Yes, Democrats

 

Maybe they could do both?

National TV is mainly for their own image.  Local TV is for the citizenry's benefit. 

Also...

Traditional Dems are living in the past when both parties played by the same, mostly respectable rules.

Parler

Where Republicans can be their racist selves.

A group of Republican lawmakers and allies of President Trump are joining Parler, a social media app that bills itself as an "unbiased" alternative to platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and urging their followers to do the same.

[...]

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) have also shared tweets about their move to Parler.

[...]

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) became the latest prominent Republican to announce the move on Thursday, saying in a video shared on Twitter and YouTube that he was "proud" to join a platform that "gets what free speech is all about."

[...]

In a tweet shared Wednesday, the same day a judge ruled Nunes could not sue Twitter over content posted by its users, the congressman described Twitter as "hell" and said, "Parler is open for business!"

  The Hill

That's rich. Nunes wants to go to a platform that allows "free speech" because he's not allowed to sue another platform over someone else's speech.

Now they have their own TV network (OAN) and their own social media platform for their alternate reality. All these jackasses who call liberals snowflakes can live in their own echo chamber and inhale each other's toxic rants.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Who knew?

Very interesting.

“I was driving through the region and noticed the same campaign was using a different font on signs in rural areas than on the signs in town,” said Haenschen, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication. “I thought, why would this candidate be using multiple fonts?”

[...]

Haenschen and Tamul reached the following key conclusions through the study:

Individuals perceive fonts to have liberal or conservative leanings.

The more people view a font as aligned with their ideology, the more they favor it.

Fonts that fall under the serif category — ones festooned with a small line or stroke — are viewed as more conservative than fonts in the sans serif group, though differences exist within font families.

[...]

“When you’re choosing a candidate’s visual identity, you need to consider how people perceive that font.”

  Neuroscience News

I would have never imagined that fonts carry political bias. The only thing I can say after being told that people perceive them that way is that sans serif fonts are more recent, newer fonts in print.

A total of 987 survey participants read the phrase “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” presented in each typeface style, and two typefaces representing the serif and sans serif categories: Times New Roman and Gill Sans.

The respondents then rated the typeface as liberal or conservative, and answered several demographic measures related to their political ideology, party affiliation, age, gender, and race.

During the second experiment, Haenschen and Tamul used a wider range of typefaces, including multiple typefaces within the same font family.

[...]

Furthermore, partisanship moderates subjects’ perceptions of typefaces: Republicans generally view typefaces as more conservative than Independents and Democrats.

I suppose that makes sense in that Republicans tend to be more tight-laced and restrictive, seeing everything in the world as defined, black or white. It might follow that they have a lens through which they see everything, and that lens is whether it fits their view of the world or not.

Results broaden our understanding of how meaning is conveyed in political communication, laying the groundwork for future research into the functions of typography and graphic design in contemporary political campaigns.

Original Research: Open access
“What’s in a Font?: Ideological Perceptions of Typograph”.
Katherine Haenschen and Daniel J. Tamul.
Communication Studies doi:10.1080/10510974.2019.1692884.

Another great idea

Let the military control information flow in this country.

Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel “large-scale, automated disinformation attacks,” as the top Republican in Congress blocks efforts to protect the integrity of elections.

  Yahoo

Are they working together?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio clips. If successful, the system after four years of trials may expand to detect malicious intent and prevent viral fake news from polarizing society.

Sure, sure. We can trust DARPA.

U.S. officials have been working on plans to prevent outside hackers from flooding social channels with false information ahead of the 2020 election. The drive has been hindered by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to consider election-security legislation. Critics have labeled him #MoscowMitch, saying he left the U.S. vulnerable to meddling by Russia, prompting his retort of “modern-day McCarthyism.”

President Donald Trump has repeatedly rejected allegations that dubious content on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google aided his election win.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What about Facebook?

"It isn't a media company internally," [says ex- FB ad manager Antonio García Martínez]. "It's a hacker company internally."

[...]

[B]y the beginning of 2018, Facebook began a sharp – and subtly frightening – turnaround. No longer denying its outsize media role, the company announced one initiative designed to create a trustworthiness measurement for news, and another to increase the content you get from close friends and family, presumably as opposed to evil (and possibly foreign) strangers.

The goal, said Facebook News Feed chief Adam Mosseri, was to "make sure the news people see, while less overall, is high-quality."

  Matt Taibbi

How on earth would increasing what you get from friends and family make sure the news you're getting is high quality? If you're a family of Trumpettes or Fox & Friends watchers, the possibility of you getting high quality news is now even less.

Now, he claims, Facebook is just trying to do the right thing. "We take our responsibilities seriously," he says, explaining the thinking behind the new initiatives. "In a world where the Internet exists, how can we make the world better?"

Not by narrowing down what people see to mostly what their family and friends share.

For Facebook to be both the cause of and the solution to so many informational ills, the design mechanism built into our democracy to prevent such problems – a free press – had to have been severely disabled well before we got here.

And it was. Long before 2016 had a chance to happen, the news media in the United States was effectively destroyed. For those of us in the business, the manner of conquest has been the most galling part. The CliffsNotes version? Facebook ate us [...] first by gutting our distribution networks, and then by using advanced data-mining techniques to create hypertargeted advertising with which no honest media outlet could compete. This wipeout of the press left Facebook in possession of power it neither wanted nor understood.

[...]

Facebook never wanted to be editor-in-chief of the universe, and the relatively vibrant free press that toppled the likes of McCarthy and Nixon never imagined it could be swallowed by a pet-meme distributor.

[...]

Facebook, which to this day seems at best to dimly understand how the news business works, [has maintained a] longstanding insistence that it's not a media company. Wired was even inspired to publish a sarcastic self-help quiz for Facebook execs on "How to tell if you're a media company." It included such questions as "Are you the country's largest source of news?"

The answer is a resounding yes. An astonishing 45 percent of Americans get their news from this single source.

Indeed, that is astonishing. How lazy are we? Memes and passed-around headlines are now news for 45% of us? Not just astonishing, but appalling and alarming.

And, speaking of alarming:

Facebook didn't just use its data to help advertisers place targeted ads. It also used AI-enhanced technology and tools like GPS to track users' information in order to learn more and more about them, all while constantly improving the reach and power of the company's advertising capabilities. In perhaps the creepiest example, Facebook applied for (and received, last year) a patent for a tool called Techniques, for emotion detection and content delivery. It would use the camera in your phone to take pictures of you as you scroll through content. Facebook would then use facial analysis to measure how much you did or did not like the content in question, so as to determine what kind of stuff to send your way. Ideas like this are what make Facebook, at times, feel like a giant blood-engorged tick hanging off your frontal lobe.

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Radioactive Jobs in the White House: Communications Dept.

Scott Jennings, a strident defender of the president on television and an ally of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, refused White House inquiries about taking a senior-level position in the communications department, two White House officials said. Richard Grenell, a Republican communications adviser, said he wasn’t interested in taking over the podium for news briefings, the White House officials said.

But the team’s biggest hurdle may be inside the Oval Office. Mr. Trump, who often says he is his own best adviser on politics and communications, frequently strays from the White House’s script and has fought attempts to tone down his Twitter persona, of which many top aides—and a majority of the American public—say they disapprove.

[...]

In an effort to impose message discipline, the communications shop orchestrated​ a series of “theme weeks,”​designed to focus both the president and his senior team on one core policy issue at a time. But the themes were often overtaken by the news of the day and legislation winding its way through Congress, and the president himself often veered off message.

  WSJ

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Get a New Phone

And stay off it.

Twitter to Go the Way of Facebook?

Disatrous idea.

Yesterday, as people panicked about Twitter’s plan to present tweets to users using algorithmic calculations of what that person might like, I wrote this:

What if humans started to experience time as an algorithm of the popular rather than lived narratively ordered experience?

Especially since I work from home and in flyover country, Twitter is very much a lived conversation for me. And if Twitter alters the way it appears to me — basically choosing who it thinks I want to talk to rather than what the serendipity of the unique collection of people I follow presents in time-ordered fashion — it will be fairly dramatically altering my lived reality.

  Empty Wheel

Yeah. That is just crap. It may be my biggest beef about Facebook. In fact, just the other day, after seeing for the umpteenth time Facebook's notification that I could have MORE stories if I had more friends, I wrote this:



Maybe there is an alien conspiracy to get us all to come unstuck in time. Or to wake up and see that in our waking time we're actually dreaming.

Or to create that...

So thought of as its almost most dystopian, Twitter wants to take the serendipitous global conversation we’ve been having and instead replace it with a living dream world chosen for us algorithmically.

But let me go one step more dystopian. As I noted yesterday, Google recently told the British Parliament that it is testing ways to show “positive” ad words and YouTubes when people look for hateful, potentially terrorist speech. Google’s announcement follows an earlier one from Facebook, stating it would do the same.

In other words, since the early January meeting in Silicon Valley, two of the big tech companies announced plans to rejigger their algorithms selectively for users the algos identify as expressing an interest in terrorism. For those interested in terrorism, Google and Facebook will create a waking dreamworld.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Presumably a Firing Offense

[An] accidental email went to organizers of the Asian Cup soccer tournament. It had the details of all top leaders that had attended the G-20 summit, an annual global policy meeting.

[...]

[T]he mistaken email exposed the personal details of 31 world leaders, including President Obama.

[...]

“[Redacted] failed to check that the autofill function in Microsoft Outlook had entered the correct person’s details into the email ‘To’ field,” the email continued. “This led to the email being sent to the wrong person.”

The exposed data included not only names and dates of birth, but passport numbers and visa details as well.

On Monday, White House deputy press secretary Eric Schultz told reporters the administration is “looking into [the reports], and we’ll take all appropriate steps necessary to ensure the privacy and security of the president’s personal information.”

  The Hill

A little late, would you say?

...but hey, it could happen to anyone, right [Redacted]?

Oh, for Fuck's Sake

The US Defense Department is conducting a counterterrorism program investigation of virtual currencies like Bitcoin and other new technologies, including smartphones and social media, to better understand if they pose security threats.

Run by the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office (CTTSO), a division of the Pentagon that analyzes terrorism and irregular warfare capabilities, the program recently ended its open call for vendors that could help the US military understand the technologies and any threats they could potentially pose, the International Business Times reported.

  RT

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Drip, Drip, Drip

The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents.

The untargeted collection and storage of SMS messages – including their contacts – is revealed in a joint investigation between the Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News based on material provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

[...]

An agency presentation from 2011 – subtitled “SMS Text Messages: A Goldmine to Exploit” – reveals the program collected an average of 194 million text messages a day in April of that year. In addition to storing the messages themselves, a further program known as “Prefer” conducted automated analysis on the untargeted communications.

The Prefer program uses automated text messages such as missed call alerts or texts sent with international roaming charges to extract information, which the agency describes as “content-derived metadata”, and explains that “such gems are not in current metadata stores and would enhance current analytics”.

[...]

The agency was also able to extract geolocation data from more than 76,000 text messages a day, including from “requests by people for route info” and “setting up meetings”. Other travel information was obtained from itinerary texts sent by travel companies, even including cancellations and delays to travel plans.

[...]

Communications from US phone numbers, the documents suggest, were removed (or “minimized”) from the database – but those of other countries, including the UK, were retained.

  Guardian

They're Hopping Like Rabbits Now

But not on the big stuff. Little hops. Bunnies.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is pushing to fast-track legislation that would require police to obtain a warrant before accessing emails and other private online messages.

Sen. Patrick Leahy's (D-Vt.) goal is for the Senate to unanimously approve his bill before the August recess, according to one of his committee aides. Any opposition could delay a vote until after Congress returns in the fall.

[...]

Leahy's bill would not affect the NSA programs, but it would curb the ability of local and federal law enforcement officials to access private online messages.

[...]

Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, police only need a subpoena, issued without a judge's approval, to force Internet companies to turn over emails that have been opened or that are more than 180 days old.

  The Hill

A subpoena issued without a judge’s approval?

   ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Nothing Hypocritical Here

For people living in countries where the the government monitors and censors the Internet, help is on the way.

It may be in a smartphone app or it could be a clandestine wireless network that looks innocuous but allows people to communicate out of the view of government censors.

A project funded by the US government and developed by a Washington think tank called “Commotion Wireless” is being readied for delivery early next year.

The effort seeks to promote free expression online and takes advantage of the fact that more people are using mobile devices.

  Raw Story

And don't even try to convince me that the US government doesn't have it programmed to let them monitor it.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.