Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is sometimes heralded as “the ‘Magna Carta’ of the internet.” It was passed in 1996 to provide websites with incentive to delete pornography, but it has since evolved. It is now effectively a shield that websites use to protect them from responsibility for all sorts of activity on…
A stunning story in Wall Street Journal on May 26, 2020 reported that an internal study by Facebook’s own researchers in 2018 revealed that the social media company’s algorithms not only did not bring people together, but in fact were driving people apart. “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a…
Below is an article from today’s The New York Times by Shira Ovide who writes the On Tech column for them. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Facebook had studied for two years whether its social network makes people more polarized. Researchers concluded that it does, and recommended changes to the…
“The decades of economic injustice and immense concentrations of wealth that we call the Gilded Age succeeded in teaching people how they did not want to live. That knowledge empowered them to bring the Gilded Age to an end, wielding the armaments of progressive legislation and the New Deal. Even now, when we recall the…
Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n. 1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modifications; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism…
To help you understand your new world environment, this is essential reading. It can be heavy lifting sometimes. But stick with it. It’s extremely enlightening. And I found it to be a sobering message about the unprecedented challenges we face as citizen of this American democracy, and our new world of global surveillance. Highly recommended.…
Here are a couple of new articles from the Opinion page of today’s New York Times that are worth our serious consideration. As I’ve mentioned before, if you want to get a good sense for how the Times’ readership feels about an article, go to their comments section and click on Reader’s Picks. You might be…
The following is from an NPR Frontline notice I received as a subscriber. I know I’ve got a lot of posts recently hammering Facebook, but it seems that finally a lot of people are waking up to the platform’s dangers. There are good things about FB, undeniably. But nothing is ALL good. Facebook’s dark side…
I recently came across this website (Freedom From Facebook) and looked into its mission and organizers. I think it’s a worthy organization to pay attention to if you’re concerned at all about your data on the Internet. Don’t take your privacy for granted. It’s YOUR data Facebook is monetizing, and we need to be informed…
We’re all familiar now with Mark Zuckerberg’s unceasing and hypocritical paen to the sacred interactions of loyal Face Book users, and how their interactions on his platform will make their lives so much better. Well, I recently came across the following tweet, it’s origin long-lost to repetition, that gives the lie to Zuck’s magnanimity: “‘Community’…