Portside

John Lanchester reviews three books on social media with a focus on Facebook, the colossal social networking corporation that now has two billion active monthly users. And, as Facebook has grown its users’ reliance on it has also grown. Facebook is an advertising company, but it is also a surveillance business that knows far, far more about its users than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. John Lanchester is “scared of Facebook.”

The Bernie Sanders show, which is filmed in the Democratic party’s DC-based studio, is atypical in ways beyond just presentation. Sanders has decided to bypass traditional media and broadcast exclusively on Facebook. And it is attracting – to borrow a Sandersism – a huge audience.

Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon have been making remarkable progress in artificial intelligence. Recently they have released much of their work to the public for free use, and adaptation. This seems bizarre: why would companies reveal the methods at the core of their businesses? And what does their embrace of open-source AI say about the current state of artificial intelligence?

Through a request under South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act, EFF found that, over the last three years, prison officials have brought more than 400 disciplinary cases for “social networking”—almost always for using Facebook. The offenses come with heavy penalties. In 16 cases, inmates were sentenced to more than a decade in what’s called disciplinary detention, with at least one inmate receiving more than 37 years in isolation.

Reader Comments - Darren Wilson Acquittal - Reader Responses; Black Friday Protests; Election Lessons for the Left; Immigration Reform; Ursula K. Le Guin, Pension Reform(?); Water Grab; Facebook Drivers Vote Union; Berlin Wall's Fall - Reflections from the GDR; Israel Lobby and Ukrainian Fascists; Mexico - 43 students murdered; Israel, Palestine and Rasmeah Odeh; The Selfless Gene; Announcement - New Politics Forum on the Environmental Crisis - New York - Dec. 9

Beware of Social Engineering; Secret World Content Scrubbing; Racist History of Ebola Coverage; Culture Wars I: GamerGate; Culture Wars II: Progressives Break Through with Pop Culture; Zuckerberg Sez Who You Are; Verizon Knows Where You Go and Wants to Give You the News

Closing the Jara case; Dropping ALEC like it's hot; Google, GE feed the deniers; Climate crisis feeds fatcats; How white is Green?; Bechdel and Chast: no respect for funnybooks

Rubble Bucket Challenge; Kids' artist hits profiling; White Ferguson betrays itself; Race/class in Silicon Valley; Cooper Union - Cooper vs. $; Klein's latest