- Radio Free Arizona Playlist
Monday, August 19, 2024
Friday, November 24, 2017
And now for a few notes on almost getting hit by a meteor and what else is lurking, exactly, out there
Bards of Mythville and Shiprect guitarist Anticide and I were on the way home from taco night when he saw a piece of a falling meteror right over our heads, perhaps 100 feet above. I could smell the sulfur. It was right over the Scottsdale Civic Center Mall, lined up with Indian School Road, downward to the east. It burned out right above a parking lot. Which means only one thing. In terms of meteorite awareness, I'm good to go. My chances of getting hit by another one for the next 500,000 years is what, maybe one out seven? Whew. That's one less thing to worry about.
I may not be a rocket scientist, but the word on the street is people here in Scottsdale, Arizona don't need to worry about other disasters spreading like contagion across the globe. On the day of the earthquake in Mexico, however, I did some low-tech scientific readings. Based on these readings, the ground was rolling. Later that day, I sat at the bus stop, not even playing my harmonica to mock the honking vehicles like I often do at Scottsdale and Shea. I just sat there, staring, taking it in, in a kind of simple-minded bliss, thinking to myself: "Hmm. This stuff all around me all looks pretty damn solid to me."
But that is falsehood. Everything is porous. Everything. It's all atoms and molecules, brothers and sisters, and the world we see is a mere illusion based on our limited censors perceiving it as stable.
The late Edward Abbey once wrote he lived in Arizona for, among many other reasons, this one: Nothing bad ever happens here. It's solid as a rock. Wrong, Everything is in flux.
Things change. Perhaps because of this: Experts in the field will tell you there are no natural disasters, only human errors. Build by the sea, pay the price. Build on the desert, make sure you have enough water. And in the heat, in Arizona? C'mon man, just look at what happened to this place in June, with temps going over 120 and records going out the window. Live on a mountaintop, look out for lightning. You get the picture. But let's set that aside, for now.
Nuclear war is a kind of cheap answer to this question of immunity from the apocalypse. Mostly because of its unthinkability. There is no rational reason for their use, since mutually assured self-destruction is always going to be the posture. But a nuclear accident? Yeah, that's out there. So are acts of terrorism with nuclear materials. Worrying about that, though, is the job of highly paid paranoids in the fear-is-security-industrial-military complex, and I'm just going to let those folks stew in their own sweat, hatred and self-loathing of all of the mosquitoes out there looking to bite us, hitting America where it ain't.
Arizona is, nevertheless, about as safe as it gets in terms of all thing militaristic. The economy depends on the military. War is Arizona's lifeline, courtesy of the U.S. government. I won't bore you with the stats (So here they are). But from end to end, this state is armed to the teeth, with everything but a navy. Air assets. Ground assets. Space assets. Probably even men-who-stare-at-goats assets. If war comes, the Southwest is bank.
In addition to that, for example, just Scottsdale alone is loaded with human shields. The international elite mutton here like locusts. They drive drunk, do their coke, bring their slave women here. It's party, party, party in Scottsdale for the uber rich. Which is what inspires this little sermon, I suppose. Watching their dance of indifference on these days when earthquakes, hurricanes and all the rest are turning the planet inside out, I ask myself, what do these people know that I don't? They are building a new Egypt in Scottsdale, and the architecture is state of all arts. The masters of the universe, as Tom Wolfe called them in "Bonfire of the Vanities," have big plans for Arizona. They have access to all the data. The ears of the governments and the corporations. The run the big money seas as they swell and burn. Why?
Well, that one thing not being considered is this: Human error. And arrogance. Incredible arrogance. See the greed? Yep, arrogance.
So I know this couple. Two of the smartest, hardest working, motivated, tuned-in people you can possibly ever know, and they are ready to book, as in flee Phoenix because they are completely convinced the gig is up ... in a matter of days. They are getting survival gear. They are dialing up both mobility and wireless techno. They are thinking about food and water and where is the best air to breathe when the shit goes down. Their conviction is infectious. And I look at this and go, well, where do you run, really, when you don't really know what's going to happen from moment to moment, much less tomorrow or the next day or month or years to come. I think about such films as "Mosquito Coast," with Harrison Ford taking his family to some far off place in South America, all geared up to build their new Jerusalem. All I can think is, you wanna take all of that off-the-grid American know-how and take it where, to make what part of your lives and the world better? With that kind of approach, aren't you just bringing the Beast with you?
But like Roland Emmerich, who did all of those disaster films like "2012," "San Andreas" and "Independence Day," I will now consider several Arizona-based scenarios because hey, it's fun to think about.
Numero Uno: Did you know the San Francisco Peaks, mainly Sunset Crater to the northeast of Flagstaff, are still active volcanoes?
Numero Dos: Public officials in Flagstaff live in fear of what might happen to the downtown area if a 100 to 500 year flood were to come, since even during the monsoons right now the amount of water running through there is unreal.
Numero Tres: The Grand Canyon. Period. One big gash in the earth capable of doing anything, at any time, it wants. Floods. Earthquakes. Dinosaurs or new races crawling out from beneath the Earth. Anything.
Numero Quatro: Native American legends tell of biblical floods. It is glued to their beliefs, and even if some of it was morphed into by the Spaniards and the Jesuits "civilizing" the Southwest. They say the white band on top of Superstition Mountain is from that flood. They say the Apache Mother landed in a little hollowed out log after the great flood in Boynton Canyon, outside Sedona, Arizona.
Numero Cinco: Dinosaurs. All over the place. Bones. Tracks. Dead. Quite Suddenly, it seems.
Numero Six Six Six: Trump.
Numero Seven: Solar storms. Let's just say the same kind of solar storm that hit America in 1859 struck again. Lights out. Electronics bursting into flames. Even paper caught on fire. Imagine the Valley of the Sun with known of its wonder-tech in working order. Fountains running on electricity, done. Traffic lights, dull, leading to panic and gridlock. Looting. Shooting because the place is loaded with both guns and economic disparity. The polarities of social and political angst are just as on edge in the Valley as it is in Los Angeles or New York. A powder keg. Take away that one thing holding it all together, electricity and communications, and, well, could get pretty wild around here.
Numero Eight: Water. This is a fucking desert. When is this place going to get serious about its usage, now that yet another huge influx of refugees are headed here after the torments on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico?
Numero Nine: Aliens
Ten: The Great Wall. Interesting thing about walls. While in Mexico, heading north, they are mere impediments to be gone around. However, in Arizona, going south, We the Sheeple aren't so well-trained in getting through them, if, for any reason the need to go southbound were required, en mass.
Yep, This One Goes to Eleven: Boy, Arizona is really becoming such a diverse place. People from all over the world come here. In fact, I think I caught a cold from one of those people who came from someplace else. Good thing it wasn't anything worse. Like some zombie plague or anything. Whew!
OK, that's all for now. Personally, I like what the Buddhist monks once told me. There is no need for an end-of-the-world myth or story or fable or prophecy. As long as we are at one with the Creator, all else is irrelevant.
Happy dancing, Scottsdale.
Namaste.
Wednesday, November 8, 2017
And now for a few words on buying a plastic Chinese compass at Walmart
You hear them gun up. They are like tanks gassing for battle. Just as the sun rises. You are at the Wal Mart distribution center in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, and the not-so-tiny army is just getting ready for the pusch.
You want to salute, but a tall, highly distinguished looking, slightly limping, downright admiralesque truck driver is watching you, watching him, and that already, as the sun continues to climb, makes the perfectly "normal," well, perfectly "paranormal." The distribution center features a huge complex, maybe four or five football fields long, with vast numbers of trucks in the back, enclosed by a barbed wire fence. Activity is continuous after the sun rises. It is systematic. Ghosty, with few souls to be actually seen. Downright robotic.
But you are simple folk. Practically human. Actually somewhat happy. Your plan for the day is to buy a compass at the Wal Mart nearby, and if it wasn't for the blazing orb in the bright orange in the circus animal clouds, you'd never be able to tell that the Mt. Pleasant Super Center is directly east. However, you do know this: If the great cities of the earth are 24-hour-a-day hotspots, your friendly neighborhood Wal Mart burns just as brightly in the spangles still gleaming, the stars brightly steaming, and so on .... With retirees at the door. Half the county is employed there, at the Super Center, actually. The other half? Most likely running in and out of the Super Center in a kind of wild-eyed state of panic.
The panic is for going in, quite truthfully. The release can be determined, the very sense of a short-term satisfaction, maybe only as good as the car ride home, in the trail of candy wrappers, soda cans, plastic pieces of all kinds of things, that stream, chaotically, along a nearby access road bordered on both sides by fields of corn grown for ethynol.
The front of the Super Center big box store is more palatable to the eye. The front is decorated with the words "Always" in a kind of cursive, red, giant type, and "low prices," half as large, directly below: reading, thus "Always low prices." But above is not always as so below, so when it comes to the medium being the message in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, you really only know one true thing: Something is quite FUBAR here. Because, for one thing, if you check the prices in the surrounding small towns, prices are far lower, just to compete and ... maybe, just maybe, even survive.
Meanwhile, over the technologically zombiefied distribution center, the angry sun continues to rise in the east and the trucks continue to gun up and line out for invasion and the people, one out of seven in America now living in poverty, continue to get, well, hungrier, angrier, more anxious, more in panic. Toward the north (one supposes, since we are still sans a compass), the trucks slowly move out in a parade of equally metered marches to thy mind in a military mode.
The Wal Mart trucks, loaded up with every conceivable kind of petroleum- or corporation corn-seed-based product, are streaming out in a viral march into every demographically correct corner of middle America. Humming onward sweetly. Moving not-so-discretely. In perfect echelons of control. One might consider how each truck driver might be as equally automated as the consumers they are targeting now.
However, as those consumers line in and out, one is more easily led to understand quite the opposite. People who work at Wal Mart are completely varied human beings, with their own tastes, flavors, beliefs and so on ... So before you go on categorizing the consumers of middle earth as being a race of Lilliputians gone completely insane, let's set ourselves in proper motion. Let's ground ourselves. Let's first seek to maintain a proper moral compass. Let's just do that first. As the sun rises. Before it sets.
One handy way to do just that is to take a closer look at what is happening within the concentric circles of what is happening, even as you read this, in other small towns in southeastern Iowa. In places like Morning Sun, for example. Maybe 30 miles away as the crow flies. In Morning Sun, you will find, the situation downtown is dismal. The whole place could be bought up now with Monopoly money. The only storefronts or commercial retail spaces left standing look burned out, bombed out, forgotten, dead, de-neighborized, closed for the rest of steaming eternity under the angry sun.
O sure, there might be, in any one of these surrounding towns, the occasional shop keeper left standing, who will greet you like Daffy Duck, waving his finger. He wags. He complains. He dreams of moving getting out his business, entirely. If not for the few good folks who come in to shop locally, he'd be in Bermuda by now. Since the finger wagging is a universal sign indicating the common small-town accusal, meaning, "Shame on you," each of these towns on most days would be classified better as ghost towns.
"Shame for all who shop at Wal Mart," they might say. "Shame on all of you who drive out of their communities, burning all of that gas, burning all of that time and money, to go out of their way to destroy the very towns they live in. Shame on all of you, far worse criminals than the little thieves who sit in their tiny small town cop jail cells, who go all of that way to buy all of that foreign-made crap, when they can buy some of my crap, much of it frequently locally produced, that they could buy instead."
But holy Ronald Reagan, sweet finger-flipping Jesus, as everyone must not know, as all wild-eyed Wal Mart shoppers do not feel or deny or fail to understand, they know not what they do. They know not that they are citizen soldiers as well for the zombied technological armies of the corporately sponsored siege against the American dream. They can't even see how they are bleeding their own communities dry. They do not know that, without their moral compass; hell they can scarcely listen or even be told, how the Wal Mart army is a big bluesy vampire sucking their very vitals, their lifestyles, their values, completely dry.
So go ahead, buy your plastic, Chinese-made compass at Wal Mart. Notice how it breaks easily. It will happen ... someday soon. You can always buy another one, and another, and another ... and if you have enough money, in great bulky bulks at Sam's Club, too ... all soon to be built on the surface of the moon.
Thursday, September 14, 2017
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Important as ...
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| The Oracle of Delphi |
But the real question is, why am I so hard on members of my own family. For example, I posted this on my band Shiprect's Facebook Page because I'm trying to get the guitarist to come out of semi-retirement at way-too-early-of-age: "MAN OVERBOARD! Missing since mid-summer, Anticide has apparently been lost at C for sometime now, and the night watchman only noticed it this morning. Apparently, he does not realize how hard it is to get 71 members on any Facebook group in about one year, much less a few days. It's like Bono going, "Oh, where's the Edge? Is he still flipping burgers for the Super Rich?" Or, better yet, Kief Richards, as channeled by Johnny Depp, upon hearing Mick J. is reluctant to tour again because he's under the false impression a solo act will ever actually make sense, saying, "If he doesn't show up, I'll break his friggin' legs." If anyone sees this missing pirate star-in-the-waiting, please alert Amber, because she's really into him. I mean, take a day off, dude. We only have nine days before Nibaru destroys the Earth, anyway, Call in seasick, please! So you can get back on that stage and punish the evil doers good and right with that guitar gawd gift of yours. OK?"
And that's just today. Yesterday, I was totally critical of one of my favorite humans on Earth, Bernie Sanders, when I wrote, "Sanders can't even get decent health care for his own state, Vermont. I will give you a living recent sample. Last week a friend of mine was taken away by some pretty brutal police officers for an involuntary mental health emergency. She didn't want to be institutionalized in Newport, Vermont, way up in moose country, where they have very few services of any kind at all .... no public transportation, no rail, no bus service, no airports for anyone other than the super class ... an there is no mental health facility, just the hospital. They kept her there in the emergency room all weekend, trying to figure out what to do ... This an area serving perhaps 25,000 people or more, if you include the outlying areas ... Nothing. I know Bernie is not into the pork but, hey brother Bern, eat some pork every now and then, at least for your own people! See my point. Not very realistic. But then, true revolutionaries are romantics. It's not their job to rebuild the worlds they blow apart. Not much different than Steve Bannon, in that regard ... I know there's a DIY publication available in that state that rails against the mental health system with a frightening amount of material. By the way, they let her go, and she's back to her normal self again ... Thankfully, since what can we really say about the "science" of psychiatry anyway without a metaphysical component, anyway? Enough said."
But was that enough said? No. I kept going, like a cat in heat, writing ... "I am happy as a clam about the way the system works for me, but I am an odd duck in a lake full of gators, so what do I know?"
Ernest, I get that self-deprecating humor from my mother. But this insistence on writing when I should just keep my mouth shut. O, it's the devil. Must be. Why I comment at all on public health care at all amazes me.
But was that enough said? No. I kept going, like a cat in heat, writing ... "I am happy as a clam about the way the system works for me, but I am an odd duck in a lake full of gators, so what do I know?"
Ernest, I get that self-deprecating humor from my mother. But this insistence on writing when I should just keep my mouth shut. O, it's the devil. Must be. Why I comment at all on public health care at all amazes me.
But then I finally found something else to blame. The season of the summer bummer 2017, about which yesterday I wrote: "This is supposed to be the day the brutal summer of Arizona ends, as we enter a period where the temperature goes below the triple digits. The question is, how do we say goodbye to this tormentor of our souls? How many brain cells did we lose? Did the heat and ozone and carbon monoxide finally turn us into compliant beings incapable of remembering each other's faces or names forever? Is there any value to this? Such as the ability to create more wacked out music than ever before. Such as being poetic, if living in the moment enough, in ways shaped by the natural environment as never before in human history. Sure, there is a cost. Like the whatevers (still too messed up to remember what they are) of Greece, who became holy producers of sacred visions by sucking in the very vapors of the Earth? I mean, they must have been pretty senile at the end, right? Or the holy men of the mountains of the Himalayas, who got themselves to the point that they had no more thoughts at all, not one, whatsoever. Who knows? One man's nirvana is another culture's Alzheimer's crisis. All I can say about the summer of 2017 in metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona is this: It hurt. Bad. I will never be the same. And if I can't figure out how to get out of here next year, just shoot me. Please. I won't even prosecute."
Later today, I saw a post by my daughter, E, and she is so great and really gets it, and has enormous musical talent. She posted something up on the so-called Denver Airport conspiracies, and I found it pretty thought provoking, if more than a little hysterically monomaniacal and fear-based. But she's very young and eager to learn. So, enter Dad, the historian. Right after I found out a sculptor, Luis Jimenez, had died making a wild-eyed horse piece, quite apocalyptic, for the Denver Airport (man, being an artist can be dangerous work). I interviewed him for a controversial sculpture that was eventually removed around Craftsman Court in Scottsdale when I worked for the Scottsdale Progress in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
It noted great mural piece and tried to interpret it through this fear-based view, and may have been created before the coming of Donald Trump into the presidential race. But ithe mural has a little Germanic looking boy with a giant hammer ushering a new age of peace, apparently destroying the old world order. "Drumpf has German ancestry," I wrote. "That is his German ancestral name before it was changed to Trump."
Summing up I wrote, "Too bad about the conclusions, though. For example, how do they know that plant is genetically modified. Also, the whole bit about Quetzcoatle, the plumed serpent. Just a North American myth based on the tragedy of the conquest of Cortez ... Furthermore, the idea that all religions are one is simply a dualistic view of religion rooted out with the persecution of the Cathars by the Catholic Church in one of the last great purges of Templar influence in Europe, perhaps the biggest stab in the back and money grab in human history (after the Wall Street bailout). Dualism is more subtle and dynamic view over more autocratic forms of monotheism, and most certainly would improve the current rifts in sectarian society, as well as the current left/right political divisions. More holistic, let's say, but also just a more compassionate and less dogmatic view of Christianity.
"There will never be a 'One World' government or 'One World Religion,' hard as either of these forms of human authoritarian organizations try to make it so. Dualism, is, in fact, the birthplace of humanitarianism, which counters the divisional violence implied with a more egalitarian view of the human spirit and its possibilities. During the French and American revolutionary war era, it was grounded in the Enlightenment, then codified in the 19th century. It was the precedent for quantum theory, mechanics and an even more open-minded world view spreading among the 'enlightened' now."
"For my money, of course, I always go back to one of my artistic and literary ancestors, in a sense, William Blake, who wrote extensively on how "All Religions are One," I wrote, ending the whole history sermon with "If you would like to know more, go to your local library, investigate these links, or, just ask your dad. Namaste." I put the punctuation mark with one of my favorite daoist images.
Later today, I saw a post by my daughter, E, and she is so great and really gets it, and has enormous musical talent. She posted something up on the so-called Denver Airport conspiracies, and I found it pretty thought provoking, if more than a little hysterically monomaniacal and fear-based. But she's very young and eager to learn. So, enter Dad, the historian. Right after I found out a sculptor, Luis Jimenez, had died making a wild-eyed horse piece, quite apocalyptic, for the Denver Airport (man, being an artist can be dangerous work). I interviewed him for a controversial sculpture that was eventually removed around Craftsman Court in Scottsdale when I worked for the Scottsdale Progress in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
It noted great mural piece and tried to interpret it through this fear-based view, and may have been created before the coming of Donald Trump into the presidential race. But ithe mural has a little Germanic looking boy with a giant hammer ushering a new age of peace, apparently destroying the old world order. "Drumpf has German ancestry," I wrote. "That is his German ancestral name before it was changed to Trump."
Summing up I wrote, "Too bad about the conclusions, though. For example, how do they know that plant is genetically modified. Also, the whole bit about Quetzcoatle, the plumed serpent. Just a North American myth based on the tragedy of the conquest of Cortez ... Furthermore, the idea that all religions are one is simply a dualistic view of religion rooted out with the persecution of the Cathars by the Catholic Church in one of the last great purges of Templar influence in Europe, perhaps the biggest stab in the back and money grab in human history (after the Wall Street bailout). Dualism is more subtle and dynamic view over more autocratic forms of monotheism, and most certainly would improve the current rifts in sectarian society, as well as the current left/right political divisions. More holistic, let's say, but also just a more compassionate and less dogmatic view of Christianity.
"There will never be a 'One World' government or 'One World Religion,' hard as either of these forms of human authoritarian organizations try to make it so. Dualism, is, in fact, the birthplace of humanitarianism, which counters the divisional violence implied with a more egalitarian view of the human spirit and its possibilities. During the French and American revolutionary war era, it was grounded in the Enlightenment, then codified in the 19th century. It was the precedent for quantum theory, mechanics and an even more open-minded world view spreading among the 'enlightened' now."
"For my money, of course, I always go back to one of my artistic and literary ancestors, in a sense, William Blake, who wrote extensively on how "All Religions are One," I wrote, ending the whole history sermon with "If you would like to know more, go to your local library, investigate these links, or, just ask your dad. Namaste." I put the punctuation mark with one of my favorite daoist images.
Your friend,
Douglas McDaniel (AKA Mythville)
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| Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State of Florida between 1999 and 2002 |
Let this all end with a song, "The Campaigner," by Neil Young, with that wonderful line, where the acoustic NY yearns for a place "where even Richard Nixon has got soul."
Saturday, August 26, 2017
And now for a few notes on a single sophisticated Facebook bot scam, or what is it exactly going on?
Here are the names of persons of interest in what may potentially be a major and quite sophisticated Facebook scam. Or, if nothing else, a real curiosity in the way Facebook is doing business. I have determined three names, or, FB avatars (profiles) or either completely bogus, or, some kind of perverse bots at work in the social media universe that, at one time, was almost entirely invested in by a major Russian oligarch.
Now, the clincher for me was this. They were offering $500,000. However, for whatever reason, they could not simply deliver the money. The were sending it Fed Ex, according to the claim agents at work here. Those names are, as perhaps people who (I must say perhaps, because who really knows with a place that has few business phone contacts) are the following. Garrett Jordan, Debra Washington and, really curious because Zuckerberg is spelled, yes, just that way ... an avatar named Mark Z u k e r b e r g. Is this matter of mis-spelling? But why?
Now, web squatters have been doing this for years, misdirecting people to similar reading sites, but false sites. Why the diffusion? Are there not infinite possibilities for the correctly spelled Zuckerberg? And then there's of course the consistent pattern of gullible people: THEY DO NOT KNOW HOW TO SPELL.
SO, let's just bring this to light. What is going on here? There is an almost alien, A. I., intelligence, about the whole process, but it cannot answer some very basic questions about such things as, in the case of Debra Washington of Louisiana, what's going on right now in the Gulf of Mexico? Do they know what Katrina is? So on. So forth.
Bring it to light. That's all I'm saying. Why would Zuckerberg, when false identities are so out of control, create Zukerberg bots?
Anybody got any good guesses, because for me, quite frankly, I've had quite enough of the whole fucking thing. Namaste.
RAW DATA MINE ...
Busines Insider, July 27
Russia's troll factories were, at one point, likely being paid by the Kremlin to spread pro-Trump propaganda on social media.
That is what freelance journalist Adrian Chen, now a staff writer at The New Yorker, discovered as he was researching Russia's "army of well-paid trolls" for an explosive New York Times Magazine exposé published in June 2015.
"A very interesting thing happened," Chen told Longform's Max Linsky in a podcast in December.
"I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don't know what's going on, but they're all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff," he said.
Linsky then asked Chen who he thought "was paying for that."
"I don't know," Chen replied. "I feel like it's some kind of really opaque strategy of electing Donald Trump to undermine the US or something. Like false-flag kind of thing. You know, that's how I started thinking about all this stuff after being in Russia."
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AOL News
According to two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and committee chairman Richard Burr (R-NC), hundreds of Russian trolls were paid in 2016 to generate fake news stories about Clinton and target them at voters in key states in an effort to swing the election for Trump.
"There were upwards of a thousand paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called a botnet, that can then generate news down to specific areas," Warner said.
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Tech Crunch 2009
Facebook is taking that rumored $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment group. DST will take a 1.96 percent stake in the company, giving Facebook a $10 billion valuation. Facebook ultimately did not have to give up a board seat to DST in return for the cash. But DST is getting preferred shares for it’s $200 million.
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The Guardian 2013
The London-listed company controlled by Russia's richest man, Alisher Usmanov, has taken advantage of the recent rise in Facebook's share price to sell its remaining stake in the social network.
Mail.ru said on Thursday it had sold 14.2m Facebook shares for $528m (£338m). The firm first bought into Mark Zuckerberg's digital venture in 2009, spending $200m for a small stake when Facebook was valued at just $10bn. Facebook today has a stock market value of $102bn.
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In the United States in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, fake news was particularly prevalent and spread rapidly over social media "bots", according to researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute.[97][98] Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel became a target for fake news in the run-up to the 2017 German federal election.[99]
File:Trump on 'fake news' and information leaks.webmhd.webm
60 Minutes producers said President Trump uses the phrase "fake news" to mean something else: "I take offense with what you said."[7]
In the early weeks of his presidency, U.S. President Donald Trump frequently used the term "fake news" to refer to traditional news media, singling out CNN.[100] Linguist George Lakoff says this creates confusion about the phrase's meaning.[101] According to CBS 60 Minutes, President Trump may use the term fake news to describe any news, however legitimate or responsible, with which he may disagree.[80]
President Trump also used social media site Twitter to express that "there is popular support for his executive order temporarily prohibiting the entry of all refugees as well as travellers from seven majority-Muslim nations", and any surveys that appear to show significantly higher number of people opposing the ban "are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election".[102][103]
After Republican Colorado State Senator Ray Scott used the term as a reference to a column in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, the newspaper's publisher threatened a defamation lawsuit.[104][105]
In December 2016, an armed North Carolina man traveled to Washington, D.C., and opened fire at Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, driven by a fake online news story accusing the pizzeria of hosting a pedophile ring run by the Democratic Party leaders.[106] These stories tend to go viral quickly. Social media systems, such as Facebook, play a large role in the broadcasting of fake news. These systems show users content that shows their interests and history, leading to fake and misleading news.
A situation study by The New York Times shows how a tweet by a person with no more than 40 followers went viral and was shared 16,000 times on Twitter.[107] The tweet concluded that protesters were paid to be bused to Trump demonstrations and protest. A twitter user then posted a photograph of two buses outside a building claiming that those were the Anti-Trump protesters. The tweet immediately went viral on both Twitter and Facebook. Fake news can easily spread since technology is so fast and accessible to everyone.
President Donald Trump uses the term "Fake news", in order to discredit news that he dislikes. CNN "investigation" shows exactly how fake news can start to trend.[108] There are "bots" used by fake news publishers that make their articles appear more popular than they are. This makes it more likely for people to see and catch the eye of many. "Bots are fake social media accounts that are programmed to automatically ‘like’ or retweet a particular message."
~~~
The Register
April 2017
Analysis Last November at the Techonomy Conference in Half Moon Bay, California, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the notion that disinformation had affected the US presidential election as lunacy.
"The idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way, I think, is a pretty crazy idea," said Zuckerberg.
Five months later, after a report [PDF] from the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence provided an overview of Russia's campaign to influence the election – via social media among other means – the social media giant has published a plan for "making Facebook safe for authentic information."
Penned by Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos and security colleagues Jen Weedon and William Nuland, "Information Operations and Facebook" [PDF] describes an expansion of the company's security focus from "traditional abusive behavior, such as account hacking, malware, spam and financial scams, to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people."
This despite Zuckerberg's insistence that "of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 per cent of what people see is authentic."
Facebook's paper says information operations to exploit the personal data goldmine revolve around targeted data collection from account holders, content creation to seed stories to the press, and false amplification to spread misinformation. It focuses on defenses against data collection and the distribution of misleading content.
To combat targeted data collection, Facebook says it is:
Promoting and providing support for security and privacy features, such as two-factor authentication.
Presenting notifications to specific people targeted by sophisticated attackers, with security recommendations tailored to the threat model.
Sending notifications to people not yet targeted but likely to be at risk based on the behavior of known threats.
Working with government bodies overseeing election integrity to notify and educate those at risk.
False amplification – efforts to spread misinformation to hurt a cause, sow mistrust in political institutions, or foment civil strife – is recognized in the report as a possible threat to Facebook's continuing vitality.
"The inauthentic nature of these social interactions obscures and impairs the space Facebook and other platforms aim to create for people to connect and communicate with one another," the report says. "In the long term, these inauthentic networks and accounts may drown out valid stories and even deter some people from engaging at all."
As can be seen from Twitter's half-hearted efforts to subdue trolls, sock puppets, and the like, such interaction can be toxic to social networks.
Stamos, Weedon and Nuland note that Facebook is building on its investment in fake account detection with more protections against manually created fake accounts and with additional analytic techniques involving machine learning.
Facebook's security team might want to have a word with computer scientists from University of California Santa Cruz, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Italy, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, and elsewhere who have made some progress in spotting disinformation.
'Some like it hoax'
In a paper published earlier this week, "Some Like it Hoax: Automated Fake News Detection in Social Networks" [PDF], assorted code boffins report that they can identify hoaxes more than 99 per cent of the time, based on an analysis of the individuals who respond to such posts.
"Hoaxes can be identified with great accuracy on the basis of the users that interact with them," the research paper claims.
Asked about Zuckerberg's claim that only about 1 per cent of Facebook content is inauthentic, Luca de Alfaro, computer science professor at UC Santa Cruz and one of the hoax paper's co-authors, said he had no information on the general distribution of misinformation on Facebook.
"I would trust Mark on this," de Alfaro said in an email to The Register. "I know that on Wikipedia, on which I worked in the past, explicit vandalism is about 6 or 7 per cent (or it was some time ago)."
More significant than the percentage of fake news, de Alfaro suggested, is the impact of hoaxes on people.
"For instance, suppose I read and believe 10 run-of-the-mill pieces of news, and one outrageous hoax: which one of these 11 news [stories] will have the greatest impact on me?" he said. "Hoaxes are frequently harmful due to the particular nature of their crafted content. You can eat 99 meatballs and 1 poison pill, and you still die."
Machine learning techniques are proving to be effective, de Alfaro suggested, but people still need to be involved in the process.
"In our work, we were able to show that we can get very good automated results even when the oversight is limited to 0.5 per cent of the news we classify: thus, human oversight on a very small portion of news helps classify most of them."
Asked whether human oversight is always necessary for such systems, de Alfaro said that was a difficult question.
"To some level, I believe the answer is yes, because even if you use machine learning in other ways, you need to train the machine learning on data that has been, in the end, selected by some kind of human process," he said. "We are developing in my group at UCSC, and together with the other collaborators, a series of tools and apps that will enable people to access our classifiers, and we hope this might have an impact."
For Facebook, and the depressingly large number of people who rely on it, such tools can't come soon enough
```
In 2017, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee claimed that fake news was one of the three most significant new disturbing Internet trends that must first be resolved, if the Internet is to be capable of truly "serving humanity." The other two new disturbing trends that Berners-Lee described as threatening the Internet were the recent surge in the use of the Internet by governments for both citizen-surveillance purposes, and for cyber-warfare purposes.
```
TIme
Russia plays in every social media space. The intelligence officials have found that Moscow's agents bought ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. "They buy the ads, where it says sponsored by--they do that just as much as anybody else does," says the senior intelligence official. (A Facebook official says the company has no evidence of that occurring.) The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, has said he is looking into why, for example, four of the top five Google search results the day the U.S. released a report on the 2016 operation were links to Russia's TV propaganda arm, RT. (Google says it saw no meddling in this case.) Researchers at the University of Southern California, meanwhile, found that nearly 20% of political tweets in 2016 between Sept. 16 and Oct. 21 were generated by bots of unknown origin; investigators are trying to figure out how many were Russian.
As they dig into the viralizing of such stories, congressional investigations are probing not just Russia's role but whether Moscow had help from the Trump campaign. Sources familiar with the investigations say they are probing two Trump-linked organizations: Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics company hired by the campaign that is partly owned by deep-pocketed Trump backer Robert Mercer; and Breitbart News, the right-wing website formerly run by Trump's top political adviser Stephen Bannon.
The congressional investigators are looking at ties between those companies and right-wing web personalities based in Eastern Europe who the U.S. believes are Russian fronts, a source familiar with the investigations tells TIME. "Nobody can prove it yet," the source says. In March, McClatchy newspapers reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators were probing whether far-right sites like Breitbart News and Infowars had coordinated with Russian botnets to blitz social media with anti-Clinton stories, mixing fact and fiction when Trump was doing poorly in the campaign.
There are plenty of people who are skeptical of such a conspiracy, if one existed. Cambridge Analytica touts its ability to use algorithms to microtarget voters, but veteran political operatives have found them ineffective political influencers. Ted Cruz first used their methods during the primary, and his staff ended up concluding they had wasted their money. Mercer, Bannon, Breitbart News and the White House did not answer questions about the congressional probes. A spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica says the company has no ties to Russia or individuals acting as fronts for Moscow and that it is unaware of the probe.
~ Mythville
Some raw data ...
Busines Insider, July 27
Russia's troll factories were, at one point, likely being paid by the Kremlin to spread pro-Trump propaganda on social media.
That is what freelance journalist Adrian Chen, now a staff writer at The New Yorker, discovered as he was researching Russia's "army of well-paid trolls" for an explosive New York Times Magazine exposé published in June 2015.
"A very interesting thing happened," Chen told Longform's Max Linsky in a podcast in December.
"I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don't know what's going on, but they're all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff," he said.
Linsky then asked Chen who he thought "was paying for that."
"I don't know," Chen replied. "I feel like it's some kind of really opaque strategy of electing Donald Trump to undermine the US or something. Like false-flag kind of thing. You know, that's how I started thinking about all this stuff after being in Russia."
---
AOL News
According to two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and committee chairman Richard Burr (R-NC), hundreds of Russian trolls were paid in 2016 to generate fake news stories about Clinton and target them at voters in key states in an effort to swing the election for Trump.
"There were upwards of a thousand paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called a botnet, that can then generate news down to specific areas," Warner said.
---
Tech Crunch 2009
Facebook is taking that rumored $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment group. DST will take a 1.96 percent stake in the company, giving Facebook a $10 billion valuation. Facebook ultimately did not have to give up a board seat to DST in return for the cash. But DST is getting preferred shares for it’s $200 million.
---
The Guardian 2013
The London-listed company controlled by Russia's richest man, Alisher Usmanov, has taken advantage of the recent rise in Facebook's share price to sell its remaining stake in the social network.
Mail.ru said on Thursday it had sold 14.2m Facebook shares for $528m (£338m). The firm first bought into Mark Zuckerberg's digital venture in 2009, spending $200m for a small stake when Facebook was valued at just $10bn. Facebook today has a stock market value of $102bn.
---
In the United States in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, fake news was particularly prevalent and spread rapidly over social media "bots", according to researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute.[97][98] Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel became a target for fake news in the run-up to the 2017 German federal election.[99]
File:Trump on 'fake news' and information leaks.webmhd.webm
60 Minutes producers said President Trump uses the phrase "fake news" to mean something else: "I take offense with what you said."[7]
In the early weeks of his presidency, U.S. President Donald Trump frequently used the term "fake news" to refer to traditional news media, singling out CNN.[100] Linguist George Lakoff says this creates confusion about the phrase's meaning.[101] According to CBS 60 Minutes, President Trump may use the term fake news to describe any news, however legitimate or responsible, with which he may disagree.[80]
President Trump also used social media site Twitter to express that "there is popular support for his executive order temporarily prohibiting the entry of all refugees as well as travellers from seven majority-Muslim nations", and any surveys that appear to show significantly higher number of people opposing the ban "are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election".[102][103]
After Republican Colorado State Senator Ray Scott used the term as a reference to a column in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, the newspaper's publisher threatened a defamation lawsuit.[104][105]
In December 2016, an armed North Carolina man traveled to Washington, D.C., and opened fire at Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, driven by a fake online news story accusing the pizzeria of hosting a pedophile ring run by the Democratic Party leaders.[106] These stories tend to go viral quickly. Social media systems, such as Facebook, play a large role in the broadcasting of fake news. These systems show users content that shows their interests and history, leading to fake and misleading news.
A situation study by The New York Times shows how a tweet by a person with no more than 40 followers went viral and was shared 16,000 times on Twitter.[107] The tweet concluded that protesters were paid to be bused to Trump demonstrations and protest. A twitter user then posted a photograph of two buses outside a building claiming that those were the Anti-Trump protesters. The tweet immediately went viral on both Twitter and Facebook. Fake news can easily spread since technology is so fast and accessible to everyone.
President Donald Trump uses the term "Fake news", in order to discredit news that he dislikes. CNN "investigation" shows exactly how fake news can start to trend.[108] There are "bots" used by fake news publishers that make their articles appear more popular than they are. This makes it more likely for people to see and catch the eye of many. "Bots are fake social media accounts that are programmed to automatically ‘like’ or retweet a particular message."
~~~
The Register
APril 2017
Analysis Last November at the Techonomy Conference in Half Moon Bay, California, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the notion that disinformation had affected the US presidential election as lunacy.
"The idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way, I think, is a pretty crazy idea," said Zuckerberg.
Five months later, after a report [PDF] from the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence provided an overview of Russia's campaign to influence the election – via social media among other means – the social media giant has published a plan for "making Facebook safe for authentic information."
Penned by Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos and security colleagues Jen Weedon and William Nuland, "Information Operations and Facebook" [PDF] describes an expansion of the company's security focus from "traditional abusive behavior, such as account hacking, malware, spam and financial scams, to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people."
This despite Zuckerberg's insistence that "of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 per cent of what people see is authentic."
Facebook's paper says information operations to exploit the personal data goldmine revolve around targeted data collection from account holders, content creation to seed stories to the press, and false amplification to spread misinformation. It focuses on defenses against data collection and the distribution of misleading content.
To combat targeted data collection, Facebook says it is:
Promoting and providing support for security and privacy features, such as two-factor authentication.
Presenting notifications to specific people targeted by sophisticated attackers, with security recommendations tailored to the threat model.
Sending notifications to people not yet targeted but likely to be at risk based on the behavior of known threats.
Working with government bodies overseeing election integrity to notify and educate those at risk.
False amplification – efforts to spread misinformation to hurt a cause, sow mistrust in political institutions, or foment civil strife – is recognized in the report as a possible threat to Facebook's continuing vitality.
"The inauthentic nature of these social interactions obscures and impairs the space Facebook and other platforms aim to create for people to connect and communicate with one another," the report says. "In the long term, these inauthentic networks and accounts may drown out valid stories and even deter some people from engaging at all."
As can be seen from Twitter's half-hearted efforts to subdue trolls, sock puppets, and the like, such interaction can be toxic to social networks.
Stamos, Weedon and Nuland note that Facebook is building on its investment in fake account detection with more protections against manually created fake accounts and with additional analytic techniques involving machine learning.
Facebook's security team might want to have a word with computer scientists from University of California Santa Cruz, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Italy, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, and elsewhere who have made some progress in spotting disinformation.
'Some like it hoax'
In a paper published earlier this week, "Some Like it Hoax: Automated Fake News Detection in Social Networks" [PDF], assorted code boffins report that they can identify hoaxes more than 99 per cent of the time, based on an analysis of the individuals who respond to such posts.
"Hoaxes can be identified with great accuracy on the basis of the users that interact with them," the research paper claims.
Asked about Zuckerberg's claim that only about 1 per cent of Facebook content is inauthentic, Luca de Alfaro, computer science professor at UC Santa Cruz and one of the hoax paper's co-authors, said he had no information on the general distribution of misinformation on Facebook.
"I would trust Mark on this," de Alfaro said in an email to The Register. "I know that on Wikipedia, on which I worked in the past, explicit vandalism is about 6 or 7 per cent (or it was some time ago)."
More significant than the percentage of fake news, de Alfaro suggested, is the impact of hoaxes on people.
"For instance, suppose I read and believe 10 run-of-the-mill pieces of news, and one outrageous hoax: which one of these 11 news [stories] will have the greatest impact on me?" he said. "Hoaxes are frequently harmful due to the particular nature of their crafted content. You can eat 99 meatballs and 1 poison pill, and you still die."
Machine learning techniques are proving to be effective, de Alfaro suggested, but people still need to be involved in the process.
"In our work, we were able to show that we can get very good automated results even when the oversight is limited to 0.5 per cent of the news we classify: thus, human oversight on a very small portion of news helps classify most of them."
Asked whether human oversight is always necessary for such systems, de Alfaro said that was a difficult question.
"To some level, I believe the answer is yes, because even if you use machine learning in other ways, you need to train the machine learning on data that has been, in the end, selected by some kind of human process," he said. "We are developing in my group at UCSC, and together with the other collaborators, a series of tools and apps that will enable people to access our classifiers, and we hope this might have an impact."
For Facebook, and the depressingly large number of people who rely on it, such tools can't come soon enough
```
In 2017, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee claimed that fake news was one of the three most significant new disturbing Internet trends that must first be resolved, if the Internet is to be capable of truly "serving humanity." The other two new disturbing trends that Berners-Lee described as threatening the Internet were the recent surge in the use of the Internet by governments for both citizen-surveillance purposes, and for cyber-warfare purposes.
```
TIme
Russia plays in every social media space. The intelligence officials have found that Moscow's agents bought ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. "They buy the ads, where it says sponsored by--they do that just as much as anybody else does," says the senior intelligence official. (A Facebook official says the company has no evidence of that occurring.) The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, has said he is looking into why, for example, four of the top five Google search results the day the U.S. released a report on the 2016 operation were links to Russia's TV propaganda arm, RT. (Google says it saw no meddling in this case.) Researchers at the University of Southern California, meanwhile, found that nearly 20% of political tweets in 2016 between Sept. 16 and Oct. 21 were generated by bots of unknown origin; investigators are trying to figure out how many were Russian.
As they dig into the viralizing of such stories, congressional investigations are probing not just Russia's role but whether Moscow had help from the Trump campaign. Sources familiar with the investigations say they are probing two Trump-linked organizations: Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics company hired by the campaign that is partly owned by deep-pocketed Trump backer Robert Mercer; and Breitbart News, the right-wing website formerly run by Trump's top political adviser Stephen Bannon.
The congressional investigators are looking at ties between those companies and right-wing web personalities based in Eastern Europe who the U.S. believes are Russian fronts, a source familiar with the investigations tells TIME. "Nobody can prove it yet," the source says. In March, McClatchy newspapers reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators were probing whether far-right sites like Breitbart News and Infowars had coordinated with Russian botnets to blitz social media with anti-Clinton stories, mixing fact and fiction when Trump was doing poorly in the campaign.
There are plenty of people who are skeptical of such a conspiracy, if one existed. Cambridge Analytica touts its ability to use algorithms to microtarget voters, but veteran political operatives have found them ineffective political influencers. Ted Cruz first used their methods during the primary, and his staff ended up concluding they had wasted their money. Mercer, Bannon, Breitbart News and the White House did not answer questions about the congressional probes. A spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica says the company has no ties to Russia or individuals acting as fronts for Moscow and that it is unaware of the probe.
Now, the clincher for me was this. They were offering $500,000. However, for whatever reason, they could not simply deliver the money. The were sending it Fed Ex, according to the claim agents at work here. Those names are, as perhaps people who (I must say perhaps, because who really knows with a place that has few business phone contacts) are the following. Garrett Jordan, Debra Washington and, really curious because Zuckerberg is spelled, yes, just that way ... an avatar named Mark Z u k e r b e r g. Is this matter of mis-spelling? But why?
Now, web squatters have been doing this for years, misdirecting people to similar reading sites, but false sites. Why the diffusion? Are there not infinite possibilities for the correctly spelled Zuckerberg? And then there's of course the consistent pattern of gullible people: THEY DO NOT KNOW HOW TO SPELL.
SO, let's just bring this to light. What is going on here? There is an almost alien, A. I., intelligence, about the whole process, but it cannot answer some very basic questions about such things as, in the case of Debra Washington of Louisiana, what's going on right now in the Gulf of Mexico? Do they know what Katrina is? So on. So forth.
Bring it to light. That's all I'm saying. Why would Zuckerberg, when false identities are so out of control, create Zukerberg bots?
Anybody got any good guesses, because for me, quite frankly, I've had quite enough of the whole fucking thing. Namaste.
RAW DATA MINE ...
Busines Insider, July 27
Russia's troll factories were, at one point, likely being paid by the Kremlin to spread pro-Trump propaganda on social media.
That is what freelance journalist Adrian Chen, now a staff writer at The New Yorker, discovered as he was researching Russia's "army of well-paid trolls" for an explosive New York Times Magazine exposé published in June 2015.
"A very interesting thing happened," Chen told Longform's Max Linsky in a podcast in December.
"I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don't know what's going on, but they're all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff," he said.
Linsky then asked Chen who he thought "was paying for that."
"I don't know," Chen replied. "I feel like it's some kind of really opaque strategy of electing Donald Trump to undermine the US or something. Like false-flag kind of thing. You know, that's how I started thinking about all this stuff after being in Russia."
---
AOL News
According to two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and committee chairman Richard Burr (R-NC), hundreds of Russian trolls were paid in 2016 to generate fake news stories about Clinton and target them at voters in key states in an effort to swing the election for Trump.
"There were upwards of a thousand paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called a botnet, that can then generate news down to specific areas," Warner said.
---
Tech Crunch 2009
Facebook is taking that rumored $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment group. DST will take a 1.96 percent stake in the company, giving Facebook a $10 billion valuation. Facebook ultimately did not have to give up a board seat to DST in return for the cash. But DST is getting preferred shares for it’s $200 million.
---
The Guardian 2013
The London-listed company controlled by Russia's richest man, Alisher Usmanov, has taken advantage of the recent rise in Facebook's share price to sell its remaining stake in the social network.
Mail.ru said on Thursday it had sold 14.2m Facebook shares for $528m (£338m). The firm first bought into Mark Zuckerberg's digital venture in 2009, spending $200m for a small stake when Facebook was valued at just $10bn. Facebook today has a stock market value of $102bn.
---
In the United States in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, fake news was particularly prevalent and spread rapidly over social media "bots", according to researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute.[97][98] Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel became a target for fake news in the run-up to the 2017 German federal election.[99]
File:Trump on 'fake news' and information leaks.webmhd.webm
60 Minutes producers said President Trump uses the phrase "fake news" to mean something else: "I take offense with what you said."[7]
In the early weeks of his presidency, U.S. President Donald Trump frequently used the term "fake news" to refer to traditional news media, singling out CNN.[100] Linguist George Lakoff says this creates confusion about the phrase's meaning.[101] According to CBS 60 Minutes, President Trump may use the term fake news to describe any news, however legitimate or responsible, with which he may disagree.[80]
President Trump also used social media site Twitter to express that "there is popular support for his executive order temporarily prohibiting the entry of all refugees as well as travellers from seven majority-Muslim nations", and any surveys that appear to show significantly higher number of people opposing the ban "are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election".[102][103]
After Republican Colorado State Senator Ray Scott used the term as a reference to a column in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, the newspaper's publisher threatened a defamation lawsuit.[104][105]
In December 2016, an armed North Carolina man traveled to Washington, D.C., and opened fire at Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, driven by a fake online news story accusing the pizzeria of hosting a pedophile ring run by the Democratic Party leaders.[106] These stories tend to go viral quickly. Social media systems, such as Facebook, play a large role in the broadcasting of fake news. These systems show users content that shows their interests and history, leading to fake and misleading news.
A situation study by The New York Times shows how a tweet by a person with no more than 40 followers went viral and was shared 16,000 times on Twitter.[107] The tweet concluded that protesters were paid to be bused to Trump demonstrations and protest. A twitter user then posted a photograph of two buses outside a building claiming that those were the Anti-Trump protesters. The tweet immediately went viral on both Twitter and Facebook. Fake news can easily spread since technology is so fast and accessible to everyone.
President Donald Trump uses the term "Fake news", in order to discredit news that he dislikes. CNN "investigation" shows exactly how fake news can start to trend.[108] There are "bots" used by fake news publishers that make their articles appear more popular than they are. This makes it more likely for people to see and catch the eye of many. "Bots are fake social media accounts that are programmed to automatically ‘like’ or retweet a particular message."
~~~
The Register
April 2017
Analysis Last November at the Techonomy Conference in Half Moon Bay, California, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the notion that disinformation had affected the US presidential election as lunacy.
"The idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way, I think, is a pretty crazy idea," said Zuckerberg.
Five months later, after a report [PDF] from the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence provided an overview of Russia's campaign to influence the election – via social media among other means – the social media giant has published a plan for "making Facebook safe for authentic information."
Penned by Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos and security colleagues Jen Weedon and William Nuland, "Information Operations and Facebook" [PDF] describes an expansion of the company's security focus from "traditional abusive behavior, such as account hacking, malware, spam and financial scams, to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people."
This despite Zuckerberg's insistence that "of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 per cent of what people see is authentic."
Facebook's paper says information operations to exploit the personal data goldmine revolve around targeted data collection from account holders, content creation to seed stories to the press, and false amplification to spread misinformation. It focuses on defenses against data collection and the distribution of misleading content.
To combat targeted data collection, Facebook says it is:
Promoting and providing support for security and privacy features, such as two-factor authentication.
Presenting notifications to specific people targeted by sophisticated attackers, with security recommendations tailored to the threat model.
Sending notifications to people not yet targeted but likely to be at risk based on the behavior of known threats.
Working with government bodies overseeing election integrity to notify and educate those at risk.
False amplification – efforts to spread misinformation to hurt a cause, sow mistrust in political institutions, or foment civil strife – is recognized in the report as a possible threat to Facebook's continuing vitality.
"The inauthentic nature of these social interactions obscures and impairs the space Facebook and other platforms aim to create for people to connect and communicate with one another," the report says. "In the long term, these inauthentic networks and accounts may drown out valid stories and even deter some people from engaging at all."
As can be seen from Twitter's half-hearted efforts to subdue trolls, sock puppets, and the like, such interaction can be toxic to social networks.
Stamos, Weedon and Nuland note that Facebook is building on its investment in fake account detection with more protections against manually created fake accounts and with additional analytic techniques involving machine learning.
Facebook's security team might want to have a word with computer scientists from University of California Santa Cruz, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Italy, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, and elsewhere who have made some progress in spotting disinformation.
'Some like it hoax'
In a paper published earlier this week, "Some Like it Hoax: Automated Fake News Detection in Social Networks" [PDF], assorted code boffins report that they can identify hoaxes more than 99 per cent of the time, based on an analysis of the individuals who respond to such posts.
"Hoaxes can be identified with great accuracy on the basis of the users that interact with them," the research paper claims.
Asked about Zuckerberg's claim that only about 1 per cent of Facebook content is inauthentic, Luca de Alfaro, computer science professor at UC Santa Cruz and one of the hoax paper's co-authors, said he had no information on the general distribution of misinformation on Facebook.
"I would trust Mark on this," de Alfaro said in an email to The Register. "I know that on Wikipedia, on which I worked in the past, explicit vandalism is about 6 or 7 per cent (or it was some time ago)."
More significant than the percentage of fake news, de Alfaro suggested, is the impact of hoaxes on people.
"For instance, suppose I read and believe 10 run-of-the-mill pieces of news, and one outrageous hoax: which one of these 11 news [stories] will have the greatest impact on me?" he said. "Hoaxes are frequently harmful due to the particular nature of their crafted content. You can eat 99 meatballs and 1 poison pill, and you still die."
Machine learning techniques are proving to be effective, de Alfaro suggested, but people still need to be involved in the process.
"In our work, we were able to show that we can get very good automated results even when the oversight is limited to 0.5 per cent of the news we classify: thus, human oversight on a very small portion of news helps classify most of them."
Asked whether human oversight is always necessary for such systems, de Alfaro said that was a difficult question.
"To some level, I believe the answer is yes, because even if you use machine learning in other ways, you need to train the machine learning on data that has been, in the end, selected by some kind of human process," he said. "We are developing in my group at UCSC, and together with the other collaborators, a series of tools and apps that will enable people to access our classifiers, and we hope this might have an impact."
For Facebook, and the depressingly large number of people who rely on it, such tools can't come soon enough
```
In 2017, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee claimed that fake news was one of the three most significant new disturbing Internet trends that must first be resolved, if the Internet is to be capable of truly "serving humanity." The other two new disturbing trends that Berners-Lee described as threatening the Internet were the recent surge in the use of the Internet by governments for both citizen-surveillance purposes, and for cyber-warfare purposes.
```
TIme
Russia plays in every social media space. The intelligence officials have found that Moscow's agents bought ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. "They buy the ads, where it says sponsored by--they do that just as much as anybody else does," says the senior intelligence official. (A Facebook official says the company has no evidence of that occurring.) The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, has said he is looking into why, for example, four of the top five Google search results the day the U.S. released a report on the 2016 operation were links to Russia's TV propaganda arm, RT. (Google says it saw no meddling in this case.) Researchers at the University of Southern California, meanwhile, found that nearly 20% of political tweets in 2016 between Sept. 16 and Oct. 21 were generated by bots of unknown origin; investigators are trying to figure out how many were Russian.
As they dig into the viralizing of such stories, congressional investigations are probing not just Russia's role but whether Moscow had help from the Trump campaign. Sources familiar with the investigations say they are probing two Trump-linked organizations: Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics company hired by the campaign that is partly owned by deep-pocketed Trump backer Robert Mercer; and Breitbart News, the right-wing website formerly run by Trump's top political adviser Stephen Bannon.
The congressional investigators are looking at ties between those companies and right-wing web personalities based in Eastern Europe who the U.S. believes are Russian fronts, a source familiar with the investigations tells TIME. "Nobody can prove it yet," the source says. In March, McClatchy newspapers reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators were probing whether far-right sites like Breitbart News and Infowars had coordinated with Russian botnets to blitz social media with anti-Clinton stories, mixing fact and fiction when Trump was doing poorly in the campaign.
There are plenty of people who are skeptical of such a conspiracy, if one existed. Cambridge Analytica touts its ability to use algorithms to microtarget voters, but veteran political operatives have found them ineffective political influencers. Ted Cruz first used their methods during the primary, and his staff ended up concluding they had wasted their money. Mercer, Bannon, Breitbart News and the White House did not answer questions about the congressional probes. A spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica says the company has no ties to Russia or individuals acting as fronts for Moscow and that it is unaware of the probe.
~ Mythville
Some raw data ...
Busines Insider, July 27
Russia's troll factories were, at one point, likely being paid by the Kremlin to spread pro-Trump propaganda on social media.
That is what freelance journalist Adrian Chen, now a staff writer at The New Yorker, discovered as he was researching Russia's "army of well-paid trolls" for an explosive New York Times Magazine exposé published in June 2015.
"A very interesting thing happened," Chen told Longform's Max Linsky in a podcast in December.
"I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don't know what's going on, but they're all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff," he said.
Linsky then asked Chen who he thought "was paying for that."
"I don't know," Chen replied. "I feel like it's some kind of really opaque strategy of electing Donald Trump to undermine the US or something. Like false-flag kind of thing. You know, that's how I started thinking about all this stuff after being in Russia."
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AOL News
According to two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and committee chairman Richard Burr (R-NC), hundreds of Russian trolls were paid in 2016 to generate fake news stories about Clinton and target them at voters in key states in an effort to swing the election for Trump.
"There were upwards of a thousand paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called a botnet, that can then generate news down to specific areas," Warner said.
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Tech Crunch 2009
Facebook is taking that rumored $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment group. DST will take a 1.96 percent stake in the company, giving Facebook a $10 billion valuation. Facebook ultimately did not have to give up a board seat to DST in return for the cash. But DST is getting preferred shares for it’s $200 million.
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The Guardian 2013
The London-listed company controlled by Russia's richest man, Alisher Usmanov, has taken advantage of the recent rise in Facebook's share price to sell its remaining stake in the social network.
Mail.ru said on Thursday it had sold 14.2m Facebook shares for $528m (£338m). The firm first bought into Mark Zuckerberg's digital venture in 2009, spending $200m for a small stake when Facebook was valued at just $10bn. Facebook today has a stock market value of $102bn.
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In the United States in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, fake news was particularly prevalent and spread rapidly over social media "bots", according to researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute.[97][98] Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel became a target for fake news in the run-up to the 2017 German federal election.[99]
File:Trump on 'fake news' and information leaks.webmhd.webm
60 Minutes producers said President Trump uses the phrase "fake news" to mean something else: "I take offense with what you said."[7]
In the early weeks of his presidency, U.S. President Donald Trump frequently used the term "fake news" to refer to traditional news media, singling out CNN.[100] Linguist George Lakoff says this creates confusion about the phrase's meaning.[101] According to CBS 60 Minutes, President Trump may use the term fake news to describe any news, however legitimate or responsible, with which he may disagree.[80]
President Trump also used social media site Twitter to express that "there is popular support for his executive order temporarily prohibiting the entry of all refugees as well as travellers from seven majority-Muslim nations", and any surveys that appear to show significantly higher number of people opposing the ban "are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election".[102][103]
After Republican Colorado State Senator Ray Scott used the term as a reference to a column in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, the newspaper's publisher threatened a defamation lawsuit.[104][105]
In December 2016, an armed North Carolina man traveled to Washington, D.C., and opened fire at Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, driven by a fake online news story accusing the pizzeria of hosting a pedophile ring run by the Democratic Party leaders.[106] These stories tend to go viral quickly. Social media systems, such as Facebook, play a large role in the broadcasting of fake news. These systems show users content that shows their interests and history, leading to fake and misleading news.
A situation study by The New York Times shows how a tweet by a person with no more than 40 followers went viral and was shared 16,000 times on Twitter.[107] The tweet concluded that protesters were paid to be bused to Trump demonstrations and protest. A twitter user then posted a photograph of two buses outside a building claiming that those were the Anti-Trump protesters. The tweet immediately went viral on both Twitter and Facebook. Fake news can easily spread since technology is so fast and accessible to everyone.
President Donald Trump uses the term "Fake news", in order to discredit news that he dislikes. CNN "investigation" shows exactly how fake news can start to trend.[108] There are "bots" used by fake news publishers that make their articles appear more popular than they are. This makes it more likely for people to see and catch the eye of many. "Bots are fake social media accounts that are programmed to automatically ‘like’ or retweet a particular message."
~~~
The Register
APril 2017
Analysis Last November at the Techonomy Conference in Half Moon Bay, California, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the notion that disinformation had affected the US presidential election as lunacy.
"The idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way, I think, is a pretty crazy idea," said Zuckerberg.
Five months later, after a report [PDF] from the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence provided an overview of Russia's campaign to influence the election – via social media among other means – the social media giant has published a plan for "making Facebook safe for authentic information."
Penned by Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos and security colleagues Jen Weedon and William Nuland, "Information Operations and Facebook" [PDF] describes an expansion of the company's security focus from "traditional abusive behavior, such as account hacking, malware, spam and financial scams, to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people."
This despite Zuckerberg's insistence that "of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 per cent of what people see is authentic."
Facebook's paper says information operations to exploit the personal data goldmine revolve around targeted data collection from account holders, content creation to seed stories to the press, and false amplification to spread misinformation. It focuses on defenses against data collection and the distribution of misleading content.
To combat targeted data collection, Facebook says it is:
Promoting and providing support for security and privacy features, such as two-factor authentication.
Presenting notifications to specific people targeted by sophisticated attackers, with security recommendations tailored to the threat model.
Sending notifications to people not yet targeted but likely to be at risk based on the behavior of known threats.
Working with government bodies overseeing election integrity to notify and educate those at risk.
False amplification – efforts to spread misinformation to hurt a cause, sow mistrust in political institutions, or foment civil strife – is recognized in the report as a possible threat to Facebook's continuing vitality.
"The inauthentic nature of these social interactions obscures and impairs the space Facebook and other platforms aim to create for people to connect and communicate with one another," the report says. "In the long term, these inauthentic networks and accounts may drown out valid stories and even deter some people from engaging at all."
As can be seen from Twitter's half-hearted efforts to subdue trolls, sock puppets, and the like, such interaction can be toxic to social networks.
Stamos, Weedon and Nuland note that Facebook is building on its investment in fake account detection with more protections against manually created fake accounts and with additional analytic techniques involving machine learning.
Facebook's security team might want to have a word with computer scientists from University of California Santa Cruz, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Italy, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, and elsewhere who have made some progress in spotting disinformation.
'Some like it hoax'
In a paper published earlier this week, "Some Like it Hoax: Automated Fake News Detection in Social Networks" [PDF], assorted code boffins report that they can identify hoaxes more than 99 per cent of the time, based on an analysis of the individuals who respond to such posts.
"Hoaxes can be identified with great accuracy on the basis of the users that interact with them," the research paper claims.
Asked about Zuckerberg's claim that only about 1 per cent of Facebook content is inauthentic, Luca de Alfaro, computer science professor at UC Santa Cruz and one of the hoax paper's co-authors, said he had no information on the general distribution of misinformation on Facebook.
"I would trust Mark on this," de Alfaro said in an email to The Register. "I know that on Wikipedia, on which I worked in the past, explicit vandalism is about 6 or 7 per cent (or it was some time ago)."
More significant than the percentage of fake news, de Alfaro suggested, is the impact of hoaxes on people.
"For instance, suppose I read and believe 10 run-of-the-mill pieces of news, and one outrageous hoax: which one of these 11 news [stories] will have the greatest impact on me?" he said. "Hoaxes are frequently harmful due to the particular nature of their crafted content. You can eat 99 meatballs and 1 poison pill, and you still die."
Machine learning techniques are proving to be effective, de Alfaro suggested, but people still need to be involved in the process.
"In our work, we were able to show that we can get very good automated results even when the oversight is limited to 0.5 per cent of the news we classify: thus, human oversight on a very small portion of news helps classify most of them."
Asked whether human oversight is always necessary for such systems, de Alfaro said that was a difficult question.
"To some level, I believe the answer is yes, because even if you use machine learning in other ways, you need to train the machine learning on data that has been, in the end, selected by some kind of human process," he said. "We are developing in my group at UCSC, and together with the other collaborators, a series of tools and apps that will enable people to access our classifiers, and we hope this might have an impact."
For Facebook, and the depressingly large number of people who rely on it, such tools can't come soon enough
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In 2017, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee claimed that fake news was one of the three most significant new disturbing Internet trends that must first be resolved, if the Internet is to be capable of truly "serving humanity." The other two new disturbing trends that Berners-Lee described as threatening the Internet were the recent surge in the use of the Internet by governments for both citizen-surveillance purposes, and for cyber-warfare purposes.
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TIme
Russia plays in every social media space. The intelligence officials have found that Moscow's agents bought ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda. "They buy the ads, where it says sponsored by--they do that just as much as anybody else does," says the senior intelligence official. (A Facebook official says the company has no evidence of that occurring.) The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, has said he is looking into why, for example, four of the top five Google search results the day the U.S. released a report on the 2016 operation were links to Russia's TV propaganda arm, RT. (Google says it saw no meddling in this case.) Researchers at the University of Southern California, meanwhile, found that nearly 20% of political tweets in 2016 between Sept. 16 and Oct. 21 were generated by bots of unknown origin; investigators are trying to figure out how many were Russian.
As they dig into the viralizing of such stories, congressional investigations are probing not just Russia's role but whether Moscow had help from the Trump campaign. Sources familiar with the investigations say they are probing two Trump-linked organizations: Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics company hired by the campaign that is partly owned by deep-pocketed Trump backer Robert Mercer; and Breitbart News, the right-wing website formerly run by Trump's top political adviser Stephen Bannon.
The congressional investigators are looking at ties between those companies and right-wing web personalities based in Eastern Europe who the U.S. believes are Russian fronts, a source familiar with the investigations tells TIME. "Nobody can prove it yet," the source says. In March, McClatchy newspapers reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators were probing whether far-right sites like Breitbart News and Infowars had coordinated with Russian botnets to blitz social media with anti-Clinton stories, mixing fact and fiction when Trump was doing poorly in the campaign.
There are plenty of people who are skeptical of such a conspiracy, if one existed. Cambridge Analytica touts its ability to use algorithms to microtarget voters, but veteran political operatives have found them ineffective political influencers. Ted Cruz first used their methods during the primary, and his staff ended up concluding they had wasted their money. Mercer, Bannon, Breitbart News and the White House did not answer questions about the congressional probes. A spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica says the company has no ties to Russia or individuals acting as fronts for Moscow and that it is unaware of the probe.
Friday, August 25, 2017
The Good Morning Trump Channel National Anthem
As so proudly we stare
that our freak flag
is still there-ere
And he has a real phone
And he's always alone
In the din of the day
he is sleeping away
O say does that rich bitch
riiiiiiiilleeee
know how to play-aaaa
In the land of the bank fees
and the home of the fey
~ Douglas McDaniel, AKA Mythville
7:18 a.m. (MST), 8.25.2017
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
In the last century, the music critic and journalistas could be counted on as arbiters of taste, as star makers, as people counted on the serve as snarky intermediaries, but things have changed. In the now, the critic is still around, sure, but new acts hardly need them if they can get their zombie technology together.
Such must be the case for Micky & the Motorcars, which has more online information, videos and links snowballing that an old ink-on-paper dinosaur seeking an interview can only shake his head, dumbfounded at how the sought-out star hardly needs the free publicity, due to this new world order
Micky & the Motorcars is something of a self-organizing miracle, an experienced, business-savvy country rock band that doesn't take today's no-money blues for an answer. Americana to the core, they have a Kickstarter.com video that plays up to the recession era artist theme, with two of the brothers from a long line of musical Brauns, Micky and Gary, splitting up on the streets of Austin to try to raise money for the new album. If they split up, they say in the video, they might increase the earnings. So one brother takes a cardboard sign saying they are raising money for beer, and the other brother holds a sign stating (he) is playing to raise more money.
But don't be fooled by the poor street busker appeal of this clear channel approach to marketing and music. Micky & the Motorcars has the Kickstarter.com thing down pat. As of this writing, the third-party tool for independent artists seeking to raise money for all kinds of projects had already surpassed its goal of raising $35,000 for a new album slated to come out this summer. The goal for the new album has been reached, notes Kickstarter, four days before the tour has even begun. In fact, they are nearly $11,000 over that goal, and who knows how much money the fundraising web site will score for them as the tour progresses.
"We are looking to raise $35,000," the Kickstarter page for the Motorcars states. "This will allow us to record the album and get it packaged. We are hoping to raise more money so that we can put the right team behind the album to push it out to the masses. Our stretch goal is $70,000 and this would be going to radio, publicity, and maybe even a music video."
There is no record company involvement for this album. At least not so far. The band has already been "roadtesting" the new songs and, after touring extensively ever westward from Austin, across the southwest, will likely be featuring those songs when they play April 7 at The Museum Club in Flagstaff. The tour began March 28 is Lewisville, Texas, moving on to Yoakum, Midland, Priddy and Lubbock, then crossing the "land of enchantment," New Mexico, without a stop or a gig, finally landing at Flagstaff, then on to Bakersfield, Calif., over a four day stretch. After that, the band turns up north
The alternative country band, originally from Idaho but now based in Austin, has five albums out and consists of Micky Braun (acoustic guitar, lead vocals), Gary Braun (lead and harmony vocals, guitars, mandolin, harmonica), Dustin Schaefer (lead guitar), Joe Fladger (bass), and Bobby Paugh (drums & percussion). Micky & the Motorcars is actually just one wing of Austin-based troubadors; Micky and Gary are the younger brothers of Willy and Cody Braun, members of the Austin band Reckless Kelly.
As musical families go, the Braun blood line runs deep. Imagine travelling down a country dirt road until you hit a cabin, where there are Brauns holding instruments all over the place. All of the brothers toured during the late 20th century with a country swing band founded by their father, Muzzie Braun & the Boys. Each year, the Braun clan performs at a family reunion in Challis, Idaho, and the tour itinerary for Micky & the Motorcars also includes a May 11 date for a "Reckless Kelly Softball Jam" in Round Rock, Texas. Brother Willy has also been named as the producer for the upcoming album for the Motorcars.
Between the two bands, Reckless Kelly, named after an 1870s to 1880s Australian Robin Hood type, rocks harder. But Micky & the Motorcars is more measured, radio-ready country, with Micky Braun's voice working in a drawl reminiscent of a Steve Earle. They are more ancestors of bands like Asleep at the Wheel, and vocally, the Everly Brothers.
"Two brothers who can really sing well together," Micky Braun says of the Everly Brothers connection, and how he harmonizes with brother Gary. "There is such a close similarity with siblings."
So in meatspace, the likes of Micky Braun can hole out without interruption in an off-the-grid cabin in Idaho, as the music journalist can only imagine a knd of Bear Country Jamboree, avoiding what Don McClean, of "American Pie" fame, once regarded as a telephone toting writer seeking to "suck out the psychic energy" over the line. With well-linked Web sites, Youtube.com videos and the likes of Kickstarter.com raising funds on automatic pilot, the game has changed so much that a little band from Texas barely needs new press.
After all, when was the last time you looked for the new musical flavor of the month by picking up a glossy for-print copy of Rolling Stone?
For more arts and culture coverage by Douglas McDaniel, go to ... Radio Free Arizona
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