Social credit in America - Politics invades personal finance

Considering the flaws of the methodology of twin studies, especially when it comes to beliefs or attitudes vs. pathologies or anatomy, and the remaining variance within that methodology, the title is quite a bit misleading to say the least.

Rules for thee, but not for me. Why Your Betters don’t have to behave on Facebook.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-files-xcheck-zuckerberg-elite-rules-11631541353?mod=hp_lead_pos7

In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are “whitelisted”—rendered immune from enforcement actions—while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.

While the program included most government officials, it didn’t include all candidates for public office, at times effectively granting incumbents in elections an advantage over challengers. The discrepancy was most prevalent in state and local races, the documents show, and employees worried Facebook could be subject to accusations of favoritism.

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Thanks for the article, and your excerpts as my ip apparently has bad juju with uncle Rupert. :frowning:

How Facebook’s post-Trump algorithm changes encouraged news, politicians, and other online attention seekers to use outrage and contentious topics that were rewarded and amplified by the FB changes. The consequences for online dialogue was predictably bad, but yeah, more people argued online on their platform so their advertising stats went up.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-algorithm-change-zuckerberg-11631654215?ns=prod/accounts-wsj
Backup link

They concluded that the new algorithm’s heavy weighting of reshared material in its News Feed made the angry voices louder. “Misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares, researchers noted in internal memos.

While the FB platform offers people the opportunity to connect, share and engage, an unfortunate side effect is that harmful and misinformative content can go viral, often before we can catch it and mitigate its effects,” he wrote. “Political operatives and publishers tell us that they rely more on negativity and sensationalism for distribution due to recent algorithmic changes that favor reshares.”

“Many [political] parties, including those that have shifted to the negative, worry about the long term effects on democracy,” read one internal Facebook report, which didn’t name specific parties.

Data scientists on that integrity team—whose job is to improve the quality and trustworthiness of content on the platform—worked on a number of potential changes to curb the tendency of the overhauled algorithm to reward outrage and lies. Mr. Zuckerberg resisted some of the proposed fixes, the documents show, because he was worried they might hurt the company’s other objective—making users engage more with Facebook.

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Outsourcing social surveillance to private enterprise

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Once a Republican gets into the White House, they will outsource uncle Joe’s financial snooping to this company … and then be pilloried by the “impartial press”. :smile:

Only 3+ years… (a Republican) please grant us.

Watching Blundering Biden this morning telling lie after lie, “only the rich” Must Pay their share. While last night it’s said Biden owes $700k pass years taxes.

‘2022 a near, new slate in Congress, maybe even a couple more R in the Senate. :slight_smile:

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Microsoft-owned Linkedin, which is probably the most used résumé publishing website, apparently doesn’t mind censoring their users.

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The Journal has an ongoing series of articles on Facebook/Instagram that are pretty good.

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In addition to the problems I spotted with that “research” it turns out there was a far bigger problem–they’re off about 25x. The paper has been withdrawn. Of course the right wing isn’t going to mention that part of the story.

a domain register with free speech values was hacked and many of their customers’ personal details revealed.

But online, data revealed by the massive hack of Epik, an internet-services company popular with the far right… The information was included in a giant trove of hundreds of thousands of transactions published this month by the hacking group Anonymous that exposed previously obscure details of far-right sites and launched a race among extremism researchers to identify the hidden promoters of online hate.

Heidi Beirich, a veteran researcher of hate and extremism, said she is used to spending weeks or months doing “the detective work” trying to decipher who is behind a single extremist domain. The Epik data set, she said, “is like somebody has just handed you all the detective work — the names, the people behind the accounts.”

After Alayon’s name appeared in the breached data, his brokerage, Travers Miran Realty, dropped him as an agent

This is another example in what seems to be a recent trend where cybercrime goes unpunished as long as it targets the political enemies of the left. Like the IRS leaking tons of rich people’s full tax returns, or various free speech / conservative social network platforms like Parler, Gab and GETTR getting hacked, it seems anything goes when you can expose those who support opposing views.

Once leaked, the leftist media or activists can selectively promote examples of bad behavior (like Parler users talking about the Jan 6 capitol protests, despite way more of that happening on Facebook) to pressure employers of the individuals or business who provide financial or technical services to the platform to cancel them.

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My question is, who the hell funds such “research”?

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The Southern Poverty Hate Mongers have raised over half a billion. Hate pays!

https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/philanthropy-magazine/article/some-people-love-to-call-names

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Such hackers are almost never caught, Epik isn’t being singled out for a lack of prosecution. The only thing special about this case is how amateurish Epik’s security was.

And why do they not want their names associated with what they are promoting???

You can give any name you want. I just signed up “Loren at FragileDeal” for running the site “Trans People Suck.com”. I am in the process of forwarding this to your employers HR department for review in creating a hostile workplace. Well, I guess I could leave that job to the person who would get promoted to your job if something unfortunate for you happened to get disclosed.

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How many of the guys who got doxxed in this hack were victims of ID theft from their enemies creating fake accounts in their name on Epik platform? How many of these personal nemesis went on to register extremist-sounding domains, hoping all along that Epik gets hacked down the line and it comes back to harm the innocent people who had no idea their good name was abused like this? Come on.

Much much more likely, the people doxxed were not victims of ID thefts like you described, and the ones who brought this onto themselves. They thought they could register any offensive domain they wanted anonymously and that it wouldn’t get traced back to them. Accountability sucks sometimes…

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I wouldn’t be surprised if the FBI did as part of counter terrorism effort against domestic threats. Getting names of participants on far right or antifa sites sounds like something they’d be interested in knowing.

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I’m old enough to remember when your employer had no business concerning itself with your views that didn’t affect your work performance. It was such a terrible time to live. I am so glad that those times are over. We are so much better off now that we can no longer feel safe that we can make a living if we express viewpoints different from our employers, regardless of whether it affects our job performance.

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As long as your employees’ views don’t affect your bottom line, sure. But in a business where reputation is a pretty big deal, if it was rumored that their realtor agency was associated with antisemitic extremists (even wrongly so), that could cost them a bunch. Much easier to sever contact with the potentially radioactive employee than having to deal with the bad PR.

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This has more often than not just been used as a scare tactic and doesn’t actually affect employer’s bottom lines anywhere near as much as they worry it will. Thanks to the internet, lots of things that aren’t actually news can become news. But thanks to the internet, people aren’t famous for 15 minutes when they’re in the news anymore. It’s more like 15 seconds. It’s amazing how quickly people move on from the story about the night manager at the local bed bath and beyond posting pepe memes. Just as amazing that it is even something worth hearing about. In 99 out of 100 stories that trend on twitter or make it on the local news where non-famous John Doe did something “wrong” and, oh-by-the-way he works for Williams HVAC Inc, Williams will barely have to deal with a few days of 1-star google reviews from people 2000 miles away and that’s it. Almost no one actually considers the viewpoints of a company’s employees when deciding if they should patronize that company for something apolitical. Since (in almost all cases) there is no significant financial loss when an employee is outed as a Jan 6 attendee, a suspected arsonist at a BLM rally, a shout-your-abortion participant, or a pregnancy resource center supporter, employers shouldn’t be concerned (in almost all cases) with anything non job-related their employees do outside work hours.

And what do you mean when you say “(even wrongly so)”?

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