of strike action, and remains the sharpest weapon workers have to fight exploitation. But the ability to log-off en masse has not assumed a particularly emancipatory function.

After weeks of driving like a maniac in order to restore my higher-than-average driver rating, I managed to raise it back up to a 4.93. Although it felt great, it is almost shameful and astonishing to admit that one’s rating, so long as it stays above 4.6, has no actual bearing on anything other than your sense of self-worth. You do not receive a weekly bonus for being a highly rated driver. Your rate of pay does not increase for being a highly rated driver. In fact, I was losing money trying to flatter customers with candy and keep my car scrupulously clean. And yet, I wanted to be a highly rated driver.
How much is an hour worth? The war over the minimum wage
Read more

And this is the thing that is so brilliant and awful about the gamification of Lyft and Uber: it preys on our desire to be of service, to be liked, to be good. On weeks that I am rated highly, I am more motivated to drive. On weeks that I am rated poorly, I am more motivated to drive. It works on me, even though I know better. To date, I have completed more than 2,200 rides.

#Lyft #Uber #Travail #Psychologie_comportementale #Gamification #Néo_management #Lutte_des_classes

Parliament seizes cache of Facebook internal papers
▻https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/24/mps-seize-cache-facebook-internal-papers

Documents alleged to contain revelations on data and privacy controls that led to Cambridge Analytica scandal Parliament has used its legal powers to seize internal Facebook documents in an extraordinary attempt to hold the US social media giant to account after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to answer MPs’ questions. The cache of documents is alleged to contain significant revelations about Facebook decisions on data and privacy controls that led to the Cambridge (...)

#CambridgeAnalytica #Six4Three #Facebook #données #procès #BigData #profiling

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Is It Easier to Imagine the End of the World Than the End of the Internet ?
▻https://theintercept.com/2018/11/24/james-bridle-new-dark-age-review

Does anyone at Facebook have the will, or even the ability, to control Facebook ? That’s the question underlying last week’s New York Times investigation of the social media giant. It’s increasingly clear that the company’s growth and survival are premised on its complicity not only in the kind of invasive data exchange revealed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but also on its ineffective, whack-a-mole approach to dealing with the promotion of violence on its platform — an approach that (...)

#Facebook #algorithme #domination #solutionnisme

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How Hamas sold out Gaza for cash from Qatar and collaboration with Israel

Israel’s botched military incursion saved Hamas from the nightmare of being branded as ’sell-outs’. Now feted as resistance heroes, it won’t be long before Hamas’ betrayal of the Palestinian national movement is exposed again

Muhammad Shehada
Nov 22, 2018 7:04 PM

▻https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-how-hamas-sold-out-gaza-for-cash-from-qatar-and-collaboration-with

Earlier this month, Hamas was confronted by one of its worst nightmares. The Palestinian mainstream began to brand Hamas with the same slurs that Hamas itself uses to delegitimize the Palestinian Authority. 
"They sold us out!” Gazans began to whisper, after Hamas reached a limited set of understandings with Israel in early November. Its conditions required Hamas to distance Gazan protesters hundreds of meters away from the separation fence with Israel and actively prevent the weekly tire-burning and incendiary kite-flying associated with what have become weekly protests.
In return for this calm, Israel allowed a restoration of the status quo ante – an inherently unstable and destabilizing situation that had led to the outbreak of popular rage in the first place. 

Other “benefits” of the agreement included a meaningless expansion of the fishing zone for few months, restoring the heavily-restricted entry of relief aid and commercial merchandise to Gaza, instead of the full-on closure of previous months, and a tentative six-month supply of Qatari fuel and money to pay Hamas’ government employees. Basically, a return to square one. 
skip - Qatari ambassador has stones thrown at him in Gaza
Qatari ambassador has stones thrown at him in Gaza - דלג

The disaffected whispers quickly became a popular current, which took overt form when the Qatari ambassador visited Gaza. He was met with angry cries of “collaborator,” as young Gazans threw stones at his vehicle after the ambassador was seen instructing a senior Hamas leader with the words: “We want calm today...we want calm.”
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Hamas leaders didn’t dare show their faces to the people for several days following, and the movement’s popular base had a very hard time arguing that the agreement with Israel - which offered no fundamental improvement of condition – and sweetened by Qatari cash wasn’t a complete sell-out by Hamas. 
Inside Hamas, there was evident anxiety about public outrage, not least in the form of social media activism, using Arabic hashtags equivalents to #sell-outs. One typical message reads: “[Suddenly] burning tires have became ‘unhealthy’ and [approaching] the electronic fence is suicide! #sell-outs.”

Social media is clearly less easy to police than street protests. Even so, there was a small protest by young Gazans in Khan Younis where this “sell-out” hashtag became a shouted slogan; the demonstrators accused Hamas of betrayal.
But relief for Hamas was at hand – and it was Israel who handed the movement an easy victory on a gold plate last week. That was the botched operation by Israel thwarted by Hamas’ military wing, the al-Qassam brigade, which cost the life of a lieutenant colonel from an IDF elite unit.
The ensuing retaliation for Israel’s incursion, led by the Islamic Jihad (prodded into action by Iran), who launched 400 improvised rockets into Israel, was intended to draw a bold red line of deterrence, signaling that the Israeli army cannot do as it pleases in Gaza. 
For days after this last escalation, Hamas leaders rejoiced: that exhibition of muscle power proved their moral superiority over the “collaborationist” Palestinian Authority. Boasting about its heroic engagement in the last escalation, Hamas easily managed to silence its critics by showing that the “armed resistance” is still working actively to keep Gaza safe and victorious. Those are of course mostly nominal “victories.”

But their campaign was effective in terms of changing the political atmosphere. Now that the apparatus of the Muqawama had “restored our dignity,” further criticism of Hamas’ political and administrative conduct in Gaza was delegitimized again. Criticism of Hamas became equivalent to undermining the overall Palestinian national struggle for liberation.

Unsurprisingly that silenced the popular outrage about Hamas’ initial agreement of trading Gaza’s sacrifices over the last seven months for a meager supply of aid and money. The few who continued to accuse Hamas of selling out were promptly showered by footage of the resistance’s attacks on Israel, or reports about Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s resignation, for which Hamas claimed credit, coming as it did a day after a Hamas leader demanded he resigned. 
Mission accomplished, a piece of cake. Now it was time for Hamas to return to business, strengthened by a renewed shield of resistance-immunity that branded criticism as betrayal.
Although Hamas leaders have admitted the reality: no more fundamental cease-fire is being negotiated, and so no fundamental improvements for Gaza can be expected - it continues to sell Gazans the delusion that their decade of endurance is finally bearing fruit and soon, more prosperity, employment and hope will trickle down to the masses.
What has actually trickled down so far are temporary and symbolic painkillers, not an actual end to Gaza’s pain.

Hamas agreed to give a small share of the Qatari spoils to 50,000 poor Gazan families; $100 for each household. They agreed to creating temporary employment programs for 5,000 young university graduates with the aspirational title of Tomoh ("Ambition"). They promised to keep up the fight until Gaza is no longer unlivable, and Hamas leaders pledged with their honor to continue the Gaza Great Return March until the protests’ main goal - lifting the blockade - was achieved.
But does that really mean anything when the protests are kept at hundreds of meters’ distance from the fence, essentially providing the “Gazan silence” Netanyahu wants? When no pressure is applied anymore on the Israeli government to create a sense of urgency for action to end the disastrous situation in Gaza? And when Hamas continues to avoid any compromises about administering the Gaza Strip to the PA in order to conclude a decade of Palestinian division, and consecutive failures?
That Hamas is desperately avoiding war is indeed both notable and worthy, as well as its keenness to prevent further causalities amongst protesters, having already suffered 200 deaths and more than 20,000 wounded by the IDF. That genuine motivation though is mixed with more cynical ones – the protests are now politically more inconvenient for Hamas, and the casualty rate is becoming too expensive to sustain.
Yet one must think, at what price is Hamas doing this? And for what purpose? If the price of Gaza’s sacrifices is solely to maintain Hamas’ rule, and the motive of working to alleviate pressure on Gaza is to consolidate its authority, then every Gazan has been sold out, and in broad daylight.

Only if Hamas resumes the process of Palestinian reconciliation and a democratic process in Gaza would those actions be meaningful. Otherwise, demanding that the world accepts Hamas’ rule over Gaza as a fait accompli – while what a Hamas-controlled Gaza cannot achieve, most critically lifting the blockade, is a blunt betrayal of Palestinian martyrdom.
It means compromising Palestinian statehood in return for creating an autonomous non-sovereign enclave in which Hamas could freely exercise its autocratic rule indefinitely over an immiserated and starving population.
Which, according to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, is what Hamas has always wanted since rising to power in 2009: an interim Palestinian state in Gaza under permanent Hamas rule, not solving the wider conflict but rather obliterating in practice the prospect of a two state solution.
It remains to be seen if the calls of “sell-outs” will return to Gaza’s social networks and streets, not least if Hamas’ obduracy and appetite for power end up selling out any prospect of a formally recognized State of Palestine.
Muhammad Shehada is a writer and civil society activist from the Gaza Strip and a student of Development Studies at Lund University, Sweden. He was the PR officer for the Gaza office of the Euro-Med Monitor for Human Rights. Twitter: @muhammadshehad2

Muhammad Shehada

How to quickly get the dates for the first 10 Mondays using #ruby
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-to-quickly-get-the-dates-for-the-first-10-mondays-using-ruby-ce90669

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If you are sometimes feeling bored and want to entertain yourself, then rather than aimlessly scrolling in a social media, you can try to learn something new. For example, you can learn something that you have not known that you can do with Ruby: Getting the dates for next Mondays, Tuesdays or any other day of the week.Here is how you do it:▻https://medium.com/media/9302ec923c0527390247b753e813cfd0/hrefAfter you execute it, you will see the list of the dates:We can replace the part monday with any other name of the days of the week in English and it will work fine.I know that this may look like something that may not be that much benefit, but maybe, you could use it in a personal #script that you have. In a better case, I hope this inspires you to explore more in the documentation of a (...)

#date #programming #tricks

How To Measure What an #instagram Influencer is Worth.
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-to-measure-what-an-instagram-influencer-is-worth-cb488f605ffe?source

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For most of us, the process of understanding what to pay a social media influencer for promoting our brand or service on Instagram is still a mystery. How are prices determined? Is the price you are given a good deal or a not-so-good one? Which #influencers should you partner with to get the highest return for your money? Luckily for us, there’s a way to figure this out ourselves, and it’s a pretty straightforward process.So, how do you do it?!In order to measure the value of an Instagram influencer, it’s important that we first understand how influencers decide how to price a promotion opportunity.How influencers price promotion opportunities.Whenever you approach an influencer with a possible promotion opportunity, they usually determine their pricing in two ways.First, how much they like (...)

#instagram-marketing #influencer-marketing #small-business-marketing

Quitting Instagram : She’s one of the millions disillusioned with social media. But she also helped create it.

▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/technology/2018/11/14/quitting-instagram-shes-one-millions-disillusioned-with-social-media

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“In the early days, you felt your post was seen by people who cared about you and that you cared about,” said Richardson, who left Instagram in 2014 and later founded a start-up. “That feeling is completely gone for me now.”

Je me souviens très bien de cette période là, Instagram était une quasi communauté qui avait, comme le disait Bailey Richardson, l’objectif tourné vers le monde et non l’inverse. J’ai participé à des Instameet ou des instachallenge ; Exemple le #Achallenge, poster une photo avec un A dedans. Un concours avec un seul hashtag :) où le gagnant avait recueillit 3000 likes sur une semaine de jeu :D maintenant c’est le symbole d’une mauvaise communication sur Instagram. Un flop quoi. Je trouvais ça ludique, amusant, bien veillant et surtout cohérent avec la culture numérique.

When Richardson joined Instagram in February 2012, at age 26, the former art history major was drawn to what was then a fast-growing indie platform for photographers, hipsters and artistic-types who wanted to share interesting or beautiful things they discovered about the world. At that time, Instagram was “a camera that looked out into the world," said one of the company’s first engineers, "versus a camera that was all about myself, my friends, who I’m with.”

Richardson ran the start-up’s blog as well as the official @instagram account from the company’s offices in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. Before there were software algorithms suggesting accounts to follow, Richardson selected featured Instagrammers by hand. For the most devoted users, she organized in-person “Insta-meets” in places as far-flung as Moscow and North Korea.

“We felt like stewards of that passion,” Richardson said.

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Richardson moved to New York after leaving Instagram. (Yana Paskova/For The Washington Post)

One of the first people she featured prominently was an early Instagrammer in Spain. The exposure Richardson gave @IsabelitaVirtual, an amateur photographer whose real name is Isabel Martinez, helped Martinez become one of the most popular Instagram users in the country and led to a career in high-end fashion photography.

Both say that type of random connection that resulted in their friendship is hardly possible in the current iteration of Instagram. Too many people to follow, too much showmanship, too many posts flickering by, they say. “I don’t even see her posts anymore,” Richardson said. Martinez told The Post that while she wouldn’t quit Instagram for professional reasons, the app has in recent years become more anxiety-producing than pleasurable for her.

#social_media #Facebook #Instagram #réseaux_sociaux