This is a long read, but worth it.
http://tinyurl.com/y733xra5
Nov 5, 1946 - Nov 19, 2018This is a long read, but worth it.
http://tinyurl.com/y733xra5
Guest
It is a very good read and is a hot topic in the news today.
Information warfare on our social interaction sites and cyber warfare on our infrastructure.
That is one of the weaknesses in the open society we enjoy over the closed and state regulated ones in the Eastern block.
Charter Member
Makes me glad I never opened a Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat/whatever account. My digital footprint is relatively small.
I remember wondering during the last election cycle where all these off the wall stories about various candidates were coming from, and why people believed them. Turns out people were being very professionally manipulated. Scary, not only for the fact that people are doing these things but that lots of people were willing to believe such wild stuff.
Back in 1997, Terry Goodkind wrote a series of fantasy books called the Sword of Truth. Part of the series was the protagonist figuring out what rules a wizard lives by. The first one always stuck with me:
I teach history and I can say that this resonated with me. So many times, people fall victim to this. One of the earliest examples was the blood libel or the Story of William of Norwich, which has been cropped up periodically for nearly 1000 years. Or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, produced by the Tsar's secret police and used by the Russians, the Nazis, hell, even Henry Ford printed half a million copies for distribution.People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they're afraid it might be true. Peoples' heads are full of knowledge, facts and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.
One of the creepiest examples was a story that circulated during WWI where German soldiers, invading Belgium, sacked a hospital and threw babies out the windows, to be caught on the bayonets below. I got chills when I heard, during Congressional testimony leading up to Desert Storm, a Kuwaiti woman repeated the same story, this time with Iraqi soldiers standing in for Germans and incubators standing in for bayonets. Turns out, it was all a lie. Poke here. Served the purpose of justifying the war, though.
Guest
Wow! The news about Cambridge-Analitica just keeps getting more and more enlightening.
https://www.channel4.com/news/expose...idge-analytica
The company says their work with data and research allowed Mr Trump to win with a narrow margin of “40,000 votes” in three states providing victory in the electoral college system, despite losing the popular vote by more than 3 million votes.
The election was plagued by allegations of fake news and smears on social media, along with the alleged attempt by Russia to influence the outcome.
Mr Nix boasted about Cambridge Analytica’s work for Trump, saying: “We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting, we ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign and our data informed all the strategy.”
Separately, Mr Turnbull described how the company could create proxy organisations to discreetly feed negative material about opposition candidates on to the Internet and social media.
He said: “Sometimes you can use proxy organisations who are already there. You feed them. They are civil society organisations.. Charities or activist groups, and we use them – feed them the material and they do the work…
“We just put information into the bloodstream to the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape. And so this stuff infiltrates the online community and expands but with no branding – so it’s unattributable, untrackable.”lolUPDATE: Cambridge Analytica have announced they have suspended chief executive Alexander Nix pending a full investigation. They said: “In the view of the board Mr Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 News do not represent the values or operations of the firm.”
Charter Member
And some of those stories still show up around here nowScary, not only for the fact that people are doing these things but that lots of people were willing to believe such wild stuff.
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis
Guest
Actually they get more info by people filling out surveys and answering questionnaires. You would not believe the things that people can tie together just by reading all of the posts one makes here at the CB. All they do is take your actual posts, boasts, spur of the moment quips you make and compile it all and create a profile of things you like, dislike, favorite foods, favorite vacation spot...etc, just by what you have mentioned in your posts. It would not surprise me one bit that the bots you see visiting, are not doing just that. Google your nickname that you use here and see if any links point right back here. If you play your cards right, these same tactics can be used to gather your info in your local town by dropping by the tax office or County clerks office and requesting the right things.Makes me glad I never opened a Facebook/Twitter/Snapchat/whatever account. My digital footprint is relatively small.
Funny, Obama used Facebook and Twitter and all of these same methods and nobody said a word. Sour grapes is all it is.
Guest
Here is a few links for reference....President Obama has been called the “first social-media president.” It’s both a true and a misleading characterization. On the one hand, the Obama White House was indeed the first presidency to make use of services like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. But on the other hand, these services either didn’t exist or weren’t used by a broad public before Barack Obama took office in 2009. The White House brags that Obama was the first to tweet from @POTUS on Twitter, to go live on Facebook, to use a filter on Snapchat. But in truth, any president in office during the last eight years probably would have become the first social-media president.
In addition to these expected steps, the White House also expressed its commitment to share its social-media content with the American people—both via accessible, downloadable archives, where possible, and also through tools and gadgets that might present the content in new and synthetic ways. In service of the latter goal, the White House invited the public to submit “creative ways to archive this content and make it both useful and available for years to come.”
The White House demonstrated remarkable astuteness toward this end, both culturally and rhetorically. It explicitly invited “students, data engineers, artists, and researchers” to contribute—just the communities likely to feel adept and engaged with the technological sphere. It reaffirmed that the Obama administration was up on the latest trends, suggesting Twitter bots, query tools, and metadata services as examples of possible submissions. It used keywords commensurate with the values and rhetoric of the technology community. And most importantly, it issued the call in the form of a short-term contest, of sorts: submissions were to be completed “no later than mid-December [2016],” or about two months after the call was first issued.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...sident/512405/
Charter Member
This company did almost exactly what Obama’s crew bragged about doing in 2012 and some in 2008 when the Obamites went further to imply that the Republicans were incompetent fools for not keeping up. Now that the R’pubs caught up and Hillary sat out the election, data mining is being projected as something bordering on crime. My Schadenfreude runnith over with their angst and hypocrisy.
A further big cheer is that when this broke this week the Lefties have gone over the edge and are attacking Facebook relentlessly for allowing their data to be used. To them, Facebook is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Left and being used by Trump to screw them is a heinous and unpardonable offense...so bad that they have driven Facebook stock down nearly 15% costing its principal stock holder, Mark Zuckerberg, about $6B. My Schadenfreude exploded on that one.
...............
“You can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.” — Too fundamental to have an attribution
Guest
Another..
The gathering in Beverly Hills in early April had all the elements of a Hollywood pitch meeting: influential celebrities, powerful agents, marketing moguls and social media strategists.
The only hint of difference was the presence of a lone government official: Paulette Aniskoff, head of the White House Office of Public Engagement. Aniskoff had journeyed from Washington to the offices of the entertainment company Live Nation for a strategy session on how YouTube and Vine stars could use their digital celebrity to promote some of the Obama administration’s key policies.
The meeting, which ran twice as long as the hour allotted, in many ways exemplifies how central digital media and audience engagement have become to the functioning of the Obama White House.
The online stars in attendance — mostly young, video-sharing entrepreneurs with large niche audiences and powerful personal connections to their millions of subscribers — are part of a robust online and social media culture at the White House that is likely to forever change the way American presidents relate to the public.......
Barack Obama rose to prominence as a politician who could deliver broad, sweeping speeches with universal themes, and he has leveraged the opportunities of the digital age to maximum political advantage. But often, this now means speaking narrowly to his base voters or to groups disconnected from the mainstream political process.....
These changes are simply part of the new reality of having come to power during the digital and social-media revolution, White House officials say. The Pew Research Center has found, for example, that more than half of Web-using adults regularly get their political news through Facebook.
After the disastrous rollout of his health insurance program, the president appeared on the Funny or Die online comedy series “Between Two Ferns.” More recently, Obama spoofed himself in a video on BuzzFeed headlined, “Things Everybody Does But Doesn’t Talk About, Featuring President Obama.” So far, the BuzzFeed video has been viewed nearly 53 million times.
In the shift from old to new media, the White House has essentially become its own media production company, one that can sometimes look like a state-run news distribution service. This year alone, White House officials have posted more than 400 videos to YouTube, which have been viewed for a total of more than 174,497,605 minutes. They have produced nearly 275 infographics for WhiteHouse.gov and for social media outlets. They have also created and programmed multiple channels on Web sites ranging from BuzzFeed to Instagram and Pinterest.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.f01bcaf4b939
Guest
And a PDF.....
https://people.stanford.edu/jaaker/s...june-obama.pdf
Guest
I just found a direct tie in to Obama and one of the orginal creators of Facebook who made Obama's website barackobama,com. How close of a tie was Obama to facebook?
Look at the bold,the Russians could not even come close to those numbers. This is all a bunch of hooey by old fogeys who do not know better and young millennials who are too ignorant to know much.The topic of Barack Obama's usage of social media in his political campaigns, including podcasting, Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube has been compared to the adoption of radio, television, MTV, and the Internet in slingshotting his presidential campaign to success and as thus has elicited much scholarly inquiry.[1] In the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama had more "friends" on Facebook and Myspace and more "followers" on Twitter than his opponent John McCain.[2]
Obama's usage of the wider Internet has often since been compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy's adaption of the radio and television mediums respectively in the history of communication between the White House and the American Public.
The official website of Barack Obama is barackobama.com. It is run by Chris Hughes, one of the three co-founders of Facebook, and has been described as a "sort of social network".[1] Steve Spinner, a member of Obama’s National Finance Committee, says that while previous campaigns have used the internet none had yet taken full advantage of social networking features.[1] The website included online tools that allowed members to identify neighbors that the Obama campaign thought might be potential backers and then report back on any resulting conversations.[3]
Members of the site could also create blogs, post photos, and form groups through the website,[3] but each member must publish limited biographical profile and no more than one photo.[4] According to Hughes, during the 2008 campaign, over two million accounts were created for the website to "organize their local communities on behalf of Barack Obama".[3][4] He estimates that more than 200,000 events were organised through the website.[3] Moreover, 400,000 articles were written in blogs. 400,000 videos that supported Obama were posted into YouTube via the official website. 35,000 volunteer groups were created. $30 million were spent by 70,000 people into their own fundraising webpages. In the final four days of the 2008 campaign, three millions phone calls were made through the website's internet virtual phone.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack...n_social_media
Guest
You really have to hand it to Mr Trump. He has taken the old disinformation techniques to grand levels.
He has invented a wonderful backdoor to bring in foreign actors into our elections and great ways to spread disinformation.
Of course, with all new and successful methods, this will be used in the future by every politician and political party here and in other nations.
The Democrats must keep Mr Trump in office at least until the 2020 elections in order to take over the Congress in 2018 and the Executive in 2020.
Guest
God please grant me patience, because if you don't, I'm gonna need bail money.....
Charter Member
I don't know if people realized just what was happening, at least not in terms we are coming to understand it now. It is a lot like so many things. It takes time to realize that it is a problem and how it can be used perniciously. I haven't seen where the Obama 2012 campaign used the data they apparently stole to plant false stories specifically designed to manipulate people into divisive behavior, so the two situations are not exactly analogous. Stealing the data is bad enough, though. I think we've all become more aware of the issue in the past year than we were before. It isn't always partisan politics at play with these sorts of things. Sometimes, it is just that things look a lot clearer in retrospect than they do at the time.Originally Posted by TxMusky
Guest
Remember when I said the Dems loved Facebook when Obama used it as an advantage to win his election......
Controversy continues to swirl around how the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtained personal data from over 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge and used it to target ads to individuals in an effort to help Donald Trump be elected president in 2016.
But a more serious case of apparent misconduct involves Facebook data going to a different presidential campaign – this time in 2012. In this case, which is getting far less attention, Facebook reportedly voluntarily provided data on millions of its users to the re-election campaign of President Obama.
If true, such action by Facebook may constitute a major violation of federal campaign finance law as an illegal corporate campaign contribution. The matter should be investigated by the Federal Election Commission – an agency I am quite familiar with, because I served as one of its commissioners from 2006 to 2007. The commission enforces campaign finance laws for congressional and presidential elections.
A federal law bans corporations from making “direct or indirect” contributions to federal candidates. That ban extends beyond cash contributions to “any services, or anything of value.” In other words, corporations cannot provide federal candidates with free services of any kind. Under the Federal Election Commission’s regulations, “anything of value” includes any “in-kind contribution.”
For example, if a corporation decided to offer a presidential candidate free office space, that would violate federal law. Corporations can certainly offer their services, including office space, to federal campaigns. But the campaigns are required to pay the fair market value for such services or rental properties.
According to Carol Davidsen, the former media director for Obama for America, Facebook gave the 2012 Obama campaign direct access to the personal data of Facebook users in violation of its internal rules, making a special exception for the campaign. The Daily Mail, a British newspaper, reported that Davidsen said on Twitter March 18 that Facebook employees came to the campaign office and “were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”
The type of data that the Obama campaign was mining from Facebook is a more sophisticated version of the type of data that has long been provided by professional direct mail marketers – something pioneered by Richard Viguerie. Viguerie, for example, has detailed personal data on “12 million conservative donors and activists” to whom his company sends letters and emails on behalf of his clients. He provides information to campaigns looking for votes and money, and to nonprofit and advocacy organizations raising funds.
Political campaigns must pay for these services. Under a Federal Election Commission regulation, giving a mailing list or something similar to a campaign is considered an “in-kind contribution.”
So if Facebook gave the Obama campaign free access to this type of data when it normally does not do so for other entities – or usually charges for such access – then Facebook would appear to have violated the federal ban on in-kind contributions by a corporation. And the Obama campaign may have violated the law by accepting such a corporate contribution.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/...deral-law.html
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