<3 <3 <3 Me too! It’s one of my favorites. It has a special feel. Lee says when it cam through it felt very ancient to him but he couldn’t quite remember exactly where from.
On December 4th, 2009, Google’s corporate blog announced with no fanfare and more or less hidden in other text: “Personalized search for everyone.” And the game changed. Almost everyone uses Google as a search engine for information. But ‘personalized search for everyone’ meant that if you are a registered Democrat in New York City and a Texan Republican and you both googled Climate Change, you would get two completely diametrically opposing sets of information. Once that happened everyone followed suit. Pandora’s Box was opened. ‘A squirrel dying in your backyard may be more relevant to you than people starving in Africa.’ Mark Zuckerberg Facebook
Eli Pariser explains: ‘More and more your computer monitor is a kind of one way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click. Websites we visit are tailoring themselves to us. The race to collect as much personal data as possible is now the defining battle for today’s Internet giants. As a result, we each live in our own unique information universe. The personalisation that’s taking place in every major website limits what we’ll be exposed to in the future, leaving less room for creativity, innovation, independent thought, and the democratic exchange of ideas.’
CONFIRMATION BIAS: On websites that we use on a daily basis, such as Youtube, an algorithm determines what it thinks you ‘like’ and feeds you more and more of the same information or ‘biased’ accounts of political, social, and cultural issues. Eventually as your website determines what it thinks you ‘like’, what you ‘like’ becomes what you ‘believe’. If you’re into conspiracy theories, you’re going to be fed an endless supply of videos ‘confirming’ what you already have a tendency to believe . As humans, we have a propensity to pay attention to and a tendency to be attracted to other voices or ideas that ‘confirm’ what we already believe. This is called confirmation bias. We are more inclined to believe opinions that agree with our own. This is insidious enough on its own, but when you add a digitally- manufactured algorithm selecting what information you’re being fed, this only compounds this tendency to have slanted and one-sided opinions and viewpoints.
It is difficult to navigate the world when there are no shared ‘facts’, when actually your personal devices are only feeding what you already have a tendency to believe. A logarithm is very efficient at determining your belief system, and then giving you your daily dose of ‘confirmation bias’. We have always assumed that search engines are unbiased. Chris Palmer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes, “You’re given a free service and the cost is information about you. And Google and Facebook translate that directly into money. On Gmail we pour the most intimate details of our lives.”
As a business strategy, the Internet giants formula is simple. The more personally relevant their info offerings are, the more ads they can sell, and the more likely you are to buy products advertisers are offering. Amazon sells billions of dollars in merchandise by predicting what each customer is interested in and by putting it in front of the virtual store.
However, the ‘filter bubble’ phenomena does much more than simply sell you on material goods as Politically motivated special interest groups pay Facebook and other Internet Giants to spread ‘fake news’ and propaganda to influence the way people think and ultimately vote. Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another’s point of view, but instead we are more and more insulated; enclosed in our own egocentric filter bubbles. Healthy democracy needs reliance on shared facts (remember those!); instead we’re being offered parallel but separate universes.’ Eli Pariser
Our culture encourages us to get ahead at any cost and grab what we can while without any concern for fundamental values. And yet we consume, we use our credit cards, our house mortgages to consume. Seriously, we don’t know that we want something until someone makes it, shows it to us, and then convinces us that we need it.
And once something is out there on the market, there is no better determinant than who will buy it, than algorithms. A computer is much better than a human at triggering Pavlov’s dog syndrome; far exceeding the wildest dreams of ad executives and marketing departments. In fact, the whole economic model is not to find out what people need and/or want, but to create something totally new and then convince them that they have to have it. Not only are we told what we need to have in terms of material goods, but also what our belief systems are: who we need to fear, to hate, which political party to support, and which God we need to believe in.
Yuval Noah Harari, author of the best-selling books Homo Sapiens and Twenty-First Lessons (over 50 million copies in 40 languages) has a new book out called Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. He is being interviewed by everyone on YouTube and he articulates better than I how much Social Networks pose a threat to democracies world-wide.
A MENTAL HEALTH EMERGENCY
The self-reported average social media among adolescents is 4.8 hours a day! Most would call that an addiction. Kids are spending five hours a day staring at a screen rather than riding a bike, reading a book, or talking to another person.
Well now The U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy is calling for warning labels for social media apps, believing they are the most powerful tool available to combat what he calls a health crisis. In an opinion piece in The New York Times, Dr. Murthy urged Congress to develop health and safety measures for social media platforms .He believes that the mental health crises among young Americans is an ‘emergency’ and social media is a big reason why. He is calling for warning labels which first appeared on cigarettes in 1965. ‘There is no seat-belt for parents to snap in place, no assurance from trusted experts that these platforms have been investigated and deemed safe for our kids. There are just parents and their children trying to figure it out on their own, pitted against some of the best product engineers and most well-resourced companies in the world. Social media addiction is no accident. It is the direct result of complex algorithms, designed to keep you and your children scrolling.’
Add to that a toxic mix of anonymous bullying, unscrupulous trolls and disinformation and it is no wonder the risk of anxiety and depression and suicidal ideation increases by some studies as high as 50 percent among young people. GEN Z gets their news from social media. The BBC found that in a recent election in the UK ,young voters were targeted on social media with fake AI -generated videos replete with misinformation. So with the American election looming on the horizon every Tom, Dick, Harry, Vladimir, Musk, and Chat GPT will be kept busy feeding you misinformation. Make no mistake about that!
Almost one in four middle and high school students have experienced cyberbullying in a 30 day period. Cyberbullying victims of middle school age are twice as likely to attempt suicide as non-victims. Eighty percent of Americans think that social media companies don’t do a good job addressing cyberbullying and want more laws and safeguards to deal with the problem. Social media has also become a dark place for young children, causing them to worry about body image. It’s a huge issue for young and developing minds. Poor body image can lead to eating disorders, which are serious illnesses. Congress would have to approve warning labels and more likely than the next president may be the biggest cyberbully of all time.
Courtesy of Dan Rather and Team SteadyThank-you so much.
THOSE WHO DARE TO FASHION THE WORLD IN THEIR OWN VISION
While Trump was still in court charged with 34 Counts of felony, Elon Musk held a gathering of the clans: That pantheon of truth Rupert Murdoch and founder and owner of Fox News, Voldemort, the Antichrist, Peter Thiel, Attila the Hun, Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, a few five star generals from the Pentagon, that old belle of the South, Lindsey Graham, Genghis Khan, Jeff Bezos, Ted Cruz, Sauron and out of sheer boredom Satan: a cornucopia of Robber Barons to discuss the possibility of Musk who fancied himself in the role of controlling economic policy in a new Republican Administration. A move akin to having the fox guard the chicken coup.
I do feel bad for Satan. We have left him with nothing more to do. Like truth and values he is simply obsolete, redundant, and by all accounts having an existential crisis.
ELON MUSK HAS GAINED A CONCERNING LEVEL OF POWER OVER US NATIONAL SECURITY
(Robert Reich from ‘The Guardian’ September 26, 2024)
Elon Musk's SpaceX has nearly total control of the world’s satellite internet through its Star link unit. With little regulation or oversight, Musk has already put more than 4,500 Star link satellites into orbit around the globe. He plans to have as many as 42,000 satellites in orbit in the coming year. SpaceX and its Star link system have become strategically critical to the American military. Starlink is providing connectivity to the U.S. Navy. The US space force signed a 70 million USD contract with SpaceX late last year for military-grade-low-Earth- orbit satellites capabilities. According to Reuters, the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees US spy satellites, has a 1.8 billion USD contract with SpaceX.
This gives Musk, the richest person in the world, remarkable power. Single-handedly, he can decide to shut a country’s access to Star link and the internet. He can also gain access to sensitive information garnered by Star link.
Conflicts of interest between Musk’s ventures around the world and US national security abound and they are multiplying. When Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine Star link provided Ukraine with internet access, enabling the country to plan attacks and defend itself. But in the fall of 2022, when Ukraine entered territory contested by Russia, Musk and SpaceX abruptly severed the connectivity.
US foreign policy experts also worry about the conflicts of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (X), given his business relationships and communications with China which has used X for disinformation campaigns. Some are concerned that China may have leverage over Musk due to his giant Tesla factory in Shanghai, which accounts for over half of Tesla’s global deliveries and the bulk of its profits, and the battery factory he’s building there.
Most of these concerns, by the way, came before Musk reactivated the accounts of conspiracy theorists and white nationalists on X and began pushing his own rightwing narrative on the platform, and before he announced his support for Trump in the upcoming election. Elon Musk poses a clear and present danger to American national security. The sooner the US government revokes his security clearance, terminates its contracts with him and the entities he controls, and builds its own alternative to Star link And Space X, the safer America will be. (Source: Robert Reich from the Guardian Magazine Sept 26, 2024)
Ooh, I like the Lee Harris affirmation too!!!
<3 <3 <3 Me too! It’s one of my favorites. It has a special feel. Lee says when it cam through it felt very ancient to him but he couldn’t quite remember exactly where from.
Oh that's cool. It does have an ancient ring.
ELI PARISER: THE FILTER BUBBLE:
On December 4th, 2009, Google’s corporate blog announced with no fanfare and more or less hidden in other text: “Personalized search for everyone.” And the game changed. Almost everyone uses Google as a search engine for information. But ‘personalized search for everyone’ meant that if you are a registered Democrat in New York City and a Texan Republican and you both googled Climate Change, you would get two completely diametrically opposing sets of information. Once that happened everyone followed suit. Pandora’s Box was opened. ‘A squirrel dying in your backyard may be more relevant to you than people starving in Africa.’ Mark Zuckerberg Facebook
=============================================================================
Eli Pariser explains: ‘More and more your computer monitor is a kind of one way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click. Websites we visit are tailoring themselves to us. The race to collect as much personal data as possible is now the defining battle for today’s Internet giants. As a result, we each live in our own unique information universe. The personalisation that’s taking place in every major website limits what we’ll be exposed to in the future, leaving less room for creativity, innovation, independent thought, and the democratic exchange of ideas.’
CONFIRMATION BIAS: On websites that we use on a daily basis, such as Youtube, an algorithm determines what it thinks you ‘like’ and feeds you more and more of the same information or ‘biased’ accounts of political, social, and cultural issues. Eventually as your website determines what it thinks you ‘like’, what you ‘like’ becomes what you ‘believe’. If you’re into conspiracy theories, you’re going to be fed an endless supply of videos ‘confirming’ what you already have a tendency to believe . As humans, we have a propensity to pay attention to and a tendency to be attracted to other voices or ideas that ‘confirm’ what we already believe. This is called confirmation bias. We are more inclined to believe opinions that agree with our own. This is insidious enough on its own, but when you add a digitally- manufactured algorithm selecting what information you’re being fed, this only compounds this tendency to have slanted and one-sided opinions and viewpoints.
=============================================================================
It is difficult to navigate the world when there are no shared ‘facts’, when actually your personal devices are only feeding what you already have a tendency to believe. A logarithm is very efficient at determining your belief system, and then giving you your daily dose of ‘confirmation bias’. We have always assumed that search engines are unbiased. Chris Palmer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes, “You’re given a free service and the cost is information about you. And Google and Facebook translate that directly into money. On Gmail we pour the most intimate details of our lives.”
As a business strategy, the Internet giants formula is simple. The more personally relevant their info offerings are, the more ads they can sell, and the more likely you are to buy products advertisers are offering. Amazon sells billions of dollars in merchandise by predicting what each customer is interested in and by putting it in front of the virtual store.
============================================================================
However, the ‘filter bubble’ phenomena does much more than simply sell you on material goods as Politically motivated special interest groups pay Facebook and other Internet Giants to spread ‘fake news’ and propaganda to influence the way people think and ultimately vote. Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another’s point of view, but instead we are more and more insulated; enclosed in our own egocentric filter bubbles. Healthy democracy needs reliance on shared facts (remember those!); instead we’re being offered parallel but separate universes.’ Eli Pariser
Our culture encourages us to get ahead at any cost and grab what we can while without any concern for fundamental values. And yet we consume, we use our credit cards, our house mortgages to consume. Seriously, we don’t know that we want something until someone makes it, shows it to us, and then convinces us that we need it.
And once something is out there on the market, there is no better determinant than who will buy it, than algorithms. A computer is much better than a human at triggering Pavlov’s dog syndrome; far exceeding the wildest dreams of ad executives and marketing departments. In fact, the whole economic model is not to find out what people need and/or want, but to create something totally new and then convince them that they have to have it. Not only are we told what we need to have in terms of material goods, but also what our belief systems are: who we need to fear, to hate, which political party to support, and which God we need to believe in.
Yuval Noah Harari, author of the best-selling books Homo Sapiens and Twenty-First Lessons (over 50 million copies in 40 languages) has a new book out called Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. He is being interviewed by everyone on YouTube and he articulates better than I how much Social Networks pose a threat to democracies world-wide.
A MENTAL HEALTH EMERGENCY
The self-reported average social media among adolescents is 4.8 hours a day! Most would call that an addiction. Kids are spending five hours a day staring at a screen rather than riding a bike, reading a book, or talking to another person.
Well now The U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy is calling for warning labels for social media apps, believing they are the most powerful tool available to combat what he calls a health crisis. In an opinion piece in The New York Times, Dr. Murthy urged Congress to develop health and safety measures for social media platforms .He believes that the mental health crises among young Americans is an ‘emergency’ and social media is a big reason why. He is calling for warning labels which first appeared on cigarettes in 1965. ‘There is no seat-belt for parents to snap in place, no assurance from trusted experts that these platforms have been investigated and deemed safe for our kids. There are just parents and their children trying to figure it out on their own, pitted against some of the best product engineers and most well-resourced companies in the world. Social media addiction is no accident. It is the direct result of complex algorithms, designed to keep you and your children scrolling.’
Add to that a toxic mix of anonymous bullying, unscrupulous trolls and disinformation and it is no wonder the risk of anxiety and depression and suicidal ideation increases by some studies as high as 50 percent among young people. GEN Z gets their news from social media. The BBC found that in a recent election in the UK ,young voters were targeted on social media with fake AI -generated videos replete with misinformation. So with the American election looming on the horizon every Tom, Dick, Harry, Vladimir, Musk, and Chat GPT will be kept busy feeding you misinformation. Make no mistake about that!
Almost one in four middle and high school students have experienced cyberbullying in a 30 day period. Cyberbullying victims of middle school age are twice as likely to attempt suicide as non-victims. Eighty percent of Americans think that social media companies don’t do a good job addressing cyberbullying and want more laws and safeguards to deal with the problem. Social media has also become a dark place for young children, causing them to worry about body image. It’s a huge issue for young and developing minds. Poor body image can lead to eating disorders, which are serious illnesses. Congress would have to approve warning labels and more likely than the next president may be the biggest cyberbully of all time.
Courtesy of Dan Rather and Team SteadyThank-you so much.
THOSE WHO DARE TO FASHION THE WORLD IN THEIR OWN VISION
While Trump was still in court charged with 34 Counts of felony, Elon Musk held a gathering of the clans: That pantheon of truth Rupert Murdoch and founder and owner of Fox News, Voldemort, the Antichrist, Peter Thiel, Attila the Hun, Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, a few five star generals from the Pentagon, that old belle of the South, Lindsey Graham, Genghis Khan, Jeff Bezos, Ted Cruz, Sauron and out of sheer boredom Satan: a cornucopia of Robber Barons to discuss the possibility of Musk who fancied himself in the role of controlling economic policy in a new Republican Administration. A move akin to having the fox guard the chicken coup.
I do feel bad for Satan. We have left him with nothing more to do. Like truth and values he is simply obsolete, redundant, and by all accounts having an existential crisis.
ELON MUSK HAS GAINED A CONCERNING LEVEL OF POWER OVER US NATIONAL SECURITY
(Robert Reich from ‘The Guardian’ September 26, 2024)
Elon Musk's SpaceX has nearly total control of the world’s satellite internet through its Star link unit. With little regulation or oversight, Musk has already put more than 4,500 Star link satellites into orbit around the globe. He plans to have as many as 42,000 satellites in orbit in the coming year. SpaceX and its Star link system have become strategically critical to the American military. Starlink is providing connectivity to the U.S. Navy. The US space force signed a 70 million USD contract with SpaceX late last year for military-grade-low-Earth- orbit satellites capabilities. According to Reuters, the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees US spy satellites, has a 1.8 billion USD contract with SpaceX.
==============================================================
This gives Musk, the richest person in the world, remarkable power. Single-handedly, he can decide to shut a country’s access to Star link and the internet. He can also gain access to sensitive information garnered by Star link.
============================================================================
Conflicts of interest between Musk’s ventures around the world and US national security abound and they are multiplying. When Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine Star link provided Ukraine with internet access, enabling the country to plan attacks and defend itself. But in the fall of 2022, when Ukraine entered territory contested by Russia, Musk and SpaceX abruptly severed the connectivity.
=====================================================================
US foreign policy experts also worry about the conflicts of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (X), given his business relationships and communications with China which has used X for disinformation campaigns. Some are concerned that China may have leverage over Musk due to his giant Tesla factory in Shanghai, which accounts for over half of Tesla’s global deliveries and the bulk of its profits, and the battery factory he’s building there.
==========================================================================
Most of these concerns, by the way, came before Musk reactivated the accounts of conspiracy theorists and white nationalists on X and began pushing his own rightwing narrative on the platform, and before he announced his support for Trump in the upcoming election. Elon Musk poses a clear and present danger to American national security. The sooner the US government revokes his security clearance, terminates its contracts with him and the entities he controls, and builds its own alternative to Star link And Space X, the safer America will be. (Source: Robert Reich from the Guardian Magazine Sept 26, 2024)