Quotulatiousness

April 15, 2018

Facebook is stalking you, even if you don’t have an account

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Gennie Gebhart and Jamie Williams explain why Facebook doesn’t need to listen in on your microphone to serve you with creepy ads:

In ten total hours of testimony in front of the Senate and the House this week, Mark Zuckerberg was able to produce only one seemingly straightforward, privacy-protective answer. When Sen. Gary Peters asked Zuckerberg if Facebook listens to users through their cell phone microphones in order to collect information with which to serve them ads, Zuckerberg confidently said, “No.”

What he left out, however, is that Facebook doesn’t listen to users through their phone microphones because it doesn’t have to. Facebook actually uses even more invasive, invisible surveillance and analysis methods, which give it enough information about you to produce uncanny advertisements all the same.

This was what finally got Elizabeth to close her Facebook account: very shortly after posting a status update that referenced a particular business (that’s been gone for decades), she started getting ads for modern equivalents outside her Facebook session. Clearly, her advertising profile had been updated to include her “new” interest, and the ads were now tailored to this sudden change of tastes.

But how does Facebook know to serve you an ad for a specific product right after you talk about it? What explains seeing ads for things you have never searched for or communicated about online? The list is long. Instead of listening to your conversations through your phone, Facebook:

  • tracks you through Like buttons across the web, whether or not you are logged in or even have a Facebook account.
  • maintains shadow profiles on people who don’t use Facebook.
  • logs Android users’ calls and texts.
  • absorbs unique phone identifiers through in-app advertising to associate your identity across the different devices you use.
  • tracks your location and serves ads based on where you are, where you live, and where you work.
  • tracks your in-store purchases to link the ads you see online with the purchases you make offline.
  • watches the things you start writing but don’t post to track your self-censorship.
  • linked purchases to Messenger accounts to allow sellers to send confirmation messages without affirmative user permission.
  • bought and advertised a VPN to track what users are doing on other apps and crush competition.
  • manipulated your Newsfeed to see if it can make you sad or happy.
  • files patents for emerging tracking technology, like tracking your location through the dust on your phone camera, for potential future use.

Tracking and analysis methods like these power not only those too on-the-nose ads, but also invasive “People You May Know” recommendations.

Users are onto this. If you have ever been creeped out by an ad for a product popping up right after you were talking out loud about it, your fear and even paranoia are warranted — just not for the exact reasons you might think. No matter how Facebook achieves its frighteningly accurate ads and suggestions, the end result is the same: an uncomfortable, privacy-invasive user experience.

I’m getting closer to the point of pulling the plug on my Facebook account as well … it seems like every week or so I need to go spelunking in the privacy settings to shut off yet another way they want to monetize my information or invade my privacy even more. Several of my FB friends are dabbling with MeWe.com as an alternative and they do claim not to track you or otherwise compromise your privacy.

April 10, 2018

QotD: The built-in toxicity of social media

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The internet age has brought us a medium with a bias towards even more gutteral, visceral messaging. Social media encourage short, punchy messages, and by punchy, I mean people are trying to punch each other with words. The medium has a bias towards stridency and absolutism, because you really can’t include too much nuance and caveat in 140 characters.

It also has a strong bias towards anger, because, as far as short missives go, “Go fuck yourself” has the virtue of being brief, direct, and very easy to write.

Much easier to write a bunch of fuck yous to strangers than compose an article explaining your beliefs or the defects of the claims of those you disagree with.

And a lazy medium thereby encourages lazy thinking.

I kind of think anything important one has to say should be said in person. If you’re going to break up with someone, it should be in person.

If you’re going to tell someone you’ll never speak to him again because he supports a candidate you don’t like, you should probably man up to deliver that message in person, too.

If you have the guts. But that’s hard. Much easier just to rip someone in a 140 character Sick Burn.

Ace, “Divisive Political Season Causing Mass Unfriending on FaceBook”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2016-08-15.

March 30, 2018

New Firefox extension to reduce Facebook‘s default tracking

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

If you use Firefox as your primary browser, you might be interested in a new Firefox extension that limits how Facebook tracks your activity:

Mozilla Firefox has a new extension to prevent Facebook from tracking your online habits.

Capitalizing on the fears surrounding Facebook privacy, Mozilla has designed the “Facebook Container,” a Firefox add-on that blocks Facebook from tracking users when they click on ads or links that take them off the site.

Facebook currently uses a program called Pixel to collect information on how users engage with the site. When users click on links, they visit external sites but are still logged in to Facebook‘s platform. These outside sites will contain “share” or “like” buttons, and when users engage with these functions, this activity is connected to their Facebook identity. That’s how Facebook is able to fine-tune its advertisements to its users. While this is a well-known practice, many aren’t aware that their behaviors outside the core function of Facebook are tracked.

But when people using Facebook Container click a link on Facebook, it loads in a seperate blue tab that isolates users’ activities from the core site. In these blue tabs, users will not be logged into Facebook, which prevents further data collection. Users do have the option to continue to use the “share” and “like” buttons, but Mozilla notes that these activities may still be tracked. The extension doesn’t prevent data collection, but it offers users more control over their privacy.

It may only be a token toward reclaiming a tiny bit of your online privacy, but even tokens can be valuable in the aggregate.

March 29, 2018

Google, Facebook, anti-trust laws, and the Network Effect

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Google and Facebook (and other, lesser, social media companies) have a lot of information on you. Lots and lots and lots of information on you. Many people are coming to the conclusion that this is bad, bad news and “something must be done”. Politicians and activists share a tendency to respond to such demands by pushing “something” they already favour as the solution to the popular demand for action. A few days ago, the “something” seemed to be some form of anti-trust action over the social media giants.

In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains why an over-the-top anti-trust offensive is likely to leave everyone in a worse state than the status quo:

Which brings us to the tech companies of today:

Big Tech May Be Monopolistic, But It’s Good for Consumers

Quite so, thus no antitrust actions should or need be taken.

At the first level there’s the simple point that Facebook, Google a little less, Microsoft, e-Bay, they benefit from network effects. The more people who use them the more attractive they become to the next user. Meaning that size, in and of itself, creates yet more size. That’s just what we mean by network effects.

In turn that also means that the efficient size of an organisation here is that global monopoly. It isn’t true in most cases because there are diseconomies of scale as well as economies of it, but another way to describe network effects is just that we’re insisting that the -economies outweigh the dis- at scales up to and including 7 billion people.

In that first reading of antitrust that would mean they gain economic power and thus government must step in. In our second reading that’s not enough.

Firstly, the monopolists must exercise that economic power they have. Something not greatly in evidence as just having power doesn’t mean it can be exercised. For when you do try to, say, raise prices can someone come in and try to undercut you? If so you’ve got contestable economic power, or even a contestable monopoly. As an example, think the Chinese and rare earths. They were producing some 97% of the world’s supply. So, they decided to play silly buggers, exercise that power. It took a couple of years but two new mines opened, China’s share of rare earths fell and prices halved, below their original point. People contested that Chinese economic power when China tried to exercise it. China didn’t win either.

If Google tried to raise the price of adverts then business would flow away from them. If Facebook started charging for access then there wouldn’t be a Facebook. They’ve got contestable monopolies.

[…]

Sure, we should keep a wary eye open and if the consumer is being gouged then we could and should do something. But while we’ve got efficient companies, monopolies or not, benefiting consumers then the correct response is to get the hell out of the way.

Unless you’re a politician who simply wants to expand the powers politicians have over society – something which explains most politicians – but then we can tell them to go boil their heads. Only the exercise of economic power to the disbenefit of consumers justifies intervention.

March 26, 2018

QotD: Virtue signalling

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s noticeable how often virtue signalling consists of saying you hate things. It is camouflage. The emphasis on hate distracts from the fact you are really saying how good you are. If you were frank and said, ‘I care about the environment more than most people do’ or ‘I care about the poor more than others’, your vanity and self-aggrandisement would be obvious, as it is with Whole Foods. Anger and outrage disguise your boastfulness.

One of the occasions when expressions of hate are not used is when people say they are passionate believers in the NHS. Note the use of the word ‘belief’. This is to shift the issue away from evidence about which healthcare system results in the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. The speaker does not want to get into facts or evidence. He or she wishes to demonstrate kindness — the desire that all people, notably the poor, should have access to ‘the best’ healthcare. The virtue lies in the wish. But hatred waits in reserve even with the NHS. ‘The Tories want to privatise the NHS!’ you assert angrily. Gosh, you must be virtuous to be so cross!

Comedians make use of virtue signalling of the vituperative kind. With the right audience they can get laughs scorning the usual suspects: Ukip, the Daily Mail, Eton, bankers and the rest. The audience enjoys the caricaturing of all of these, sneering at them and, in the process, joining together as a congregation of the righteously contemptuous. What a delight to display your virtue, feel confirmed in your views, enjoy a sense of community, let off some anger and have a laugh all at the same time! It is so easy, too!

No one actually has to do anything. Virtue comes from mere words or even from silently held beliefs. There was a time in the distant past when people thought you could only be virtuous by doing things: by helping the blind man across the road; looking after your elderly parents instead of dumping them in a home; staying in a not-wholly-perfect marriage for the sake of the children. These things involve effort and self-sacrifice. That sounds hard! Much more convenient to achieve virtue by expressing hatred of those who think the health service could be improved by introducing competition.

James Bartholemew “The awful rise of ‘virtue signalling’: Want to be virtuous? Saying the right things violently on Twitter is much easier than real kindness”, The Spectator, 2015-04-18.

March 25, 2018

Policing speech

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

British police forces don’t seem to have enough resources to track down and disrupt organized rape gangs, but they do have a burning desire to clamp down on what you say on social media. Priorities, I guess: it might be dangerous to tackle actual criminals, but it’s as safe as can be to bring the full force of law down on orange-fingered basement-dwelling keyboard warriors, critics of transgender policies, and other clear and present threats to the social order.

Patrick West sums up the situation:

It’s been a strange month for free speech. First comes the news that a stay-at-home mother of four has been contacted by the police for making comments critical of transgender ideology on Twitter.

Then, we read that the Canadian vlogger Lauren Southern was refused entry to the UK because, according to the Home Office, her presence was ‘not conducive to the public good’. Then, most absurdly, we hear that ‘self-confessed shitposter’ Markus Meechan – known on YouTube as Count Dankula – was found guilty in a Scottish court of hate speech for teaching his dog to perform a Nazi salute.

It doesn’t matter if the Count Dankula incident seems innocuous, or that he has many unpleasant supporters online. Nor does it matter that Southern is a leading ‘alt-right’ figurehead. Free speech means standing up for people you don’t care for, because if your enemies aren’t safe from the encroaching powers of the state, then you and you friends won’t be safe, either. You don’t have to be a libertarian fundamentalist to be worried about the state now prosecuting people for jokes.

But these incidents have been thrown into even sharper relief, owing to the fact that this week has also seen supporters of Tommy Robinson – not a particularly endearing character either, but an important one nonetheless – clash with extremist Muslims at Speakers’ Corner in London, of all places.

At a time when there are an estimated 20,000 Islamists at large in the country – 3,000 of whom are deemed particularly dangerous – it is perverse that the police and the courts are instead pursuing such soft targets. Because it’s far better for a police force’s profile to be seen as an ‘anti-Nazi’ rather than ‘Islamophobic’, the scandal of grooming gangs in Telford and elsewhere is ignored or brushed under the carpet. For similar reasons of denial and sheer cowardice, the issue of Sharia Patrols in London, threatening gay people with violence, is met with a proverbial fingers in the ears. If only the police and courts had been so vigilant about those who planned and then executed last year’s atrocities in London and Manchester.

The first duty of a state is to protect its citizens and their safety. The last duty of a state is to tell them what they can and can’t say. Being offensive should never be a crime.

March 24, 2018

Today in bad ideas examined – Time to [nationalize | regulate | break-up] Facebook?

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Facebook is having a particularly bad moment right now. Earlier this year, it was the Republicans in the US demanding that “something must be done” about Facebook. Now, after discovering that the Trump campaign did exactly what the Obama campaign did in 2012, it’s the Democrats insisting that “something must be done”. In Britain, it’s both the Tories and the Corbynistas howling for action. Well, [nationalizing | regulating | breaking-up] Facebook is something, and here’s why we shouldn’t do it:

The latest bright idea from Paul Mason is that Facebook must be regulated or changed in some manner to make darn sure it does what Paul Mason wants Facebook to be doing.

There are lots of problems with the Corbynista columnist’s idea. They include: not understanding how the internet or corporate law works; ignoring how innovation happens; and the political problem of allowing the government to control a social network, real or digital.

That’s not to mention the broader point that the people best placed to control Facebook are the 2 billion users of Facebook, who can choose to use the service or not. But such free-market liberalism isn’t quite the fashion de nos jours, is it?

[…]

Mason, along with far too much of the British Left, is pretty relaxed about repeating Soviet mistakes, but there’s no reason why the rest of us have to go along with it. That rather covers the regulation and ownership aspects. As to breaking the company up, we find more in his thread of tweets on the subject.

He points to the UK corporate registration as proof that we can control the local bit, or break it off from the whole. Such a conclusion is hard to square with the complaint about the Facebook profits HMRC struggles to tax. The reason Facebook doesn’t pay UK corporation tax on all the money collected from the UK is that the UK company just does some engineering bits, and doesn’t actually run the service. That engineering could be done from elsewhere just as the ad sales are. And the design. And there’s absolutely no one at all who has insisted that there must be a UK company out there before signing up for the service, is there?

We then come to what is arguably Mason’s silliest claim: “Next comes the f***wittery about ‘we don’t want the state owning our data.’ Me too. Hence I proposed a public owned digital ID service.“

There might be some manner in which “public owned” and “state” are different, but I’m absolutely certain that this wouldn’t be the case in modern Britain. As even Gordon Brown ended up agreeing when he revealed that the BBC license fee was indeed just another tax all along.

March 22, 2018

The social media mistake

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Robert Tracinski explains why the move to social media was dangerous to free public discourse despite the otherwise-attractive nature of TwitFaceTube and other factions of the social media Borg:

Was social media a mistake? Two recent events crystallized my answer to this question. First, conservative comedian Steven Crowder had his Twitter account suspended for a week because he posted a video on YouTube that was critical of “gender fluidity” and used a Bad Word. The video was also pulled from YouTube, which you might not think of as a social media platform, even though it definitely is.

Then Brandon Morse noticed Twitter was preventing him from tweeting a link to an article by a controversial conservative columnist. This follows stories of Google-owned YouTube “demonetizing” videos by conservatives, unplugging them from the ability to make money from ads, and Facebook and Google targeting conservative sites for hilariously inaccurate and tendentious “fact checks.” It’s becoming clear that the big social media companies are targeting ideas and thinkers on the Right, and not just the far-out provocateurs and trolls like Milo Yianopoulos, but everyone.

What strikes me most is the contrast between this and the Internet era before social media, before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube swallowed up everything. I’m talking about the 2000s, the great era of the blogs. Do you remember what that blog era was like? It felt like liberation.

The era of blogging offered the promise of a decentralized media. Anybody could publish and comment on the news and find an audience. Guys writing in their pajamas could take down Dan Rather. We were bypassing the old media gatekeepers. And we had control over it! We posted on our own sites. We had good discussions in our own comment fields, which we moderated. I had and still have an extensive e-mail list of readers who are interested in my work, most of which I built up in that period, before everybody moved onto social media.

But then Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube came along and killed the blogs. There were three main reasons they took over.

I have various social media accounts, but in most cases I just use them to link to my blog posts. The old saw about never reading the comments applies with even greater force to most of the social media platforms. I don’t do “breaking news” on the blog, because that’s one thing social media can do better — most of my regular visitors come here once a day to see what I’ve posted since their last visit, not to check for smoking hot takes on something that happened in the last fifteen minutes. For immediacy, the social media sites will win over the blogs (and even the mainstream media, in many cases).

H/T to American Digest for the link.

March 20, 2018

China’s dark vision of “social credit”

Filed under: China, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jazz Shaw says the Chinese government appears to have studied and taken extensive notes to “improve” on the social controls depicted in Black Mirror:

For those of you who have never seen the Netflix series Black Mirror, it’s a show which presents a series of mostly unrelated vignettes from various dystopian futures where the world is simply awful in a variety of horrifying ways. In the third season, they featured an episode called “Nosedive” which imagined a society where people’s social media rankings (based on feedback and ratings they received from other citizens each time they interact) determined their success in life. With high marks, you had access to the best rental properties, classy cars, highest paying jobs and invitations to the best parties. Too low of a score could see you taking the subway to your job cleaning public restrooms and living in the human equivalent of a roach motel.

Sounds like a terrifying, science fiction world, right? It absolutely does, except that it’s already taking place in China. They’re instituting precisely such a social media “credit” system where too many social offenses (which essentially means anything viewed by the Communist Party in a negative fashion) could block you from even being able to ride public transit. (Reuters)

    China said it will begin applying its so-called social credit system to flights and trains and stop people who have committed misdeeds from taking such transport for up to a year.

    People who would be put on the restricted lists included those found to have committed acts like spreading false information about terrorism and causing trouble on flights, as well as those who used expired tickets or smoked on trains, according to two statements issued on the National Development and Reform Commission’s website on Friday.

    Those found to have committed financial wrongdoings, such as employers who failed to pay social insurance or people who have failed to pay fines, would also face these restrictions, said the statements which were dated March 2.

Wow, China. Amiright? This sort of neo-puritan-panopticon-nanny-state-on-steriods couldn’t possibly happen here, could it?

You similarly receive “scores” if you’re a seller on E-bay. Other examples abound. At this point, the government doesn’t seem inclined to try to hop on this ride, but do they even need to? Facebook, Google, Twitter and the other major platforms already have a shocking level of influence on our lives. It would only take a few tweaks before they could begin sharing user ratings with the whole world and who knows where they could go from there?

March 19, 2018

Meet “the gay Canadian vegan who [created] ‘Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindf*ck tool'”

Filed under: Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Guardian, Carole Cadwalladr talks to the young developer at Cambridge Analytica who says he’s the one who created the tools that the Trump campaign used to sway opinions their way:

The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.

By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd.

Two months later, when he arrived in London from Canada, he was all those things in the flesh. And yet the flesh was impossibly young. He was 27 then (he’s 28 now), a fact that has always seemed glaringly at odds with what he has done. He may have played a pivotal role in the momentous political upheavals of 2016. At the very least, he played a consequential role. At 24, he came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that went on to claim a major role in the Leave campaign for Britain’s EU membership referendum, and later became a key figure in digital operations during Donald Trump’s election campaign.

Or, as Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.

In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart – was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.

February 18, 2018

QotD: The “rules” of Twitter

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

• How dare you talk about A when B is infinitely more important?

• If I disagree with you, you’re almost certainly arguing in bad faith and probably evil as well.

• You are personally responsible, in toto and in perpetuity, for everything that your friends, colleagues, and/or ancestors have ever said, done, or thought.

• Sentences #2 and #3 do not apply to me.

Terry Teachout, “Twitter, in four sentences”, About Last Night, 2015-06-22.

February 6, 2018

Katie Roiphe on the new whisper network

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

She’s already taken a lot of heat from other women over this essay:

For years, women confined their complaints about sexual harassment to whisper networks for fear of reprisal from men. This is an ugly truth about our recent past that we are just now beginning to grapple with. But amid this welcome reckoning, it seems that many women still fear varieties of retribution (Twitter rage, damage to their reputations, professional repercussions, and vitriol from friends) for speaking out — this time, from other women. They are, in other words, inadvertently creating a new whisper network. Can this possibly be a good thing?

Most of the new whisperers feel as I do, exhilarated by the moment, by the long-overdue possibility of holding corrupt and bullying men such as Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, and Matt Lauer to account for their actions. They strongly share some of its broader goals: making it possible for women to work unbothered and unharassed even outside the bubble of Hollywood and the media, breaking down the structures that have historically protected powerful men. Yet they are also slightly uneasy at the weird energy behind this movement, a weird energy it is sometimes hard to pin down.

Here are some things these professional women said to me on the condition that their names be withheld:

    I think “believe all women” is silly. Women are unreliable narrators also. I understand how hard it is to come forward, but I just don’t buy it. It’s a sentimental view of women … I think there is more regretted consent than anyone is willing to say out loud.

    If someone had sent me the Media Men list ten years ago, when I was twenty-five, I would have called a harmlessly enamored guy a stalker and a sloppy drunken encounter sexual assault. I’d hate myself now for wrecking two lives.

    One thing people don’t say is that power is an aphrodisiac … To pretend otherwise is dishonest.

    What seems truly dangerous to me is the complete disregard the movement shows for a sacred principle of the American criminal justice system: the presumption of innocence. I come from Mexico, whose judicial system relied, until 2016, on the presumption of guilt, which translated into people spending decades, sometimes lifetimes, in jail before even seeing a judge.

    I have never felt sexually harassed. I said this to someone the other day, and she said, “I am sure you are wrong.”

    Al Franken asked for an investigation and he should have been allowed to have it; the facts are still ambiguous, the sources were sketchy.

    Why didn’t I get hit on? What’s wrong with me? #WhyNotMeToo

    I think #MeToo is a potentially valuable tool that is degraded when women appropriate it to encompass things like “creepy DMs” or “weird lunch ‘dates.’” And I do not think touching a woman’s back justifies a front page in the New York Times and the total annihilation of someone’s career.

I have a long history with this feeling of not being able to speak. In the early Nineties, death threats were phoned into Shakespeare and Company, an Upper West Side bookstore where I was scheduled to give a reading from my book The Morning After. That night, in front of a jittery crowd and a sprinkling of police, I read a passage comparing the language in the date-rape pamphlets given out on college campuses to Victorian guides to conduct for young ladies. When I read at universities, students who considered themselves feminists shouted me down. It was an early lesson in the chilling effect of feminist orthodoxy.

But social media has enabled a more elaborate intolerance of feminist dissenters, as I just personally experienced. Twitter, especially, has energized the angry extremes of feminism in the same way it has energized Trump and his supporters: the loudest, angriest, most simplifying voices are elevated and rendered normal or mainstream.

January 26, 2018

British sex workers create a “National Ugly Mugs” database to avoid sketchy customers

Filed under: Britain, Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Register, Iain Thomson reports on a study of professional sex workers in Britain:

A study into the effect of the internet on professional sex workers has shown the online world keeps them safer, happier in their job, and more able to weed out creepy customers.

Researchers at the universities of Leicester and Strathclyde in the UK interviewed 641 courtesans – with a roughly 80/20 per cent female to male split – and found [PDF] more than three quarters found using online channels to find and vet punters made them safer in their trade. Online forums also gave then a valuable tool in staying safe and countering loneliness or depression.

“Girls are very open because obviously we started talking about the safety from the very get-go,” Milena, 32, an independent escort providing BDSM services. “If you didn’t have that internet … everything would have been underground and everybody would be scared.”

[…]

“I’d say the worst bit of the job is constantly feeling like you’ve got to look over your shoulder,” said Jane, 40, a BDSM specialist. “Even though I’m working legally, I’m constantly worried.”

Sex workers in the UK have also set up a National Ugly Mugs database, whereby abusive punters are flagged up by their email addresses or social media handles, which 85 per cent of the respondents used. Sharing this information between themselves made is much less likely that the workers would come to harm.

Support groups for people in the business have been greatly enabled by the online world.

Prostitution is legal in the UK, but not in a brothel or via a pimp. Going online meant that 89 per cent of respondents used online communications to eliminate the need for a third party to manage their affairs, 82 per cent went online to make sure they weren’t breaking the law, and 78 per cent said it had improved the quality of their lives.

January 18, 2018

QotD: The news business, post-internet impact

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The job he was hired to do, namely to help the president of the United States communicate with the public, was changing in equally significant ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologies that people in Washington were just beginning to wrap their minds around. It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the “content” they provide to their readers. You have to have skin in the game — to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on its products — to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed. Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

David Samuels, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru”, New York Times Magazine, 2016-05-05.

January 8, 2018

QotD: Differentiating between lies and (political) bullshit

Filed under: Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Thirty years ago, the Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt published an essay in an obscure academic journal, Raritan. The essay’s title was “On Bullshit”. (Much later, it was republished as a slim volume that became a bestseller.) Frankfurt was on a quest to understand the meaning of bullshit — what was it, how did it differ from lies, and why was there so much of it about?

Frankfurt concluded that the difference between the liar and the bullshitter was that the liar cared about the truth — cared so much that he wanted to obscure it — while the bullshitter did not. The bullshitter, said Frankfurt, was indifferent to whether the statements he uttered were true or not. “He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

Statistical bullshit is a special case of bullshit in general, and it appears to be on the rise. This is partly because social media — a natural vector for statements made purely for effect — are also on the rise. On Instagram and Twitter we like to share attention-grabbing graphics, surprising headlines and figures that resonate with how we already see the world. Unfortunately, very few claims are eye-catching, surprising or emotionally resonant because they are true and fair. Statistical bullshit spreads easily these days; all it takes is a click.

Tim Harford, “How politicans poisoned statistics”, TimHarford.com, 2016-04-20.

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