#Social Media

 

God Only Knows What Facebook Is Doing To Our Children's Brains
Says Sean Parker
QUOTE
Facebook has been attacked by one of its founding members for "exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology" and putting children's mental health at risk.

Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook who joined Mark Zuckerberg's company in its first months, said the company's founders intentionally built the site to consume as much human attention as possible.

Parker, who has made billions as an early shareholder in the social network, also criticised Facebook's effect on children. "It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other," he told news site Axios. "It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."

"The inventors, creators... understood this consciously. And we did it anyway," Parker said.
UNQUOTE
Mr Parker was seriously involved but.............. The real issue is that the Main Stream Media and the Education Industry are losing their grip as Propaganda machines. So the Telegraph, otherwise known as the Quislinggraph is feeding us this story. The Economist is doing the same with Do Social Media Threaten Democracy? Recall too that Theresa May is complaining about Free Speech being used to incite disaffection but she is importing Terrorists by the thousand.

On the other hand Ron Unz tells us that the Media have a monstrous track record of concealing the truth. A current example is Harvey Weinstein, Rapist, bully, Racist & Jew. They protected him for thirty years; they did the same for Bernie Madoff, the world record thief and, not incidentally another Jew. It was the same when Monica Lewinsky was at it with Clinton. See the reality at Our American Pravda. Yes, Franklin Roosevelt's administration was riddled with communist traitors. Joe McCarthy was right and grossly abused for his pains. So was Sibel Edmonds but her revelations of treason were ignored. Yes, Bernard Kerik almost became the United States Secretary of Homeland Security but went to prison for fraud instead. It goes on.

 

Do Social Media Threaten Democracy Asks  Economist
No, it doesn't
QUOTE
Do social media threaten democracy?
Facebook, Google and Twitter were supposed to save politics as good information drove out prejudice and falsehood. Something has gone very wrong

IN 1962 a British political scientist, Bernard Crick, published “In Defence of Politics”. He argued that the art of political horse-trading, far from being shabby, lets people of different beliefs live together in a peaceful, thriving society. In a liberal democracy, nobody gets exactly what he wants, but everyone broadly has the freedom to lead the life he chooses. However, without decent information, civility and conciliation, societies resolve their differences by resorting to coercion.

How Crick would have been dismayed by the falsehood and partisanship on display in this week’s Senate committee hearings in Washington. Not long ago social media held out the promise of a more enlightened politics, as accurate information and effortless communication helped good people drive out corruption, bigotry and lies. Yet Facebook acknowledged that before and after last year’s American election, between January 2015 and August this year, 146m users may have seen Russian misinformation on its platform. Google’s YouTube admitted to 1,108 Russian-linked videos and Twitter to 36,746 accounts. Far from bringing enlightenment, social media have been spreading poison.

Russia’s trouble-making is only the start. From South Africa to Spain, politics is getting uglier. Part of the reason is that, by spreading untruth and outrage, corroding voters’ judgment and aggravating partisanship, social media erode the conditions for the horse-trading that Crick thought fosters liberty.

A shorter attention spa...oh, look at that!
The use of social media does not cause division so much as amplify it. The financial crisis of 2007-08 stoked popular anger at a wealthy elite that had left everyone else behind. The culture wars have split voters by identity rather than class. Nor are social media alone in their power to polarise—just look at cable TV and talk radio. But, whereas Fox News is familiar, social-media platforms are new and still poorly understood. And, because of how they work, they wield extraordinary influence.

They make their money by putting photos, personal posts, news stories and ads in front of you. Because they can measure how you react, they know just how to get under your skin (see article). They collect data about you in order to have algorithms to determine what will catch your eye, in an “attention economy” that keeps users scrolling, clicking and sharing—again and again and again. Anyone setting out to shape opinion can produce dozens of ads, analyse them and see which is hardest to resist. The result is compelling: one study found that users in rich countries touch their phones 2,600 times a day.

It would be wonderful if such a system helped wisdom and truth rise to the surface. But, whatever Keats said, truth is not beauty so much as it is hard work—especially when you disagree with it. Everyone who has scrolled through Facebook knows how, instead of imparting wisdom, the system dishes out compulsive stuff that tends to reinforce people’s biases.

This aggravates the politics of contempt that took hold, in the United States at least, in the 1990s. Because different sides see different facts, they share no empirical basis for reaching a compromise. Because each side hears time and again that the other lot are good for nothing but lying, bad faith and slander, the system has even less room for empathy. Because people are sucked into a maelstrom of pettiness, scandal and outrage, they lose sight of what matters for the society they share.

This tends to discredit the compromises and subtleties of liberal democracy, and to boost the politicians who feed off conspiracy and nativism. Consider the probes into Russia’s election hack by Congress and the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, who has just issued his first indictments. After Russia attacked America, Americans ended up attacking each other (see article). Because the framers of the constitution wanted to hold back tyrants and mobs, social media aggravate Washington gridlock. In Hungary and Poland, without such constraints, they help sustain an illiberal, winner-takes-all style of democracy. In Myanmar, where Facebook is the main source of news for many, it has deepened the hatred of the Rohingya, victims of ethnic cleansing.

Social media, social responsibility
What is to be done? People will adapt, as they always do. A survey this week found that only 37% of Americans trust what they get from social media, half the share that trust printed newspapers and magazines. Yet in the time it takes to adapt, bad governments with bad politics could do a lot of harm.

Society has created devices, such as libel, and ownership laws, to rein in old media. Some are calling for social-media companies, like publishers, to be similarly accountable for what appears on their platforms; to be more transparent; and to be treated as monopolies that need breaking up. All these ideas have merit, but they come with trade-offs. When Facebook farms out items to independent outfits for fact-checking, the evidence that it moderates behaviour is mixed. Moreover, politics is not like other kinds of speech; it is dangerous to ask a handful of big firms to deem what is healthy for society. Congress wants transparency about who pays for political ads, but a lot of malign influence comes through people carelessly sharing barely credible news posts. Breaking up social-media giants might make sense in antitrust terms, but it would not help with political speech—indeed, by multiplying the number of platforms, it could make the industry harder to manage.

There are other remedies. The social-media companies should adjust their sites to make clearer if a post comes from a friend or a trusted source. They could accompany the sharing of posts with reminders of the harm from misinformation. Bots are often used to amplify political messages. Twitter could disallow the worst—or mark them as such. Most powerfully, they could adapt their algorithms to put click bait lower down the feed. Because these changes cut against a business-model designed to monopolise attention, they may well have to be imposed by law or by a regulator.

Social media are being abused. But, with a will, society can harness them and revive that early dream of enlightenment. The stakes for liberal democracy could hardly be higher.
UNQUOTE
This is Propaganda from the Main Stream Media. They are being bypassed by the Internet, the world's biggest truth machine. Look at it, filter out the crazies, the dross and you are in with a chance. You might like some of our Fellow Travelers.
PS The Economist continues the theme with Once considered a boon to democracy, social media have started to look like its nemesis - Less Euromaidan, more Gamergate but you have to pay money to read the lies. You might; I won't. We are being worked on by Social Engineers. How? See e.g. How To Frame A Patriot.

 

We Have To Back Our Institutions Against The Attempted Coups Of Social Media Subversives
This Telegraph headline is verbatim.
QUOTE
In an age when anyone or anything can be attacked by a Twitter storm, it is up to the public to stand firm

Standing on a Tube escalator one evening this week, I was overtaken by a long-standing acquaintance, roughly my age. We started chatting. “When things were last so bad, in the 1970s,” she asked me, “were they so unsettling?” It interested me she was thinking this way.

She and I are broadly on opposite sides, politically – she Remain, I Leave; she Leftish, I conservative. Yet we agreed that the word “unsettling” described the effect of the state of our country on both of us, and we couldn’t remember it worse.

When times are bad, and the public space is filled with people talking utter rot, I draw comfort from a famous quotation from Edmund Burke: “Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”

It is the perfect description of the difference between the screeching excitement of agitators and the settled beliefs and interests of a stable society. It is a definition of the “silent majority”, nearly two centuries before that phrase was invented.

But is Burke still right in an age when the half-a-dozen grasshoppers can whip up a Twitter storm? When the mainstream media, despite their denunciations of “fake news”, magnify it further? And when the Government, political party, business, university, charity or prominent person under attack panics?

The very structure of politics is vulnerable to such technological subversion

How do the “thousands of great cattle” react? Although, by temperament, calm, they begin to stir. They raise their heads, get off their haunches and worry how well the British oak is protecting them.

The grasshoppers are at their most dangerous when they use social media to distort issues which the thousands of great cattle truly care about. If they stick to matters like the Chagos Islands (one of Jeremy Corbyn’s obsessions), they won’t get very far. Their dream is to grab a mainstream question and refashion it the way they want.

This week, they came close to succeeding over animal welfare. Millions of British people care a great deal about the subject – although we often differ about how best to advance it. To arouse popular anger on animal welfare would be a great prize for the tweeting grasshoppers.

The EU Withdrawal Bill causes us – obviously – to withdraw from the Lisbon Treaty. Article 13 of that treaty speaks of animals as “sentient beings”. So when Parliament voted against a Green amendment to transfer this into UK law, it was the work of a social-media moment to allege that “Tory MPs say animals don’t have feelings”.

Luckily for the Government, which is simultaneously too timid and too careless about such attacks, Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, had seen in time how environmental questions would be distorted by Remainers.

He had already promised a strong statement of post-Brexit environmental policy principles in the New Year and the setting-up of some form of environmental governance after we leave, to replace that of the European Commission. He is not about to deny animal sentience. The Government seems to have escaped without a serious wobble, but it could easily have gone the other way.

Nowadays, scarcely a day passes without attacks of this sort.

They are best understood as attempted coups. Instead of the clunky, old-fashioned method in which armed revolutionaries take over the state broadcasting station, play martial music and then announce that they have achieved power – as we saw, low-key, in Zimbabwe – the modern Western method is by cyber-propaganda and intimidation. It nearly worked in the Scottish referendum and the recent illegal vote in Catalonia.

The very structure of politics is vulnerable to such technological subversion.

Was Catalonia's social media takeover any different to the army taking over a broadcaster? Once the post-Blair Labour Party had become a hollow shell, Momentum could use social media to turn it into a Jeremy Corbyn personality cult (I gather some of his followers even have their own special JC red pyjamas). The hard-Left infiltration which took many years – and ultimately failed – in the late Seventies and early Eighties, can today spread like a computer virus.

These 21st-century coups can be mounted on a company, as well as a party or a government. Recently, Paperchase was scared off doing a promotion with the Daily Mail by a hate-filled online campaign called Stop Funding Hate.

They can be mounted against a charity. Last month, National Trust members came within 300 votes of supporting a motion to ban trail-hunting on its land, although less than one per cent of them voted.

They can be used against a collective organisation – the Church, the army, a university, a school.

They can be staged against an individual: the easiest way to ruin someone is to accuse him of being a paedophile or a groper. He will probably be dismissed whether or not the accusation is true.

Such attacks can be made by pseudonymous fantasists, people with grudges, tiny extremist groups, Russian robots or the likes of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange. The nature of the source seldom troubles those who run with the stories.

There are 13.4 million files in the so-called Paradise Papers, but that didn’t stop Mr Corbyn using them, from day one, in would-be drive-by slayings of prominent people, including the Queen, as if he really knew what the papers meant.

If it was foolish to believe that, say, the police never concocted evidence, or priests never molested children, it is even more idiotic to believe they always do

These attacks are the reputational equivalent of a power cut, and so their potential victims are absolutely desperate to keep the lights on. What they need, to pursue the analogy, is their own back-up generators. They must store up the inner strength to deal quickly with attacks, and survive them instead of folding.

This is where we, the public, come in. We have moved, in not much more than a generation, from a naïve deference towards our institutions to an equally naïve cynicism. If it was foolish to believe that, say, the police never concocted evidence, or priests never molested children, it is even more idiotic to believe they always do.

In any institution, trust cannot be absolute, but it has to be the presumption. The concept of the benefit of the doubt, like the presumption of innocence, is essential for civilisation to work.

We have come so close to losing this concept that institutions and individual leaders find it dangerously hard to do their work. If you are a general, bishop, chief executive, charity boss, consultant, and so on, your time is ever more absorbed by issues of governance, compliance, workplace rights, “equalities”, and the investigations, tribunals, law suits, and trolling which proliferate when things go wrong.

Not all of these things are avoidable. Some are essential. But when one sticks them all together, one can see that the purpose of bodies on which we all depend is seriously distorted by these demands.

We want our armed services to defend us, our police to stop crime, our universities to educate us, our doctors to make us better, our businesses to make us prosperous, our Members of Parliament to represent us. If people who represent almost no one can undermine them, “unsettling” is the right word.

We, the public, are going to have to back our institutions much more strongly against what Burke called “the little shrivelled, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour”.
UNQUOTE
What is the difference between the #tiny extremist groups mentioned by the Telegraph above and the journalists writing in the Main Stream Media? Not a lot.

 

Paywall ex Wiki
Restricting access to Internet content via a paid subscription is often called a Paywall.^[1][2] Newspapers started implementing paywalls on their websites in the mid-2010s to increase their revenue, which had been diminishing due to a decline in paid print readership and advertising revenue.^[3] Academic papers are often subject to a paywall, and available typically to researchers via academic libraries that subscribe.^[4][5]

Paywalls have also been used to increase the number of print subscribers; for example, some newspapers offer access to online content plus delivery of a Sunday print edition at a lower price than online access alone.^[6] Newspaper websites such as that of The Boston Globe and The New York Times use this tactic because it increases both their online revenue and their print circulation (which in turn provides more ad revenue).^[6]

Creating online ad revenue has been problematic for newspapers. In 2011, an online advertisement brought in only 10–20% of the funds brought in by an identical print ad.^[3] Paywall revenue has failed to support any related business models.^[3] Paywalls may be trivially bypassed. Most news coverage of the use of paywalls analyzes them from the perspective of commercial success, whether through increasing revenue by increasing print subscriptions or solely through paywall revenue. However, as a solely profit-driven device, the use of a paywall also brings up questions of media ethics pertaining to accessible democratic news coverage.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

Social Media ex Wiki
Social media are computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks. The variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available introduces challenges of definition; however, there are some common features:^[1]

1. Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.^[1][2]
2. User-generated content, such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions, are the lifeblood of social media.^[1][2]
3. Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.^[1][3]
4. Social media facilitate the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.^[1][3]

Users typically access social media services via web-based technologies on desktop computers, and laptops, or download services that offer social media functionality to their mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablet computers). When engaging with these services, users can create highly interactive platforms through which individuals, communities and organizations can share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content or pre-made content posted online. They introduce substantial and pervasive changes to communication between businesses, organizations, communities and individuals.^[4] Social media changes the way individuals and large organizations communicate. These changes are the focus of the emerging field of technoself studies. Social media differ from paper-based media (e.g., magazines and newspapers) or traditional electronic media such as TV broadcasting in many ways, including quality,^[5] reach, frequency, interactivity, usability, immediacy, and permanence. Social media operate in a dialogic transmission system (many sources to many receivers).^[6] This is in contrast to traditional media which operates under a monologic transmission model (one source to many receivers), such as a paper newspaper which is delivered to many subscribers or a radio station which broadcasts the same programs to an entire city. Some of the most popular social media websites are Baidu Tieba, Facebook (and its associated Facebook Messenger), Gab, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, Tumblr, Twitter, Viber, VK, WeChat, Weibo, WhatsApp, Wikia, and YouTube. These social media websites have more than 100,000,000 registered users.

In America, a survey reported that 84 percent of adolescents in America have a Facebook account.^[7] Over 60% of 13 to 17-year-olds have at least one profile on social media, with many spending more than two hours a day on social networking sites.^[8] According to Nielsen, Internet users continue to spend more time on social media sites than on any other type of site. At the same time, the total time spent on social media sites in the U.S. across PCs as well as on mobile devices increased by 99 percent to 121 billion minutes in July 2012 compared to 66 billion minutes in July 2011.^[9] For content contributors, the benefits of participating in social media have gone beyond simply social sharing to building a reputation and bringing in career opportunities and monetary income.^[10]

Observers have noted a range of positive and negative impacts of social media use. Social media can help to improve individuals' sense of connectedness with real or online communities and social media can be an effective communication (or marketing) tool for corporations, entrepreneurs, nonprofit organizations, including advocacy groups and political parties and governments. At the same time, concerns have been raised about possible links between heavy social media use and depression, and even the issues of cyberbullying, online harassment and "trolling". Currently, about half of young adults have been cyberbullied and of those, 20 percent said that they have been cyberbullied regularly.^[11] Another survey was carried out among 7th grade students in America which is known as the Precaution Process Adoption Model. According to this study, 69 percent of 7th grade students claim to have experienced cyberbullying and they also said that it is worse than face to face bullying.^[12]............... 

Most popular services
This is a list of the leading social networks based on number of active user accounts as of August 2017.

1. Facebook: 2,047,000,000 users
2. YouTube: 1,500,000,000 users
3. WhatsApp: 1,200,000,000 users
4. Facebook Messenger: 1,200,000,000 users
5. WeChat: 938,000,000 users
6. QQ: 861,000,000 users
7. Instagram: 700,000,000 users
8. QZone: 638,000,000 users
9. Tumblr: 357,000,000 users
10. Twitter: 328,000,000 users
11. Sina Weibo: 313,000,000 users
12. Baidu Tieba: 300,000,000 users
13. Skype: 300,000,000 users
14. Viber: 260,000,000 users
15. Snapchat: 255,000,000 users
16. Line: 214,000,000 users
17. Pinterest 175,000,000 users