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How Some Parents Changed Their Politics in the Pandemic - The New York Times
In interviews, 27 parents who called themselves anti-vaccine and anti-mask voters described strikingly similar paths to their new views. They said they had experienced alarm about their children during pandemic quarantines. They pushed to reopen schools and craved normalcy. They became angry, blaming lawmakers for the disruption to their children’s lives.
Many congregated in Facebook groups that initially focused on advocating in-person schooling. Those groups soon latched onto other issues, such as anti-mask and anti-vaccine messaging. While some parents left the online groups when schools reopened, others took more extreme positions over time, burrowing into private anti-vaccine channels on messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.
Eventually, some began questioning vaccines for measles and other diseases, where inoculations have long been proven effective. Activists who oppose all vaccines further enticed them by joining online parent groups and posting inaccurate medical studies and falsehoods.
How Some Parents Changed Their Politics in the Pandemic - The New York Times
Ms. Longnecker and her fellow objectors are part of a potentially destabilizing new movement: parents who joined the anti-vaccine and anti-mask cause during the pandemic, narrowing their political beliefs to a single-minded obsession over those issues. Their thinking hardened even as Covid-19 restrictions and mandates were eased and lifted, cementing in some cases into a skepticism of all vaccines.
Nearly half of Americans oppose masking and a similar share is against vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, polls show. But what is obscured in those numbers is the intensity with which some parents have embraced these views. While they once described themselves as Republicans or Democrats, they now identify as independents who plan to vote based solely on vaccine policies.
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - The Atlantic
The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension. […]The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.
Wall Street’s Lack of Big Tech Skepticism Is Why It Got Meta Earnings So Wrong - Bloomberg
While analysts who advised clients to buy Meta ahead of its 26% plunge could be in for some tough conversations, data compiled by Bloomberg show that the two in Europe who recommended selling shares have been saying so since 2015 and 2019, respectively—so the calls may not have been that useful to their clients. Even after the post-earnings plunge, shares are up about 190% since the beginning of 2015.
BMJ fights back against Facebook fact-checkers - The Post
Despite being fully evidenced and error-free, Lead Stories, a company that conducts around half of all fact-checking on Facebook, said the article was “missing context” and stated that a whistle-blower at the heart of the investigation failed to “express unreserved support for covid vaccines”. The fact-checking company later commented that it was concerned about who was sharing the article online. In other words, the documentation of research and investigation in some areas is not permitted if it risks causing the infantilised public to stray from their designated path.
Matt Taibbi’s TK News Joins the List of Media Outlets Alarmed at Facebook Censorship
Then I went to the “fact check,” and it was just insane. It looked like it’d been written by high school students. It describes the British Medical Journal as a “blog.” I was joking with my editors about how they work. They pick some proposition out of the blue and then they debunk it, and it’s like, “Aha, win!” Bullshit. It’s like, “Did the BMJ prove that the vaccine kills Martians? No! Fact check: wrong.” And you’re thinking, “Wait, what?”
Here’s what they do. They’re not fact checking facts. What they’re doing is checking narratives. They can’t say that your facts are wrong, so it’s like, “Aha, there’s no context.” Or, “It’s misleading.” But that’s not a fact check. You just don’t like the story.
How Big Pharma Finds Sick Users on Facebook – The Markup
Ads for Latuda, an antipsychotic from the company Sunovion used in the treatment of bipolar depression, were shown to users with an interest in the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, a nonprofit support group. We also found it targeted at users interested in therapy and the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
The 61-Year-Old Queen of Quarantine Karaoke Won’t Stop Singing From Her Living Room – Texas Monthly
If I’m going to be really honest, if it weren’t for Quarantine Karaoke, I don’t think I would be here. I was just so upset, just so depressed, it felt like there was nothing to live for. I actually went on to Quarantine Karaoke to leave a legacy of music for my kids and grandkids. I thought if I put some songs on there, they could always go back and look at them, because medically or mentally, I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d be around.
I have to give credit to all those Quarantine Karaoke people. I don’t know what it was—maybe the music, or people’s responses. There was just love from everywhere. It changed my life completely.
Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine - The Atlantic
Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, targeted harassment, terrorist recruitment, emotional manipulation, and genocide—a world-historic weapon that lives not underground, but in a Disneyland-inspired campus in Menlo Park, California.
Gilead, LGBTQ community ask Facebook to remove misleading PrEP ads | FiercePharma
More than 50 organizations involved with LGBTQ advocacy, public health and HIV/AIDS prevention have co-signed a letter to Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking him to take down “dangerous and misleading” ads on Facebook and Instagram. By not doing anything, the social media companies are harming public health, the groups contend.
Gilead, which makes HIV prevention drugs Truvada and Descovy, agrees with the effort and applauds the organizations standing up for their communities, it said. “We join calls to have any misleading advertisements related to Gilead’s HIV medications removed from Facebook," it added in a statement.
Facebook posts better at predicting diabetes, mental health than demographic info -- ScienceDaily
For example, "drink" and "bottle" were shown to be more predictive of alcohol abuse. However, others weren't as easy. For example, the people that most often mentioned religious language like "God" or "pray" in their posts were 15 times more likely to have diabetes than those who used these terms the least. Additionally, words expressing hostility -- like "dumb" and some expletives -- served as indicators of drug abuse and psychoses.
Facebook posts better at predicting diabetes, mental health than demographic info -- ScienceDaily
Using an automated data collection technique, the researchers analyzed the entire Facebook post history of nearly 1,000 patients who agreed to have their electronic medical record data linked to their profiles. The researchers then built three models to analyze their predictive power for the patients: one model only analyzing the Facebook post language, another that used demographics such as age and sex, and the last that combined the two datasets.
Looking into 21 different conditions, researchers found that all 21were predictable from Facebook alone. In fact, 10 of the conditions were better predicted through the use Facebook data instead of demographic information.
Facebook’s cardiologist on social media's role in health research
But at a high level, he said, “I can tell you what we do — which is really focus on public health evidence-base-driven interventions and analyses.”
Facebook has a relatively flat organizational structure, he said, and there are a number of different people across the company working on different aspects of health. Abnousi, for example, isn’t closely involved in the work to crack down on vaccine misinformation, he said.
Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website | News | The Harvard Crimson
But Director of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis ’98 said that the creation of a Harvard facebook was not as far off as Zuckerberg predicted.
“There is a project internally with computer services to create a facebook,” Davis said. “We’ve been in touch with the Undergraduate Council, and this is a very high priority for the College. We have every intention of completing the facebook by the end of the spring semester.”
These are the Facebook posts Russia used to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign – ThinkProgress
Because where pro-Trump and anti-Clinton material have dominated the accounts that have thus far come to light, a key theme emerges throughout: The Russian operations also targeted the cultural schisms and tensions coursing through the U.S., muddying messages and exacerbating tensions to the point of nearly breaking.
I Helped Create Facebook's Ad Machine. Here's How I'd Fix It | WIRED
But modern digital advertisers constantly tweak and experiment with ads. When big brands requested the ability to post lots of different creative, it posed a real problem. Brands wanted to show a dozen different ad variations every day, but they didn’t want to pollute their page (where all posts necessarily appear). ‘Dark posts’ were a way to shoehorn that advertiser requirement into the Pages system, allowing brands to create as many special, unseen posts as they’d like, which would only be seen by targeted audiences in their Feeds, and not to random passers-by on their page. The unfortunate term ‘dark post’ assumed a sinister air this past election, as it was assumed that these shady foreign elements, or just certain presidential candidates, were showing very different messages to different people, engaging in a cynical and hypocritical politicking.
Zuckerberg’s proposes, shockingly, a solution that involves total transparency. Per his video, Facebook pages will now show each and every post, including dark ones (!), that they’ve published in whatever form, either organic or paid. It’s not entirely clear if Zuckerberg intends this for any type of ad or just those from political campaigns, but it’s mindboggling either way. Given how Facebook currently works, it would mean that a visitor to a candidate’s page—the Trump campaign, for instance, once ran 175,000 variations on its ads in a single day—would see an almost endless series of similar content.
I Helped Create Facebook's Ad Machine. Here's How I'd Fix It | WIRED
To prevent rogue advertisers, Facebook will monitor all ad creative for political content. That sounds harder than it is. Take alcohol advertising, for example, which nearly every country in the world regulated heavily. Right now, Facebook screens every piece of ad creative for anything alcohol-related. Once flagged, that content goes into a separate screening workflow with all the varied international rules that govern alcohol ads (e.g. nothing in Saudi Arabia, nothing targeted to minors in the US, etc.).
Political content would fall into a similar dragnet and be triaged accordingly. As it does now, Facebook would block violating ad accounts, and could use account meta-data like IP address or payment details to prevent that advertiser from merely creating another account. It would be a perpetual arms race, but one Facebook is well-equipped to win, or at least keep as a stalemate. Zuckerberg’s video shows commitment to waging that war.
I Helped Create Facebook's Ad Machine. Here's How I'd Fix It | WIRED
Code-named KITTEN, it ingested all manner of user data—Likes, posts, Newsfeed shares—and disgorged that meal as a large set of targetable "keywords" that advertisers would choose from, and which presumably marked some user affinity for that thing (e.g. "golf," "BMW," and definitely nothing about burning humans).
Free content at Facebook
A neutral observer might wonder if Facebook’s attitude to content creators is sustainable. Facebook needs content, obviously, because that’s what the site consists of: content that other people have created. It’s just that it isn’t too keen on anyone apart from Facebook making any money from that content. Over time, that attitude is profoundly destructive to the creative and media industries. Access to an audience – that unprecedented two billion people – is a wonderful thing, but Facebook isn’t in any hurry to help you make money from it. If the content providers all eventually go broke, well, that might not be too much of a problem. There are, for now, lots of willing providers: anyone on Facebook is in a sense working for Facebook, adding value to the company. In 2014, the New York Times did the arithmetic and found that humanity was spending 39,757 collective years on the site, every single day. Jonathan Taplin points out that this is ‘almost fifteen million years of free labour per year’. That was back when it had a mere 1.23 billion users
Fire Writers, Make Videos Latest Web Recipe for Publishers | Digital - AdAge
Mic, a website aimed at millennials, used to employ 40 writers and editors producing articles on topics like "celebrating beauty" and "strong women." Ten were let go this month, with most in the revamped newsroom of 63 now focused on making videos for places like Facebook.
Critics have called such moves "100 percent cynical" and out of sync with audience demand. Yet Americans are watching more video snippets online, either because they secretly like them or because they're getting harder to avoid. The growing audience for video, more valuable to advertisers than the space next to words, is causing websites to shift resources in what's become known across the industry as the pivot to video.
Ad targetting at Facebook
occasionally, if used very cleverly, with lots of machine-learning iteration and systematic trial-and-error, the canny marketer can find just the right admixture of age, geography, time of day, and music or film tastes that demarcate a demographic winner of an audience.
Variations in Facebook Posting Patterns Across Validated Patient Health Conditions: A Prospective Cohort Study. - PubMed - NCBI
Significantly correlated language topics among participants with the highest quartile of posts contained health terms, such as "cough," "headaches," and "insomnia." When adjusted for demographics, individuals with a history of depression had significantly higher posts (mean 38, 95% CI 28-50) than individuals without a history of depression (mean 22, 95% CI 19-26, P=.001). Except for depression, across prevalent health outcomes in the sample (hypertension, diabetes, asthma), there were no significant posting differences between individuals with or without each condition.
Two years after buying Elite Daily, the Daily Mail says the Facebook publisher is worthless - Recode
The owner of the Daily Mail, the publisher that bought Elite Daily in January 2015, says the New York-based startup has been a bust, and has written down all of its investment in the money-losing company, citing “poor performance.” It is taking a $31 million loss in the process. […] “audience retention and revenue growth have been disappointing and losses have exceeded expectations,” leading to the write-off.
Mike Butcher thinks Facebook is fried
Extremely close to giving up on Facebook as a place where any kind of rational debate can happen. That sounds extreme. Let me explain my thinking.
The early days of Twitter were pretty good but that's all done now, and the limitation of 140 characters says it all. It's also full to the brim with trolls (as I found during the Referendum). Is use it as a way to announce things. It's very tough to have much of a debate on.
Facebook allows for longer pieces but I've seen simple posts descend into multiple sub-threads of arguments. The trigger is now too easily pulled and I'm as guilty as anyone, because the medium is just too easy to hit post on.
The 'original' social media was blogging. Someone would write a post which would appear in an RSS feed. Maybe there might be the ability to comment. But before comment platforms you had to reply with your own blog post, which would ping the original you were replying to. "Blog fights" like this would continue over days, perhaps weeks. The responses detailed and closely argued. The slowness afforded real thinking.
Perhaps Medium is gradually getting there - at least you can follow people and read longer pieces which follow an argument. I may use their app more, come to think of it. When Ev created Medium I thought he was crazy. Now I'm starting to see the potential.
As for myself I'm going to check myself from here on to TRY and reply in a slower, better thought out manner. I may save a post and reply when I'm on a desktop instead of trying to reply on a mobile which makes you want to get it out quickly and not think too hard.
We live in very strange times now, and we (and I include myself) need to tack back towards rationality, civility and a kind of 'slow thinking' our ancestors possessed but which modernity has lost touch with.
Facebook adjusts News Feed to favor friends and family over publishers | The Verge
The technical change this time around is that Facebook will favor links shared by your friends and family over links that publishers place directly into the News Feed through their pages. The Verge will share this post on its Facebook page, but that will matter less than if large numbers of people paste this link into a new post on Facebook to share it with their friends directly.
Facebook's director of product design says you'll spend most of your life in 7 apps
You're going to spend a high percentage of time in seven applications — which seven is different for every person. Globally, Facebook is going to have a very high likelihood of being one of those seven, along with Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and others.
