Congress lays into the heads of major tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to find out how Russia used social media to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.
Rep. Barbara Lee: “Now look at Facebook allowing ads by the Russian government to create this kind of environment. That’s a problem. I don’t know if they’re even aware of the history and how dangerous allowing the promotion of division and racial animosity and racial hatred can be.”
After an eventful summer in Silicon Valley, there is blood in the water. At stake is democracy itself.
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.
The fact that your company gives you good free lunches and shuttles to work and nice paycheck does not change the fact that you could get more by negotiating together, as a union. Anyone smart enough to get a job at Google is smart enough to grasp these facts.
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
Spread the word