Tag: Facebook

To Tell the Truth

 

Investigative journalist Robert Parry, founder and editor of the website Consortium News, died on January 27 after a series of strokes precipitated by pancreatic cancer. He was 68.

Adding “investigative” to Mr. Parry’s job description of journalist gives an insight into the principles he applied to his work. Aren’t all journalists investigators in some way or other? No. Some are content rewriting press releases. Robert Parry was not one of those, and for that he paid a price in getting pushed out of working for mainstream media outlets. He would never be one of those television talking heads claiming journalist credentials while making millions of dollars for asking trivial questions of celebrities about their plastic surgeries. He came by his credentials through hard work looking into things that matter.


Reagan meets with aides on Iran-Contra
President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office on November 25, 1986, with Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of State George Shultz, Attorney General Ed Meese, and Chief of Staff Don Regan, discussing remarks he intended to make at a press briefing on the Iran-Contra affair.

Robert Parry was best known for breaking the story in the second term of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s that eventually became known as the Iran-Contra affair. The Contras were Nicaraguan rebels or terrorists, depending on point of view, who sought to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Earlier in the decade, the United States Congress had passed legislation making it more difficult for the Reagan administration to meddle in Nicaraguan politics by supporting the Contras. The administration circumvented the law by selling arms to Iran, a purported enemy, and funneling the profits to the Contras.

Mr. Parry also wrote about how the CIA appeared to be enabling drug trafficking by the Contras in order to give them more material support, though it was another investigative journalist, Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News who explored the story in greater detail in 1996. In the early 1990s, Mr. Parry wrote about another aspect of the Reagan years that remained in shadows, which was the possibility of a deal between Reagan’s campaign team and the Iranian government to delay releasing the 52 American hostages Iran had held from November 4, 1979, until after the U.S. presidential election in 1980. Iran released the hostages on January 20, 1981, when Reagan was sworn in as president. Jimmy Carter lost his bid for re-election in large part due to the poor economy, and at least in small part due to the continuation of the hostage crisis.

 

Because of Mr. Parry’s habit of pursuing stories like that, he wore out his welcome with the corporate media outlets he had been working for, such as Newsweek and the Associated Press, and in 1995 he started Consortium News, possibly the first independent online news site written and edited by a reputable, professionally trained journalist. Since then online news sites have proliferated, which has been both good and bad for readers. It has been good for the obvious reason that more choice means a discerning reader is likely to find a trustworthy site delivering quality journalism, and bad because more choice means the non-discerning reader is likely to find a site masquerading as news that serves up opinions which reinforce existing prejudices. Add to that the algorithm of a social media platform like Facebook which ensures readers see more of what they want to see, and it’s an uphill battle for the truth.

Kerry report cover
Cover of the Kerry Committee December 1988 final report of an investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations into the possible role of the Nicaraguan Contras in drug trafficking.

Robert Parry surely understood the maxim that we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts. He also understood that some facts, known collectively as the truth, were unpleasant for all kinds of reasons, chief among them that they afflicted the comfortable, another maxim. And to underscore how old school was his journalistic integrity, never mind his early appearance on the digital frontier, Mr. Parry knew his first job was to tell the truth, and if that meant he wasn’t invited on the Washington, D.C. cocktail club circuit, then so be it. People like him don’t end up making millions of dollars, and don’t realistically expect to, but to the readers who valued his services he was one in a million.
— Ed.

 

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Once Bitten, Twice Shy

 

In a surprising development, Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Warner (D-VA), and John McCain (R-AZ), recently introduced a bill, called the Honest Ads Act, that would impose the same types of regulations on internet political advertising that have long held sway over political ads in print, radio, and television. What’s surprising about it is why it took this long to regulate online political advertising, and that until now there hasn’t been regulation of the same sort as in other media. A reader of online news could be forgiven for having assumed that internet political ads were subject to regulations similar to what has existed in other media for decades, such as disclosure within the ad of who paid for it. Not so.

What took Congress this long? Congress has been behind the curve for years on technological developments, and so in this case the more relevant question is why are they acting now. The answer is presumed Russian interference in last year’s presidential election, and specifically the placement of advertisements as well as so-called news stories on social media sites that the Russians allegedly intended to influence the election results. All that has yet to be sorted out in ongoing investigations, but in the meantime it will be a positive development to have online political advertisers more openly accountable.


March for Truth (35076251785)
A demonstrator in a Trump mask at one of the March for Truth rallies that took place around the country on June 3, 2017. Photo by kellybdc.

Much has been made over the past year especially, because of the election, of the effect of “fake news” on the electorate, the majority of which now appears to get its news through social media feeds on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Those sites have made noises about doing a better job monitoring the reliability of news sources, but ultimately they cannot effect a major reduction in fake news without entangling themselves in issues of censorship, and consequently losing user trust even beyond the drop in trust they experience when another fake news story makes the rounds.

Forty and more years ago, when there were three national television news outlets and one or more print, radio, and television news outlets in every middling city or larger throughout the country, all of them reliant on a few news service gatekeepers such as the Associated Press, United Press International, and Reuters, the daily news reached a consensus that most people plugged into. There were drawbacks to such centralization, of course, but in general there existed a set of generally agreed upon facts from which disputants could diverge.

Now the news has atomized to the point that someone with a large Facebook following can spread a story with no basis in fact, and those followers will spread the story some more. There are no editors sitting on the story until it is verified. The engineers at Facebook and Twitter are not interested in the job, nor do they seem to think it should be their job. Their job is to watch what their customers watch so that they can boost their company’s revenue by effectively targeting advertising based on those results.

It is as if a newspaper’s staff printed almost everything that came across their desks, with little or no editorial judgment on the contents, and focused most of their energies on the advertisements. A newspaper could not do that because of physical limitations on paper, ink, and space, but an online news feed has no such limitations. A reader can scroll on forever, if so inclined. It’s a buffet that the social media sites are serving up, and it’s in their interest to try to specifically please each person they serve, a task made possible by the interactive nature of the web, where each user click is tabulated as a vote in favor.

From the 1976 film The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau shows the foolishness of making assumptions based on limited information.

There’s only a limited amount then that the news feed providers can and should do to monitor the reliability of the content they provide. Every little bit helps, which is why it’s good news that Congress is belatedly getting around to at least subjecting political advertisements to regulations that would alert interested readers to the provenance of online political advertisements, therefore allowing the readers to judge for themselves the veracity of the ads.

Ultimately people who read news online from a multitude of sources have to exercise critical thinking more than ever before in evaluating the reliability of what they are reading. The days of passively accepting the news in predigested form from trusted sources are over, and that’s all for the good really, but it also means being on guard and skeptical more than ever, much as people want to indulge their lazy tendencies toward confirmation bias, or believing what they want to be true.
― Techly

 

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10 Reasons Your Mind Is Not a Waste

 

“When you take the UNCF model that, what a waste it is to lose one’s mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”
― Vice President Dan Quayle, speaking at a luncheon for the United Negro College Fund on May 9, 1989, mangling the Fund’s slogan “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

 

Is the internet making us dumber? stupider? how about less bright? Listicles like this one could be one reason why we might not be that smart anymore. Maybe they’ve helped make us smarter than we used to be. Did listicles ever exist outside the internet, meaning a long, long time ago? Maybe in magazines, most of which were not meant for serious people, the way newspapers were, way back when.


Mel Brooks shows us an alternative past involving lists and tablets in his 1981 movie History of the World – Part 1.

Anyway, enough history. Here we go ―

  1. Before the internet, you needed to know and remember stuff, because you couldn’t just look it up online at the drop of a hat. You maybe could find out from a book, if you knew where to find one.
  2. Because you can look up practically anything now on the internet, some people think it’s making us smarter, especially about what our favorite celebrities have been up to lately.
  3. Without the internet, we couldn’t check on what our friends had for dinner and all the cool places they’ve been out to eat, unless we called them, which we don’t want to bother with, just text. Everything would have to be texts, which is probably okay.
  4. Spending lots of time playing computer games is good because it trains you for a good job with the military remotely piloting drones to drop bombs on terrorists over in their country from an undisclosed location somewhere else, and that’s really smart because otherwise they’d be over here blowing themselves up.
  5. Knowing a lot of internet and computer stuff is also a smart way to get a job with the National Security Agency (NSA) looking into everybody’s business.
  6. There’s no need to develop social skills when there are social media networks like Facebook and Twitter around.
  7. The internet is also good for getting things off your chest by commenting online, and you don’t have to worry about being nice about it, because on the internet no one knows who you are, unless they’re with the NSA.
  8. It used to be that before the internet you could be bored a lot. Now with smartphones and tablets that you always have with you, you don’t ever have to be bored and think about stuff, because you can do other things online, like Facebook or Twitter again.
  9. According to Hebb’s Law, which you can look up online, when your brain spends a lot of time doing something, it gets smarter doing that thing. Even though the brain is mostly fat, it’s like a muscle that way.
  10. Your brain is wired just like the internet. Well, actually, since your brain was here first, especially if you were born a generation or more ago, the internet is wired like your brain. Not that any central authority planned it that way, it just happened. If you’re an old person, that’s probably why you might not understand everything about the internet, because you have to think about it, instead of being wired up ready to go from early on.


Mike Judge shows us a possible future in his 2006 movie Idiocracy. Okay, it might be more than just a possible future and might be closer to now than is comfortable. Warning: foul language.

Okay, that pretty much wraps it up. It was fun. Now you know the internet isn’t necessarily making us any dumber, just different, but don’t think about it too hard or your brain’ll seize up and crash like you drank something really cold really fast. You can’t email Microsoft tech support about that.
― Techly

 

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We’ll Take That As a Yes

 

Last week the United States Congress voted to repeal new Federal Communications Commission rules which would have required that internet service providers (ISPs) notify their customers of the data they collect on them for their own commercial purposes unrelated to providing the service, and that customers had to specifically opt-in to the practice. The FCC voted 3 to 2 in favor of the new rules in October 2016, and they would have gone into effect on March 2 of this year had the FCC not stayed it on March 1 under new chairman Ajit Pai. Outgoing FCC chairman Tom Wheeler pushed for the new rules in order to spell out consumer privacy protections in relationship to ISPs, something which he and two of the other commissioners felt was inadequately addressed in Section 222 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

 

The Telecommunications Act goes back to 1934, when the original law went into effect creating the FCC and granting it the authority to regulate telecommunications companies as common carriers, which is to say the same as utilities. Section 222 of that law pertained to how the carriers could use their customers’ personal information, and it required them to keep the information confidential except as required by law or by consent of the customer. Congress has amended the Act periodically to reflect changes in technology, with the last major revision in 1996.

Common carrier or not is the logical puzzle in question. Substitute “Section 222” for Catch-22 to relish the flavor of the ISP regulatory mess.

 

Since the advent of widespread consumer internet service in the 1990s, there has been a regulatory battle over whether ISPs should be considered common carriers, and thus subject to oversight by the FCC under the Telecommunications Act. Since some providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, were also telephone companies, they were already partially subject to FCC oversight. It wasn’t until early 2015 with the FCC’s Open Internet Rules that all ISPs were brought under the same set of regulations as common carriers and bound by the consumer privacy protections of Section 222.

 

Previously the only regulatory oversight of some ISPs on behalf of consumer privacy came from the Federal Trade Commission, and it was limited to holding the companies accountable to the terms of their own privacy policies. The FTC does not regulate consumer privacy regarding the actions of common carriers. It does regulate consumer privacy regarding the actions of so-called edge providers that offer services by voluntary subscription, like Facebook, and of websites in general, but again only by holding them to their own privacy policies, as invasive as they may be. Since the implementation of the FCC’s Open Internet Rules in 2015, all ISPs must adhere to the more restrictive regulations applied to common carriers.

 


The 1970 film adaptation of Joseph Heller’s brilliant Catch-22 lays out a problem in logic. It does not attempt to explicate it, because that would be impossible and probably unhealthy.

 

Still, Chairman Wheeler and others felt that the language of Section 222 did not go far enough in spelling out consumer privacy protection in the internet age. Originally written in 1934 when the capacity of a common carrier to sweep up vast amounts of customer data was not even a pipe dream, and inadequately addressed in the major 1996 revision of the law, Section 222 did not explicitly deny ISPs the ability to sell customer data because the ISPs could interpret “with the approval of the customer” in Section (c)(1) to mean they could consider customers opted-in unless they stated otherwise. Being passive and silent rather than active and vocal has always been considered assent or approval, especially by sneaky people with an agenda, and it is a prevalent practice on the internet. That is a trick of the interactive internet age that no one foresaw in 1934, and apparently not even in 1996. In 2002, Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota introduced a bill which would have changed “the approval of the customer” to “the affirmative written consent of the customer.” The bill went nowhere.

 

Without legislation from Congress to clarify things in the new regulatory environment, Chairman Wheeler felt obliged to take up the slack by adopting Broadband Consumer Privacy Rules in October 2106. As already noted, the vote was 3 to 2. The 3 ayes came from Chairman Wheeler and the two other Democrats on the Commission board. The 2 nays came from the Republicans on the board, including Ajit Pai, now the new Chairman. When the new Republican Congress and President came to Washington, Chairman Pai stayed the new Privacy Rules before they could take effect, and Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona introduced a bill to repeal the Rules and also prevent the FCC from making similar rules in the future.

That’s an android in the center, but it could just as well be you, an internet service customer, caught between government regulators and telecommunications providers.

 

The rest is history. We are returning to the regulatory environment of the past year and a half after the FCC ruled all ISPs were common carriers, but before it adopted new Privacy Rules to clarify the difference between “approval” and “consent” of customers. Now ISPs, though they are common carriers, have a gray area to navigate in Section 222 of the Telecommunications Act, and their claim that they will still be regulated by the FTC is disingenuous at best, considering the FTC does not regulate common carriers. It should be understandable now why ISPs lobbied to repeal the new Privacy Rules. Citing their own privacy policies in which they claim they never have and never will sell customer data, and which had been enforced by the FTC (they glide over the part about FTC regulation no longer applying to them as common carriers), they claimed the FCC was unnecessarily complicating the regulatory environment. They say they shouldn’t be held to stricter privacy standards than companies like Google and Facebook, thereby putting them at a competitive disadvantage. Except for the part about competitive disadvantage not being applicable to monopolistic utilities that are regulated in the public interest, that’s a fair point. Instead of raising the privacy bar for everyone, however, they and their mostly Republican allies in Congress and in the new FCC prefer to lower the bar, serving corporate interests instead of consumers. Trust us, they say. Uh-huh.
― Techly

 

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Nomophobic No More

 

Nomophobia is a term coined in 2010 by the United Kingdom Post Office, which commissioned research into the anxieties of mobile phone users. It stands for no-mobile-phone phobia, or the fear of not having access to a phone or phone service.

On February 3, 2017, New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton, responding in part to the antics of Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown, who streamed a post-game speech by his head coach, Mike Tomlin, on Facebook Live from his smartphone, vowed to “scramble” social media sites in the Saints’ locker room in the future. It was unclear what Payton meant exactly by “scramble,” but perhaps he was referring to using a filter on the locker room wi-fi service. Players could still access social media sites using the signal from their cellular service, however, making the overall effectiveness of Payton’s ban doubtful. A cell phone signal jammer would be an option if it were legal.

Payton’s proposed ban was his response to players’ increasing inattention as well, since they itched to check their phones for distractions instead of devoting their full attention to the business at hand in locker room meetings. These are men in their twenties and thirties, some of them making millions of dollars a year, and they cannot be relied upon to disregard their smartphones for more than forty minutes at a time while their head coach conducts a meeting. But then, considering the behavior some players exhibit during games, perhaps it should come as no surprise they are selfish and immature in other areas of their lives. We would more usefully order our priorities to not give the players and the game as much attention as we do.

 

Arrecife - Iglesia de San Ginés in 18 ies
No cell phones sign at a church in the Canary Islands.
The message in English reads “Sacred Place – Silence Please”.
Iglesia de San Ginés in Arrecife, Lanzarote, Canary Islands;
photo by Frank Vincentz.

 

Whether it is a compulsion or an addiction that many people have to constantly check their smartphone for text messages, emails, or social media posts, is something they need to examine for themselves. The rest of us just wish they would stop checking, checking, and checking again, because it is costing us time and frustration, and in some cases our lives. Besides the everyday annoyances caused by compulsive smartphone users disrupting the enjoyment of theater-goers and patrons at restaurants and shops, there is the now nearly constant problem of being held up at a traffic light by the driver in front being too engrossed in their smartphone to realize the light has turned green. Such drivers build up road rage in others, and that’s minor considering the dangers they pose once they get their car moving.

A majority of drivers sensibly acknowledge that texting and driving is dangerous and are in favor of state laws prohibiting it, yet many of them continue to do it. You can see these drivers everywhere on the roads, bobbing their heads up and down like mechanical dipping birds as they look up and down from the smartphone they hold down just out of view of others – as if they’re fooling anyone – to the road and back again. The danger comes not only while they are looking down, but also for the first few seconds after they look up, because in that time their minds are elsewhere.

The Green Eggs and Ham Cafe - panoramio
The Green Eggs and Ham Cafe at the Seuss Landing attraction
of the Universal Islands of Adventure theme park in
Orlando, Florida; photo by Panoramio user BihnX.
Since some people can’t seem to stop themselves from texting and driving, and since enforcement is lax, it appears the only thing that will get at least some of them to stop is the kind of social disapproval that has built up around smoking in public over the past twenty years. It’s incredible now to recall that up until twenty or thirty years ago smoking in most public places was not only acceptable, it was the norm. People smoked in theaters, restaurants, and on planes and trains. Like enjoying green eggs and ham, people had a cigarette pretty much anywhere they liked. Speaking of green eggs and ham, now there’s an excellent idea: shut off that phone, smart or otherwise, and enjoy an attentive meal with friends or family, put the phone to sleep in the glove compartment while you drive to the theater, and then leave it in the car when you go in to relax and enjoy the show. Your dinner companions, the drivers you share the road with, and your fellow patrons at the theater will appreciate it, and it won’t kill you.
― Techly

 

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The Games People Play

 

“Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.”
― Barry Switzer, U.S. football coach.

 

In 1976, the movie Network satirized the television business of the day and projected then current trends into the future, to extremes that at the time seemed preposterous. A reality show about terrorists? A planned assassination filmed live on television? Too much! Satire turned into fantasy! Looking back from over forty years later, we realize maybe it wasn’t too much. Maybe it was prophetic.

George Fenneman and Groucho Marx You Bet Your Life 1951
George Fenneman and Groucho Marx
on “You Bet Your Life” in 1951, a quiz show
where the financial stakes weren’t as
important as entertaining conversation.

Thirteen years before Network appeared in theaters, the psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment at Yale University that tested how far subjects would go in administering electric shocks to other people they thought were also subjects of the experiment, but who in fact were actors. It turned out that when directed by authority figures (also actors), two thirds of the subjects giving shocks escalated the punishment to 460 volts, which is severe to the point of being dangerously debilitating. In 2010, a game show aired in France which re-enacted the parameters of the Milgram experiment in the name of televised entertainment. The producers later revealed that the show was in fact a fictitious re-enactment, with no one harmed, but most of the participants did not know that while the show was in production, nor did the studio audience. In the French game show, 80% of the subjects delivering shocks escalated them to 460 volts.

A 2012 experiment designed by the psychologist Paul Piff at the University of California-Berkeley had subjects play the board game “Monopoly,” with the rules changed to allow one subject to enjoy advantages throughout the game. The methodology and results of the experiment appear to indicate we do not so much learn the haughtiness of economic privilege as have the capacity already within us, waiting only for the switches of power and money to activate it. Economic inequality in the United States has burgeoned since the 1970s when the fictitious mad TV news anchor, Howard Beale, ranted about the inequities in American society, and the divergence between the haves and have nots has only increased since then.


The point where the 2010 French game show and the 2012 “Monopoly” experiment intersect is in describing what has become acceptable behavior for people seeking fame and fortune. Forty or fifty years ago, before YouTube and Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, fame and fortune were as like as not obtainable only after a long slog of work for most, and certainly it was rare to become an overnight sensation. Now we see that most people have sloughed off the diffidence and decorum they had when appearing in public in the age before instantaneous media saturation. Now it seems many people feel little restraint in satisfying their thirst for fame and fortune, no matter how ignominiously won, and will cast off all restraint when egged on by peers or authority figures. Now conscientiousness and civility have become quaint afterthoughts.
― Vita

 

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Consider the Source

 

Fake news is in the news these days. There’s nothing new about that, really. We have always had to contend with dubious sources for our information, and ultimately we have always had to fall back on our own healthy skepticism and critical thinking to discount those sources. The difference now seems to be with how fast and how far lies can spread through social media, and how well people who believe those lies can insulate themselves from contrary information. Don’t confuse them with the facts!

 

A reasonable discussion of the issues confronting our society is not possible when different sides come armed with their own facts, all of which conveniently confirm their biases. Before discussion is even possible we have to agree on at least some facts that are, as it were, self-evident. If we insist on our own so-called facts to the exclusion of others, then we descend into tribalism.

What is truth
“What is truth? Christ and Pilate”
painting by Nikolai Ge

 

How to determine fact from fiction? Common sense observations are a good place to start. Gravity is a fact. Dispute it at your own peril. The Earth is round, as one can see when the Moon moves into the Earth’s shadow during a lunar eclipse. Despite that observable fact, because the conclusion requires a leap into abstract reasoning many people throughout history have not agreed the Earth was round. Some people still don’t agree. From celestial mechanics down to whether an ant can move a rubber tree plant all by itself, there is more or less room for dispute regarding the facts of life, depending on how well we can prove them ourselves or trust the proofs of others.

Think of all the common expressions people have used over the years relating to skepticism and the alternative, gullibility:

  • Prove it!
  • Show me!
  • The proof is in the pudding.
  • There’s a sucker born every minute.
  • Tell it to the marines!
  • I’ll believe it when I see it.
  • Falling for something hook, line, and sinker.
  • If you believe that one, there’s a bridge I’d like to sell you.

There are many more, of course. Another expression has to do with learning a hard lesson from gullibility:

  • Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

A twist on that with a nod to a rock song by The Who was coined by George W. Bush:


Currier and Ives Brooklyn Bridge2 courtesy copy
1883 illustration of the Brooklyn Bridge, looking west; by Currier and Ives

 

Facebook and other social media sites which share news sources with their members have promised to more vigilantly curate what they allow on their platforms, but ultimately the responsibility lies with readers to view all news skeptically, and question their own willingness to hear what they want to hear and little else.
– Ed.

 

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