Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Aren’t most Twitter accounts trying to “manipulate” their audience? “Vote Republican!” “Buy my album” “Send me money and I’ll unlock your files”
Twitter Suspends Accounts Engaged in Manipulation
Twitter this week announced the suspension of a total of 770 accounts for “engaging in coordinated manipulation.”
The suspensions were performed in two waves. One last week, when the social networking platform purged 284 accounts, many of which supposedly originated from Iran, and another this week, when 486 more accounts were kicked for the same reason.
The report triggered reactions from large Internet companies, including Facebook and Google. The former removed 652 pages, groups, and accounts suspected of being tied to Russia and Iran, while the latter blocked 39 YouTube channels and disabled six Blogger and 13 Google+ accounts.




I imagine rich neighborhoods will tweak the algorithm to keep more people in jail. And if anyone released re-offends, “Hey! The computer made me release him!”
California Becomes First State To End Cash Bail After 40-Year Fight
California will become the first state in the nation to abolish bail for suspects awaiting trial under a sweeping reform bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday.
An overhaul of the state's bail system has been in the works for years, and became an inevitability earlier this year when a California appellate court declared the state's cash bail system unconstitutional. The new law goes into effect in October 2019.
… Under the California law those arrested and charged with a crime won't be putting up money or borrowing it from a bail bond agent to obtain their release. Instead, local courts will decide who to keep in custody and whom to release while they await trial. Those decisions will be based on an algorithm created by the courts in each jurisdiction.




Reminds me of the fight Phil Zimmerman had to publish PGP software. Same law. Same chance of the government keeping these files from terrorists – ZERO. After all, nothing will keep terrorist groups from doing exactly what Cody Wilson did.
After court order, 3D-printed gun pioneer now sells pay-what-you-want CAD files
During what he called his first ever press conference, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson announced Tuesday that he would continue to comply with a federal court order forbidding him from internationally publishing CAD files of firearms. Wilson said he would also begin selling copies of his 3D-printed gun files for a "suggested price" of $10 each.
The files, crucially, will be transmitted to customers "on a DD-branded flash drive" in the United States. Wilson also mentioned looking into customer email and secure download links.
Previously, Defense Distributed had given the files away for free, globally.




Perspective. Words of hate.
Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime
Müller, Karsten and Schwarz, Carlo, Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime (May 21, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3082972 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3082972
“This paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime using Facebook data. We study the case of Germany, where the recently emerged right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has developed a major social media presence. We show that right-wing anti-refugee sentiment on Facebook predicts violent crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage. To further establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in major internet and Facebook outages, which fully undo the correlation between social media and hate crime. We further find that the effect decreases with distracting news events; increases with user network interactions; and does not hold for posts unrelated to refugees. Our results suggest that social media can act as a propagation mechanism between online hate speech and real-life violent crime.”




Perspective. Confirming a few speculations… [Problems with the link?]
Using Twitter to Visualize Polarization
Center for Data Innovation“MIT Technology Review has created a set of visualizations that uses data about Twitter activity to illustrate the polarization of political discourse in the United States. The visualizations include multiple cluster maps demonstrating that accounts that follow each other tweet similar content. In addition, diagrams show that the most partisan accounts, which include bot accounts that tweet hundreds of times a day, tweet significantly more than accounts in the political center. The visualizations also show the polarization of Turkish and Russian accounts.”




My book would be: How to guarantee security!


No comments: