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Serious people do not need to sniff 58 times. The generals behind him had to be thinking 'shit, we'd send a trooper to drug rehab if they sniffed that much.'
Perhaps
Bet that if you put 'rooster' on your resume you'd do better interviewing with KFC or Popeye's, unless you're afraid that they might eye you for the menu.
No, close the browser, not necessary to log out of non-financial sites. It's probably the only solution for the problem described
Russia, taking a 'test drive' of their 'MAGA II' cyber effort to reelect Trump. The bestest friend a former KGB thug could ever have.
'For immediate departure to Iran.'
Well now that's a deal breaker right there. I may be a dumb-ass 19 year old shit kicker but I need me some basic training, some time on the rifle range, before you ship me out to shoot some Iraineeuns.
Iran, if you are listening, I hope you’re able to get Donald's tax returns and leak them to every news agency that wants them. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.
Imagine the shit that would be lost by Trumpanzees If the wording of Trump's infamous plea to Russia were changed just so and mouthed by any Dem candidate.
Lines outside of the shit lost and found would rival those outside of Apple stores for an iPhone introduction.
800 million animals
The ecological damage of the Australian bushfires in Victoria and New South Wales is now estimated to be at least 800 million animals, as well as “hundreds of billions of insects.”
The Sydney Morning Herald reports more than 6 million hectares have been destroyed so far, “including rainforest normally considered too wet to burn.”
The damage is so extensive that “at least one species is feared extinct.” [The Sydney Morning Herald]
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/significant-digits-for-thursday-jan-9-2020/
What Did Harry Truman Mean?
Posted on December 31, 2013
Why Voting Democrat Means Living Like a Republican
http://livelikearepublican.com/harry-truman-mean/
Most people who read much about politics or actual policy positions held by each political party probably already have a pretty good idea what it was President Truman meant when he said these words.
The simplistic explanation is that Democrats are interested in pooling a communities resources to raise the standard of living for as many people as possible.
Because most people born in the United States are not born with trust funds most people have to do as well or better than their parents did to maintain what is called a middle class lifestyle.
Just how does a non rich person better themselves in America? Mostly they do it through the education and other government provided resources made available to citizens.
Or course this is just the starting point to the conversation. To really get to the guts of what living like a Republican means you first have to define what living like a Republican actually means.
What Living Like a Republican Means
Likely most people think of very rich people going about their lives in mansions, private jets, and luxury cars when they think of living a Republican lifestyle. This thinking is not correct. For most people in America living a basic upper middle class lifestyle means living like a Republican.
Most people do not understand how much of the population is living a very modest to poor life. To put this into perspective think about this. The Walton family of Walmart own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of America (verification).
Here is what this means. To live like a Republican these days means that you have enough money each month to pay a mortgage, car payment, quality groceries, insurances, clothing, entertainment, a few meals out, and have a bit left over to build up some savings. That’s it.
If this doesn’t sound like much to you then count yourself fortunate. For millions of Americans the reality is that hard choices have to be made each month when it comes affording the basics each month. Forget about having enough left over to build up any real savings.
Why Voting Democratic Helps
Start with the false assumption that many Republicans have. That is if you work hard and come into money, or just have money, that most the services performed by the national or local governments are not of value. If you think like this then all the services that taxes pay for can be eliminated and your life would not in any way be changed.
This thinking will be a common discussion topic for this blog but is too complicated to sort out in this one post.
In general Democrats are interested in the government collecting enough money that a number of services that help lift the poor and middle class have enough money to work. Here are a few.
•Free Public Education: Everyone agrees that “education is the silver bullet” when it comes to solving poverty and crime. Do not listen to those that proclaim more money can’t help education. These are the same people who do not want CEO salaries looked at as unfair because to get the best talent you have to pay for it. Apparently paying for talent is not something we should be doing when it comes to teachers.
•Local and Federal Courts: If poor or middle class people do not have a government provided resource to help solve disputes they will continue to be taken advantage of by rich corporations and wealthy people.
•Military, Police, and other First Responders: Imagine if poor or middle class people had to rely on their own to solve crimes or get to safety during tornadoes or hurricanes.
•Food and Drug Administration FDA: Perhaps the most important factor to being able to improve your life is being able to trust the food that you eat. The threat of government inspections of the food supply does not protect us 100% of the time but it is hard to think what it would be like if eating into a burger was a life gamble.
•Social Security: Most think of SS as a program just for subsidizing the living of retired people. Social security also helps to pay for the supporting of orphans and disabled people.
For sure helping to reduce poverty among the retirement aged citizens has made perhaps the biggest impact on life in the U.S. For sure before social security in America the only people that ever thought about retirement were the very wealthy.
Political ideology has not really changed that much in America from President Truman’s era. The one difference is related to civil rights, but that will get talked about more in other postings here.
Republicans still believe that the best way to improve lives in America is to cut taxes on people with lots of money and Democrats still believe that government is an agent for good that can help.
Truman knew that people living hand to mouth would never have a more comfortable “Republican” life without help. For the vast majority of America that is not currently living like a Republican learning that voting for more Democrats is their best shot at having a more comfortable life.
Again, THE bankrupt economic policy is trickle down economics disproportionately benefiting the wealthy and running up the deficits because the fucking GOPERS never walk their spending cut talk. It's just the empty talk they save for when Dems are in the WH.
The successful have done better under Dem presidents. Look it up. Both the stock market and new job creation historically have done better under Dems than under Repugs.
Don't respond without posting the links you find that confirm what I've just claimed.
Irony abounds with your posts. Seriously, WTF do conservatives, the author in particular, know about 'caring about other peoples problems'?
What is really grating is the empty moralizing from sanctimonious hypocritical righties who support an amoral prick who couldn't give two shits about anyone but himself.
Sounds like Tammy has been reading Shower Cap. She really nails president truck-stop urinal cake to the wall.
Trump Furious at Iran for Distracting People from Impeachment for Only Two Days
By Andy Borowitz
5:50 P.M.
Photograph by Salwan Georges / The Washington Post / Getty
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump is “incredibly angry” at Iran for taking the American people’s attention away from his impeachment for only about two days, Trump told reporters on Wednesday.
“When I did that drone strike, I was under the impression that it would knock impeachment out of the news for at least a month,” a visibly enraged Trump said. “Instead, it’s Wednesday and we’re back to this Pelosi garbage.”
Trump said that he had hoped that Iranians would react to his provocation in a way that might have forced Democrats to forget about impeaching him altogether, but “all I got for my trouble was a chickenshit couple of days.”
“Honestly, Iran reacted like it was Belgium or something,” Trump said.
Trump said that he was unlikely to attack Iran again “if this is the thanks I get,” and wondered if attacking a different country might have resulted in a more substantial distraction from his impeachment.
“Should I have attacked North Korea?” he said. “Frankly, I don’t know who to trust anymore.”
Trump Furious at Iran for Distracting People from Impeachment for Only Two Days
By Andy Borowitz
5:50 P.M.
Photograph by Salwan Georges / The Washington Post / Getty
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump is “incredibly angry” at Iran for taking the American people’s attention away from his impeachment for only about two days, Trump told reporters on Wednesday.
“When I did that drone strike, I was under the impression that it would knock impeachment out of the news for at least a month,” a visibly enraged Trump said. “Instead, it’s Wednesday and we’re back to this Pelosi garbage.”
Trump said that he had hoped that Iranians would react to his provocation in a way that might have forced Democrats to forget about impeaching him altogether, but “all I got for my trouble was a chickenshit couple of days.”
“Honestly, Iran reacted like it was Belgium or something,” Trump said.
Trump said that he was unlikely to attack Iran again “if this is the thanks I get,” and wondered if attacking a different country might have resulted in a more substantial distraction from his impeachment.
“Should I have attacked North Korea?” he said. “Frankly, I don’t know who to trust anymore.”
Probably just a higher degree of furrowed brow than we see from the continually 'very concerned' Susan Collins.
Hey Mike, draw a connection between the briefing and the asshole you're going to vote to acquit. They are of a kind.
Mike Pence and the Coming Rapture
I've read that VP Pence is a believer in the End Times and the Rapture. Well, here's a Rapture scene from the opening sequence of an episode of "Six Feet Under." Maybe Pence would enjoy watching it, you know, although Mother might forbid it:
Nice makeup job
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212852711
Donald J. Trump is not at all well.
His word-slurring and odd pauses to breathe seem to me to indicate low oxygen levels in his bloodstream.
He very deliberately inhales forcefully through his nose to prevent the appearance of gasping for breath, but he is, in fact, gasping for breath.
I would not be surprised if he receives oxygen prior to such appearances. That could explain his lateness. He probably does not come out until his oxygen levels approach normal. I would also not be surprised if he leaves the room after speaking and immediately dons an oxygen mask.
He is a man with serious health issues.
I take this comment as putting internal pressure, now public, on the 'misinformation and integrity' shops within FB. A not so subtle 'do your fucking jobs, THIS time' around'.
Also, the author made clear his liberal leanings and his desire to not have FB place it's digital thumb on the scale for any candidate in '20.
That's what I meant with my 'two wrongs don't make a right' lead in to the piece.
Legal Weed, Chicago's Newest Local Delicacy
Legal Weed, Chicago's Newest Local Delicacy
That has to be bluster. No way Israel doesn't use an attack on any of its cities as an excuse to go after Iranian nuke facilities. They view Iran as an existential threat.
Iran doesn't match up favorably 1 to 1 against ether Israel or the U.S.
Their generals know that even if the Mullahs don't.
She doesn't even understand WTF daddy's policies are.
Toward the end of the keynote, Shapiro mentioned that both he and Trump have mothers who are immigrants and asked about efforts to keep the pipeline open to foreign talent. “Well, the president said that he thinks that it’s absolutely insane that we educate immigrants from across the world, and as they are about to start their business, open their business, become employers, we throw them out of our country,” Trump said.
She went on to say the U.S. immigration system needs to be overhauled. However, the Trump administration has increased H-1B visa denials that affect these high-tech positions. In addition, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has set up fake technology and computer science schools to bring in students from countries such as India, only to deport them.
Well I hope someone is rewriting her speech on the fly, if in fact it's not about daddy's support for STEM education for women.
Wouldn't be surprised if her trip to Vegas is cancelled ostensibly for breaking developments.
"Beyond the politics of the Trump administration - Ivanka is not a woman in tech. She's not a CEO. She has no background," tweeted computer programmer Brianna Wu, who is running for United States Congress as a Democrat. "It's a lazy attempt to emulate diversity - but like all emulation it's not quite the real thing."
"This is an insult to women in technology," investor Elisabeth Fullerton wrote in the Women Who Tech group on Facebook. "We did hard times in university, engineering, math, and applied sciences. This is what extreme privilege and entitlement get you. It’s not what you know it’s who you know I guess."
https://popculture.com/celebrity/2020/01/07/ivanka-trump-sparks-backlash-keynote-speaker-ces-2020/
Way to miss the point. it was a straight partisan SCOTUS vote and Gore won the popular vote.
Place a GOPER in Gore's place, exact same circumstances, see if helps your comprehension.
How unkind...……………...to pugs.
Cyber Poop Time Pal, perhaps.
He lost the popular vote by the largest margin in presidential election history.
It was a fucking black swan event to win by 75K votes in just 3 States. You'll sooner see a rooster that color than you'll see that color swan again.
And cut the shit. If the SCOTUS had handed the vote to a Dem in 2000 AND Clinton won by the same slim margin of electoral votes, while losing the popular vote big time, you assholes would be torches and pitchforks clamoring for the elimination of the electoral college.
I get it, two wrongs don’t make a right. But for god’s sake FB scrutinize your shit more closely than you did last time. First do no harm shouldn’t only apply to the medical profession.
Thoughtful piece, anyway.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212849232
Facebook executive: we got Trump elected, and we shouldn't stop him in 2020
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/7/21055348/facebook-trump-election-2020-leaked-memo-bosworth
In a memo obtained by The New York Times and publicly posted, a Facebook executive says the company’s platform was responsible for electing Donald Trump president in 2016, but he warned employees against using the company’s power to stop Trump’s reelection in 2020.
6. The whole darn thing - those interested should read before commenting
The NYT recently obtained a copy of a post I made to the wall of my internal profile within Facebook. I thought it worth sharing in its entirety here for those who are interested. It wasn’t written for public consumption and I am worried about context collapse so I wanted to share some important context for those who are curious.
— We have a culture at Facebook of sharing ideas and inviting discussion internally. This post had dozens of comments challenging some of my statements and exploring the implication of others. I don’t think it appropriate to expose my colleagues’ internal musings to the same scrutiny as I will receive but several of those comment threads changed my views and I thought it was a very healthy back and forth.
— Overall I hoped this post would encourage my coworkers to continue to accept criticism with grace as we accept the responsibility we have overseeing our platform. I end with a call to discussion for what other areas we feel we are falling short that should be a focus in 2020.
— My day to day work doesn’t cover the issues discussed, so for example I’m not responsible for the teams working on misinformation or civic integrity.
Today is my birthday and I am out of the country and have only intermittent access to the internet, so I won’t be able to follow the coverage of this closely. I do hope it will be received in the spirit it was shared, one of exploring the past to better see what lies ahead.
+++
Thoughts for 2020
The election of Donald Trump immediately put a spotlight on Facebook. While the intensity and focus of that spotlight may be unfair I believe it isn’t unjust. Scrutiny is warranted given our position in society as the most prominent of a new medium. I think most of the criticisms that have come to light have been valid and represent real areas for us to serve our community better. I don’t enjoy having our flaws exposed, but I consider it far better than the alternative where we remain ignorant of our shortcomings.
One trap I sometimes see people falling into is to dismiss all feedback when they can invalidate one part of it. I see that with personal feedback and I see it happening with media coverage. The press often gets so many details wrong it can be hard to trust the veracity of their conclusions. Dismissing the whole because of flaws in parts is a mistake. The media has limited information to work with (by our own design!) and they sometimes get it entirely wrong but there is almost always some critical issue that motivated them to write which we need to understand.
It is worth looking at the 2016 Election which set this chain of events in motion. I was running our ads organization at the time of the election and had been for the four years prior (and for one year after). It is worth reminding everyone that Russian Interference was real but it was mostly not done through advertising. $100,000 in ads on Facebook can be a powerful tool but it can’t buy you an American election, especially when the candidates themselves are putting up several orders of magnitude more money on the same platform (not to mention other platforms).
Instead, the Russians worked to exploit existing divisions in the American public for example by hosting Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter protest events in the same city on the same day. The people who shows up to those events were real even if the event coordinator was not. Likewise the groups of Americans being fed partisan content was real even if those feeding them were not. The organic reach they managed sounds very big in absolute terms and unfortunately humans are bad at contextualizing big numbers. Whatever reach they managed represents an infinitesimal fraction of the overall content people saw in the same period of time and certainly over the course of an election across all media.
So most of the information floating around that is widely believed isn’t accurate. But who cares? It is certainly true that we should have been more mindful of the role both paid and organic content played in democracy and been more protective of it. On foreign interference, Facebook has made material progress and while we may never be able to fully eliminate it I don’t expect it to be a major issue for 2020.
Misinformation was also real and related but not the same as Russian interference. The Russians may have used misinformation alongside real partisan messaging in their campaigns, but the primary source of misinformation was economically motivated. People with no political interest whatsoever realized they could drive traffic to ad-laden websites by creating fake headlines and did so to make money. These might be more adequately described as hoaxes that play on confirmation bias or conspiracy theory. In my opinion this is another area where the criticism is merited. This is also an area where we have made dramatic progress and don’t expect it to be a major issue for 2020.
It is worth noting, as it is relevant at the current moment, that misinformation from the candidates themselves was not considered a major shortcoming of political advertising on FB in 2016 even though our policy then was the same as it is now. These policies are often covered by the press in the context of a profit motive. That’s one area I can confidently assure you the critics are wrong. Having run our ads business for some time it just isn’t a factor when we discuss the right thing to do. However, given that those conversations are private I think we can all agree the press can be forgiven for jumping to that conclusion. Perhaps we could do a better job exposing the real cost of these mistakes to make it clear that revenue maximization would have called for a different strategy entirely.
Cambridge Analytica is one of the more acute cases I can think of where the details are almost all wrong but I think the scrutiny is broadly right. Facebook very publicly launched our developer platform in 2012 in an environment primarily scrutinizing us for keeping data to ourselves. Everyone who added an application got a prompt explaining what information it would have access to and at the time it included information from friends. This may sound crazy in a 2020 context but it received widespread praise at the time. However the only mechanism we had for keeping data secure once it was shared was legal threats which ultimately didn’t amount to much for companies which had very little to lose. The platform didn’t build the value we had hoped for our consumers and we shut this form of it down in 2014.
The company Cambridge Analytica started by running surveys on Facebook to get information about people. It later pivoted to be an advertising company, part of our Facebook Marketing Partner program, who other companies could hire to run their ads. Their claim to fame was psychographic targeting. This was pure snake oil and we knew it; their ads performed no better than any other marketing partner (and in many cases performed worse). I personally regret letting them stay on the FMP program for that reason alone. However at the time we thought they were just another company trying to find an angle to promote themselves and assumed poor performance would eventually lose them their clients. We had no idea they were shopping an old Facebook dataset that they were supposed to have deleted (and certified to us in writing that they had).
When Trump won, Cambridge Analytica tried to take credit so they were back on our radar but just for making bullshit claims about their own importance. I was glad when the Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale called them out for it. Later on, we found out from journalists that they had never deleted the database and had instead made elaborate promises about its power for advertising. Our comms team decided it would be best to get ahead of the journalists and pull them from the platform. This was a huge mistake. It was not only bad form (justifiably angering the journalists) but we were also fighting the wrong battle. We wanted to be clear this had not been a data breach (which, to be fair to us, it absolutely was not) but the real concern was the existence of the dataset no matter how it happened. We also sent the journalists legal letters advising them not to use the term “breech” which was received normally by the NYT (who agreed) and aggressively by The Guardian (who forged ahead with the wrong terminology, furious about the letter) in spite of it being a relatively common practice I am told.
In practical terms, Cambridge Analytica is a total non-event. They were snake oil salespeople. The tools they used didn’t work, and the scale they used them at wasn’t meaningful. Every claim they have made about themselves is garbage. Data of the kind they had isn’t that valuable to being with and worse it degrades quickly, so much so as to be effectively useless in 12-18 months. In fact the United Kingdom Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) seized all the equipment at Cambridge Analytica and found that there was zero data from any UK citizens! So surely, this is one where we can ignore the press, right? Nope. The platform was such a poor move that the risks associated were bound to come to light. That we shut it down in 2014 and never paid the piper on how bad it was makes this scrutiny justified in my opinion, even if it is narrowly misguided.
So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks. He didn’t get elected because of Russia or misinformation or Cambridge Analytica. He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.
To be clear, I’m no fan of Trump. I donated the max to Hillary. After his election I wrote a post about Trump supporters that I’m told caused colleagues who had supported him to feel unsafe around me (I regret that post and deleted shortly after).
But Parscale and Trump just did unbelievable work. They weren’t running misinformation or hoaxes. They weren’t microtargeting or saying different things to different people. They just used the tools we had to show the right creative to each person. The use of custom audiences, video, ecommerce, and fresh creative remains the high water mark of digital ad campaigns in my opinion.
That brings me to the present moment, where we have maintained the same ad policies. It occurs to me that it very well may lead to the same result. As a committed liberal I find myself desperately wanting to pull any lever at my disposal to avoid the same result. So what stays my hand?
I find myself thinking of the Lord of the Rings at this moment. Specifically when Frodo offers the ring to Galadrial and she imagines using the power righteously, at first, but knows it will eventually corrupt her. As tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I am confident we must never do that or we will become that which we fear.
The philosopher John Rawls reasoned that the only moral way to decide something is to remove yourself entirely from the specifics of any one person involved, behind a so called “Veil of Ignorance.” That is the tool that leads me to believe in liberal government programs like universal healthcare, expanding housing programs, and promoting civil rights. It is also the tool that prevents me from limiting the reach of publications who have earned their audience, as distasteful as their content may be to me and even to the moral philosophy I hold so dear.
That doesn’t mean there is no line. Things like incitement of violence, voter suppression, and more are things that same moral philosophy would safely allow me to rule out. But I think my fellow liberals are a bit too, well, liberal when it comes to calling people Nazi’s.
If we don’t want hate mongering politicians then we must not elect them. If they are getting elected then we have to win hearts and minds. If we change the outcomes without winning the minds of the people who will be ruled then we have a democracy in name only. If we limit what information people have access to and what they can say then we have no democracy at all.
This conversation often raises the alarm around filter bubbles, but that is a myth that is easy to dispel. Ask yourself how many newspapers and news programs people read/watched before the internet. If you guessed “one and one” on average you are right, and if you guessed those were ideologically aligned with them you are right again. The internet exposes them to far more content from other sources (26% more on Facebook, according to our research). This is one that everyone just gets wrong.
The focus on filter bubbles causes people to miss the real disaster which is polarization. What happens when you see 26% more content from people you don’t agree with? Does it help you empathize with them as everyone has been suggesting? Nope. It makes you dislike them even more. This is also easy to prove with a thought experiment: whatever your political leaning, think of a publication from the other side that you despise. When you read an article from that outlet, perhaps shared by an uncle or nephew, does it make you rethink your values? Or does it make you retreat further into the conviction of your own correctness? If you answered the former, congratulations you are a better person than I am. Every time I read something from Breitbart I get 10% more liberal.
What does all of this say about the nature of the algorithmic rewards? Everyone points to top 0.1% content as being acutely polarized but how steep are the curves? What does the top 1% or 5% look like? And what is the real reach across those curves when compared to other content? I think the call for algorithmic transparency can sometimes be overblown but being more transparent about this type of data would likely be healthy.
What I expect people will find is that the algorithms are primarily exposing the desires of humanity itself, for better or worse. This is a Sugar, Salt, Fat problem. The book of that name tells a story ostensibly about food but in reality about the limited effectiveness of corporate paternalism. A while ago Kraft foods had a leader who tried to reduce the sugar they sold in the interest of consumer health. But customers wanted sugar. So instead he just ended up reducing Kraft market share. Health outcomes didn’t improve. That CEO lost his job. The new CEO introduced quadruple stuffed Oreos and the company returned to grace. Giving people tools to make their own decisions is good but trying to force decisions upon them rarely works (for them or for you).
In these moments people like to suggest that our consumers don’t really have free will. People compare social media to nicotine. I find that wildly offensive, not to me but to addicts. I have seen family members struggle with alcoholism and classmates struggle with opioids. I know there is a battle for the terminology of addiction but I side firmly with the neuroscientists. Still, while Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar. Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation.
At the end of the day we are forced to ask what responsibility individuals have for themselves. Set aside substances that directly alter our neurochemistry unnaturally. Make costs and trade-offs as transparent as possible. But beyond that each of us must take responsibility for ourselves. If I want to eat sugar and die an early death that is a valid position. My grandfather took such a stance towards bacon and I admired him for it. And social media is likely much less fatal than bacon.
To bring this uncharacteristically long and winding essay full circle, I wanted to start a discussion about what lessons people are taking away from the press coverage. My takeaway is that we were late on data security, misinformation, and foreign interference. We need to get ahead of polarization and algorithmic transparency. What are the other big topics people are seeing and where are we on those?
In an internal memo, Andrew Bosworth said he “desperately” wanted the president to lose. But, he said, the company should avoid hurting Mr. Trump’s campaign.
I get it, two wrongs don’t make a right. But for god’s sake FB scrutinize your shit more closely than you did last time. First do no harm shouldn’t only apply to the medical profession.
Thoughtful piece, anyway.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212849232
Facebook executive: we got Trump elected, and we shouldn't stop him in 2020
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/7/21055348/facebook-trump-election-2020-leaked-memo-bosworth
In a memo obtained by The New York Times and publicly posted, a Facebook executive says the company’s platform was responsible for electing Donald Trump president in 2016, but he warned employees against using the company’s power to stop Trump’s reelection in 2020.
6. The whole darn thing - those interested should read before commenting
The NYT recently obtained a copy of a post I made to the wall of my internal profile within Facebook. I thought it worth sharing in its entirety here for those who are interested. It wasn’t written for public consumption and I am worried about context collapse so I wanted to share some important context for those who are curious.
— We have a culture at Facebook of sharing ideas and inviting discussion internally. This post had dozens of comments challenging some of my statements and exploring the implication of others. I don’t think it appropriate to expose my colleagues’ internal musings to the same scrutiny as I will receive but several of those comment threads changed my views and I thought it was a very healthy back and forth.
— Overall I hoped this post would encourage my coworkers to continue to accept criticism with grace as we accept the responsibility we have overseeing our platform. I end with a call to discussion for what other areas we feel we are falling short that should be a focus in 2020.
— My day to day work doesn’t cover the issues discussed, so for example I’m not responsible for the teams working on misinformation or civic integrity.
Today is my birthday and I am out of the country and have only intermittent access to the internet, so I won’t be able to follow the coverage of this closely. I do hope it will be received in the spirit it was shared, one of exploring the past to better see what lies ahead.
+++
Thoughts for 2020
The election of Donald Trump immediately put a spotlight on Facebook. While the intensity and focus of that spotlight may be unfair I believe it isn’t unjust. Scrutiny is warranted given our position in society as the most prominent of a new medium. I think most of the criticisms that have come to light have been valid and represent real areas for us to serve our community better. I don’t enjoy having our flaws exposed, but I consider it far better than the alternative where we remain ignorant of our shortcomings.
One trap I sometimes see people falling into is to dismiss all feedback when they can invalidate one part of it. I see that with personal feedback and I see it happening with media coverage. The press often gets so many details wrong it can be hard to trust the veracity of their conclusions. Dismissing the whole because of flaws in parts is a mistake. The media has limited information to work with (by our own design!) and they sometimes get it entirely wrong but there is almost always some critical issue that motivated them to write which we need to understand.
It is worth looking at the 2016 Election which set this chain of events in motion. I was running our ads organization at the time of the election and had been for the four years prior (and for one year after). It is worth reminding everyone that Russian Interference was real but it was mostly not done through advertising. $100,000 in ads on Facebook can be a powerful tool but it can’t buy you an American election, especially when the candidates themselves are putting up several orders of magnitude more money on the same platform (not to mention other platforms).
Instead, the Russians worked to exploit existing divisions in the American public for example by hosting Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter protest events in the same city on the same day. The people who shows up to those events were real even if the event coordinator was not. Likewise the groups of Americans being fed partisan content was real even if those feeding them were not. The organic reach they managed sounds very big in absolute terms and unfortunately humans are bad at contextualizing big numbers. Whatever reach they managed represents an infinitesimal fraction of the overall content people saw in the same period of time and certainly over the course of an election across all media.
So most of the information floating around that is widely believed isn’t accurate. But who cares? It is certainly true that we should have been more mindful of the role both paid and organic content played in democracy and been more protective of it. On foreign interference, Facebook has made material progress and while we may never be able to fully eliminate it I don’t expect it to be a major issue for 2020.
Misinformation was also real and related but not the same as Russian interference. The Russians may have used misinformation alongside real partisan messaging in their campaigns, but the primary source of misinformation was economically motivated. People with no political interest whatsoever realized they could drive traffic to ad-laden websites by creating fake headlines and did so to make money. These might be more adequately described as hoaxes that play on confirmation bias or conspiracy theory. In my opinion this is another area where the criticism is merited. This is also an area where we have made dramatic progress and don’t expect it to be a major issue for 2020.
It is worth noting, as it is relevant at the current moment, that misinformation from the candidates themselves was not considered a major shortcoming of political advertising on FB in 2016 even though our policy then was the same as it is now. These policies are often covered by the press in the context of a profit motive. That’s one area I can confidently assure you the critics are wrong. Having run our ads business for some time it just isn’t a factor when we discuss the right thing to do. However, given that those conversations are private I think we can all agree the press can be forgiven for jumping to that conclusion. Perhaps we could do a better job exposing the real cost of these mistakes to make it clear that revenue maximization would have called for a different strategy entirely.
Cambridge Analytica is one of the more acute cases I can think of where the details are almost all wrong but I think the scrutiny is broadly right. Facebook very publicly launched our developer platform in 2012 in an environment primarily scrutinizing us for keeping data to ourselves. Everyone who added an application got a prompt explaining what information it would have access to and at the time it included information from friends. This may sound crazy in a 2020 context but it received widespread praise at the time. However the only mechanism we had for keeping data secure once it was shared was legal threats which ultimately didn’t amount to much for companies which had very little to lose. The platform didn’t build the value we had hoped for our consumers and we shut this form of it down in 2014.
The company Cambridge Analytica started by running surveys on Facebook to get information about people. It later pivoted to be an advertising company, part of our Facebook Marketing Partner program, who other companies could hire to run their ads. Their claim to fame was psychographic targeting. This was pure snake oil and we knew it; their ads performed no better than any other marketing partner (and in many cases performed worse). I personally regret letting them stay on the FMP program for that reason alone. However at the time we thought they were just another company trying to find an angle to promote themselves and assumed poor performance would eventually lose them their clients. We had no idea they were shopping an old Facebook dataset that they were supposed to have deleted (and certified to us in writing that they had).
When Trump won, Cambridge Analytica tried to take credit so they were back on our radar but just for making bullshit claims about their own importance. I was glad when the Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale called them out for it. Later on, we found out from journalists that they had never deleted the database and had instead made elaborate promises about its power for advertising. Our comms team decided it would be best to get ahead of the journalists and pull them from the platform. This was a huge mistake. It was not only bad form (justifiably angering the journalists) but we were also fighting the wrong battle. We wanted to be clear this had not been a data breach (which, to be fair to us, it absolutely was not) but the real concern was the existence of the dataset no matter how it happened. We also sent the journalists legal letters advising them not to use the term “breech” which was received normally by the NYT (who agreed) and aggressively by The Guardian (who forged ahead with the wrong terminology, furious about the letter) in spite of it being a relatively common practice I am told.
In practical terms, Cambridge Analytica is a total non-event. They were snake oil salespeople. The tools they used didn’t work, and the scale they used them at wasn’t meaningful. Every claim they have made about themselves is garbage. Data of the kind they had isn’t that valuable to being with and worse it degrades quickly, so much so as to be effectively useless in 12-18 months. In fact the United Kingdom Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) seized all the equipment at Cambridge Analytica and found that there was zero data from any UK citizens! So surely, this is one where we can ignore the press, right? Nope. The platform was such a poor move that the risks associated were bound to come to light. That we shut it down in 2014 and never paid the piper on how bad it was makes this scrutiny justified in my opinion, even if it is narrowly misguided.
So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks. He didn’t get elected because of Russia or misinformation or Cambridge Analytica. He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.
To be clear, I’m no fan of Trump. I donated the max to Hillary. After his election I wrote a post about Trump supporters that I’m told caused colleagues who had supported him to feel unsafe around me (I regret that post and deleted shortly after).
But Parscale and Trump just did unbelievable work. They weren’t running misinformation or hoaxes. They weren’t microtargeting or saying different things to different people. They just used the tools we had to show the right creative to each person. The use of custom audiences, video, ecommerce, and fresh creative remains the high water mark of digital ad campaigns in my opinion.
That brings me to the present moment, where we have maintained the same ad policies. It occurs to me that it very well may lead to the same result. As a committed liberal I find myself desperately wanting to pull any lever at my disposal to avoid the same result. So what stays my hand?
I find myself thinking of the Lord of the Rings at this moment. Specifically when Frodo offers the ring to Galadrial and she imagines using the power righteously, at first, but knows it will eventually corrupt her. As tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I am confident we must never do that or we will become that which we fear.
The philosopher John Rawls reasoned that the only moral way to decide something is to remove yourself entirely from the specifics of any one person involved, behind a so called “Veil of Ignorance.” That is the tool that leads me to believe in liberal government programs like universal healthcare, expanding housing programs, and promoting civil rights. It is also the tool that prevents me from limiting the reach of publications who have earned their audience, as distasteful as their content may be to me and even to the moral philosophy I hold so dear.
That doesn’t mean there is no line. Things like incitement of violence, voter suppression, and more are things that same moral philosophy would safely allow me to rule out. But I think my fellow liberals are a bit too, well, liberal when it comes to calling people Nazi’s.
If we don’t want hate mongering politicians then we must not elect them. If they are getting elected then we have to win hearts and minds. If we change the outcomes without winning the minds of the people who will be ruled then we have a democracy in name only. If we limit what information people have access to and what they can say then we have no democracy at all.
This conversation often raises the alarm around filter bubbles, but that is a myth that is easy to dispel. Ask yourself how many newspapers and news programs people read/watched before the internet. If you guessed “one and one” on average you are right, and if you guessed those were ideologically aligned with them you are right again. The internet exposes them to far more content from other sources (26% more on Facebook, according to our research). This is one that everyone just gets wrong.
The focus on filter bubbles causes people to miss the real disaster which is polarization. What happens when you see 26% more content from people you don’t agree with? Does it help you empathize with them as everyone has been suggesting? Nope. It makes you dislike them even more. This is also easy to prove with a thought experiment: whatever your political leaning, think of a publication from the other side that you despise. When you read an article from that outlet, perhaps shared by an uncle or nephew, does it make you rethink your values? Or does it make you retreat further into the conviction of your own correctness? If you answered the former, congratulations you are a better person than I am. Every time I read something from Breitbart I get 10% more liberal.
What does all of this say about the nature of the algorithmic rewards? Everyone points to top 0.1% content as being acutely polarized but how steep are the curves? What does the top 1% or 5% look like? And what is the real reach across those curves when compared to other content? I think the call for algorithmic transparency can sometimes be overblown but being more transparent about this type of data would likely be healthy.
What I expect people will find is that the algorithms are primarily exposing the desires of humanity itself, for better or worse. This is a Sugar, Salt, Fat problem. The book of that name tells a story ostensibly about food but in reality about the limited effectiveness of corporate paternalism. A while ago Kraft foods had a leader who tried to reduce the sugar they sold in the interest of consumer health. But customers wanted sugar. So instead he just ended up reducing Kraft market share. Health outcomes didn’t improve. That CEO lost his job. The new CEO introduced quadruple stuffed Oreos and the company returned to grace. Giving people tools to make their own decisions is good but trying to force decisions upon them rarely works (for them or for you).
In these moments people like to suggest that our consumers don’t really have free will. People compare social media to nicotine. I find that wildly offensive, not to me but to addicts. I have seen family members struggle with alcoholism and classmates struggle with opioids. I know there is a battle for the terminology of addiction but I side firmly with the neuroscientists. Still, while Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar. Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation.
At the end of the day we are forced to ask what responsibility individuals have for themselves. Set aside substances that directly alter our neurochemistry unnaturally. Make costs and trade-offs as transparent as possible. But beyond that each of us must take responsibility for ourselves. If I want to eat sugar and die an early death that is a valid position. My grandfather took such a stance towards bacon and I admired him for it. And social media is likely much less fatal than bacon.
To bring this uncharacteristically long and winding essay full circle, I wanted to start a discussion about what lessons people are taking away from the press coverage. My takeaway is that we were late on data security, misinformation, and foreign interference. We need to get ahead of polarization and algorithmic transparency. What are the other big topics people are seeing and where are we on those?
In an internal memo, Andrew Bosworth said he “desperately” wanted the president to lose. But, he said, the company should avoid hurting Mr. Trump’s campaign.
While he's gathering himself from laughing his ass off over such a softball of a question, lemme give it a shot.
How in TF could it have not occurred to you that the most reasonable answer, that would occur to most reasonable people, is that both deserve contempt rather than compassion?
The general for being a murderous terrorist and the fake POTUS for being manifestly stupid and irresponsible for not giving a heads up to congressional leadership, the FBI, Homeland Security and Israel.
Even before this no one who is not an amoral ends justify the means jackass would view Trump with compassion rather than with the contempt he has earned.
The only party that deserves compassion, and unmentioned in your false choices, is the American people for having to suffer such a fool as Trump. And not gladly
I agree. Phone call form Bibi to Donnie Two Scoops:
Donald, we'll take out their cyber command and control, you take out their 'navy' and air force on the ground and we both take out as many missile sites as we can find. Deal?
Nikki's just another Repug nitwit making asinine statements and mischaracterizations that she can't back up with examples.
Why don't you help her out and post some?
"…...that left Iran's leaders "shaking in their boots."
Really? Just another example of the sociopathic need of RW ass-hats to imagine causing other's to shake in their boots.
Overcompensation for a lifetime spent walking around scared shitless themselves is my diagnosis.
Robotic Cats, "Pooptime Robot Pal" Among The Hot New Gadgets At C.E.S. 2020
Robotic Cats, "Pooptime Robot Pal" Among The Hot New Gadgets At C.E.S. 2020
I'm sitting here generating some memes while waiting to meet with a contractor.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212848079
That will assure laughs, sympathy and a quick turnaround from a straight male tech or a gay female tech.
Transgender tech means ambivalence and an 'I'll get around to it later' response.
Have YOU ever considered dealing with the actual content of the posts you respond to?
As in identify a single fictional word, sentence or paragraph in my post.
It would be novel, for you, if you did,
Hard Times & War Crimes: News From Hell
http://showercapblog.com/hard-times-war-crimes-news-from-hell/
Monday, January 6th, 2020
by Shower Cap | American Madness Journal | 1 comment
I was looking over some old blog entries the other day, and it seems almost quaint to have written about comparatively trivial crap like, “wow, Scott Pruitt buys really expensive lotion haw haw haw” now that we’re breaking shit that won’t get fixed in my lifetime, but here we are. Might as well do the news, I ‘spose.
Tonight’s theme is Entirely Predictable Consequences, because, shockingly, the killing of Qassem Suleimani has not resulted in a spontaneous downpour of delicious frosting mingled with hailstones of moistest red velvet cake, but rather the fecal hurricane that any rational person could have seen coming from miles away, and isn’t it a dang shame there are no such people to be found anywhere in the executive branch of the United States federal government in this fresh new year? Like, you’d settle for a pushy intern at this point, wouldn’t you?
We learned Lil’ Donnie Two-Scoops couldn’t help but slink around Marm-a-Lago over the holidays, desperately trying to impress the wealthy dirtbags who line his pockets with membership fees in exchange for the opportunity to wield the power of the American presidency simply by manipulating his fragile ego, teasing them something big and bomb-shaped, that rhymes with Munconstitutional Massassination, was coming soon regarding Iran, even while hiding the plans from the congressional Gang of Eight. It might behoove House Democrats to join Every Intelligence Agency on Earth and set up a little surveillance equipment down at the “Winter White House.”
Thuggish Theocratic Diplogoon Mike Pompeo is all peeved n’ pissy because America’s traditional European allies have proven somewhat less than eager to share the credit for Shart Garfunkel’s latest colossal blunder. Shit, even Boris “no, I look like this on purpose” Johnson is smart enough to tell Littlefinger “Actually, you can have the terrorist retaliation all to yourself, old boy.”
Yeah, Mike, it’s just an indecipherable fucking mystery why these people you’ve been pelting with shit for three long years aren’t gleefully leaping into the car you’re driving off a cliff (and in a stupid, suicidal, way, not an awesome, life-affirming, Thelma & Louise way, for the record). IS THERE ANYBODY IN THIS ADMINISTRATION WITH EVEN A PASSING FAMILIARITY WITH THE IDEA OF CAUSE AND EFFECT?
Pentagon officials have convened a hasty game of Pin the Blame on the Dotard, leaking to the press details of what only the profoundly charitable would call the “decision-making process” behind the Drone Strike That Fucked Literally Everything Up.
Seems Dorito Mussolini’s military advisors were in the habit of presenting him with a buffet of options, including one extreme “only a braindead moron would pick this one” choice, designed to make the other plans look more reasonable by comparison. Whoever could’ve imagined that playing silly little psychological games with an idiot manchild would backfire so spectacularly? Who, except, y’know…everybody? Fucking EVERYBODY?!?
Oh, and all that stuff about having two scoops of plump, juicy, intelligence that the strike was necessary to prevent an “imminent” attack? Yeah, that’s quickly turning out to be pure horseshit as well, and there’s no Colin Powell to razzle-dazzle the U.N. this time, but if you try to trot out, say, Stephen Miller to bamboozle the world, I will buy front row seats.
Some bored pollster/aspiring horror writer decided to ask a bunch of Republicans who they wanted to see run for President in 2024, and two of the top choices turned out to be Turdwaffle, Jr., and Princess Ivanka Turdwaffle, I guess because rank and file conservatives just like paying rich people to golf.
Like, I get the concept of a cult of personality, but I guess I always figured there would something appealing about the personality, y’know? A mouth-breathing 40-year-old boy who looks like he diligently collected stray pubes from the locker room and glued them to his cheeks because he can’t grow a beard on his own? For PRESIDENT? Fuck, I’d get up and move if he sat next to me on the train.
Oh, but Son of Shart is out to prove me wrong, showing off his political bonafides by…sigh…by posting pictures of himself holding a gun decorated with this sad little cartoon of Hillary Clinton behind bars, and grinning like he finally, after years of humiliating failure and declining expectations, switched to pull-up diapers.
You should most definitely nominate this kid, Republicans. The platform can be owning th’libs and…and…let’s face it, that’s all you care about anymore, so why not line up behind Sultan Spraytan’s Subpar Son?
I can’t tell if it really falls under the mission of this blog to mention that Meat Loaf and Greta Thunberg are feuding, but for what it’s worth, Meat Loaf and Greta Thunberg are feuding.
But let’s get back to those consequences. It’s almost as though the Treasonweasel Administration felt bad about killing Suleimani, and decided to give him more or less everything he ever wanted to make up for it. So when the Cult45ers in your social media feed squawk WHY U LUV TERRORISTS SO MUCH, you can point out all the pesky real-world effects of the Bonespur Buttplug’s recklessness.
Huge anti-American protests erupted all over Iraq and Iran, and god only knows how many angry young people will now wind up forgoing that long-shot theatre degree to pursue a career in terrorism instead. Anyway, as far as ominous signs go, you could do worse than the unfurling of a red flag, symbolizing vengeance, over the Jamarkaran Mosque in Qom, Iran. Increased hatred of the USA? Strengthening the autocratic Iranian regime? Point Suleimani.
The Government of Iran, of course, promptly announced they would no longer abide by agreed-upon restrictions placed on their nuclear program, golly, that’ll sure stick it to Obama, right? Anyway, back to the ol’ uranium enrichment labs, I bet it’ll be super-fun, like Breaking Bad meets Jack Ryan, oh wait, I keep getting TV and reality confused since we put a game show host in charge of national security.
And in Iraq, the Parliament voted to expel all U.S. troops from their borders, because, as anyone who’s ever read Miss Manners understands, it’s really quite rude to conduct drone strike assassinations when you’re a guest in someone else’s home. Anyway, in the aftermath of the attack, Iraq has been pushed further than ever into Iran’s willing arms, in case you’re wondering why Suleimani’s corpse has that sloppy grin on its face.
(In an apparent effort to forever eradicate the perception of American military competence in front of the entire world, the Cud-Brained Dolt Administration issued a letter announcing immediate and total compliance with Iraq’s request to Kindly Get the Fuck Out, only to walk that bad boy back a couple hours later, sending the Fucking Chairman of the Joint Fucking Chiefs of Staff out to announce, “Whoopsie, our bad, didn’t mean it, it turns out we are massive fuck-ups. Anyway, stand by, we’ve got some equipment en route that should help us pull our heads out of our asses, but don’t get your hopes up.”)
Oh, and U.S. troops in Iraq have now suspended anti-ISIS operations so they can hang around and wait for potential Iranian retaliation instead, that’s a fun rearrangement of priorities, isn’t it?
It’s weird to have a President who’s done more to benefit ISIS than, say, the U.S. manufacturing sector, which is in recession due to Weehands McNodick’s Dumbass Trade War™?, and weirder still to have the party of “fiscal conservatism” and “national security” enabling him every disastrous step of the way, but y’know…interesting times and all that.
Anyway, this is what happens when you hand the keys to the most powerful military machine in history to a tantrum-prone narcissist with an insecure third-grade boy’s idea of “toughness”; the sugar rush of a button pushed and half a day’s worth of sensational headlines, followed by the inevitable, totally avoidable, crash, a price to be paid by untold thousands for years to come. History, scrawled in crayon, by a sociopath with a single, dried-out, rabbit turd for a soul.
Indeed, the Tangelo-Tinted Taint Tumor has responded to the snowballing pile of shit of his own making with his trademark brand of apocalyptic childishness, threatening to bomb cultural sites inside Iran (a war crime, of course, but get in line, The Hague), and to levy sanctions against Iraq for kicking him out before he could finish working his way through their complete set of Everybody Loves Raymond DVDs. Y’know, you catch more flies with honey than with pompous, belligerent, and ultimately hollow, bluster, Dotard.
As for the violence that’s almost sure to come, don’t worry, Mike Pompeo has already written off the casualties as merely “a little noise,” a casual reminder that he is a religious nutcase trying to use the powers of the U.S. government to give the end times an encouraging nudge whenever possible, sleep tight.
Meanwhile, Paul Gosar is still out there doin’ his best to provide a role model for all the shittiest kids in America, proving you can be an unrepentant bag of moldy dicks, and still get rewarded with wealth and power. You like photoshop so much, Paulie? Tonight’s graphic is for you.
Oh, and I see John Bolton is once again strutting around, tantalizingly flaunting his filthy mustache lingerie, promising to tell a tantalizing tale of treason, if only Mitch McConnell and the GOP-controlled Senate will subpoena him. Flash all the ankle you like, old man, I’m not buying your book.
In the wake of Murderstache’s tease, Marco Rubio reached miles up his own ass, past all the just-in-case plastic water bottles, to offer the theory that the Senate shouldn’t hear Bolton’s testimony because an old witch laid a curse upon the Upper House that forbids them from hearing new evidence in an impeachment trial, which is as silly as it is craven, and therefore awfully fucking silly indeed.
Looking on the bright side, I think it’s cool that, even as a slovenly, drunken, moron in a beat-to-hell Captain America bathrobe, I still have more integrity and self-respect than a U.S. Senator.
Ok, that’s what I’ve got for y’all tonight. Anyway, we’re launching the kickstarter for the comic book very soon, tentatively on January 15th.
If you don’t contribute, I’m gonna drink a bunch of cheap beer, eat some shitty bar food, come over to your house, and commit a war crime in your bathroom. You’ve been warned.
How ‘bout another teaser image for that comic, huh?