The fact “Lady Middleton” is referenced without her first name illustrates to the reader that she was married by a man with a title. However, in the novel Pride and Prejudice Lady Catherine de Bourgh is addressed with her first name indicates she was born into nobility.

(The British System of Aristocratic Honorifics, The Republic of Pemberley)

Said of a woman who determines to gain the affections of a man....Origin: from the French nautical phrase 'mettre le cap sur' - 'to set a course for'... Women commonly wore caps of white linen or muslin in the 18th century. Any woman who was intent on attracting a man would certainly wear her best cap, probably ornamented with lace and ribbons, and set it at the most becoming angle… By the early 19th century the phrase was common enough to have taken on a metaphorical usage. ('Set One's Cap At' - the Meaning and Origin of This Phrase. Phrasefinder.)

"In Jane Austen’s day most people walked to work, town, church, and market square, or to their neighbors. Six miles was not considered an undue distance to travel by foot one way. The gentry were another breed. They either owned their own carriages or hired a public horse cab." (Victorian and Edwardian Horse Cabs by Trevor May, a Book Review, Jane Austen's World)

In her conduct book, Letters to Young Ladies on their Entrance into the World (1824), Elizabeth Lanfear warns women not to rush into marriage: "love-matches, at least those which are generally so called, do not always prove the happiest ; and, when entered into rashly, or at an early period of life, before either the taste or the judgement are sufficiently matured, mutual disappointment is too frequently the result" (Lanfear, p. 49). Lanfear is stating the possibility that marriage can lead unhappiness and warns women not to rush into marriage. If Colonel Brandon proposed the idea of marriage to Charlotte to Sir John, Charlotte might have needed Lanfear's advice not to jump into marriage so rashly.

Horse-drawn carriage used in the 18th and 19th centuries; a status symbol of material wealth used by the upper classes.

“Hair jewelry served as a physical demonstration of internal feelings, similar to the idea of sensibility” (Absorption in Austen,On Hair Jewelry). The act of a man carrying a woman's lock of hair is a symbol of love between the two lovers. It is an act of affection as the lock of hair can also represent a woman's beauty and virtue. By gifting a lock of hair a woman is in a way promising herself to her lover, and in return the man carries and protects the lock which is his way of symbolizing that her will protect her virtue.

Proletarianization is the social process by which people move from being either the employer or self-employment to being employed as a wage laborer by an employer.

Marx, Karl, and David McLellan. Karl Marx: selected writings. Oxford University Press, USA, 2000.

"A carriage with a half-head behind which can be raised or let down at pleasure, having a seat in front for the driver, and seats inside for two couples to sit facing each other" (OED).

For a young, unmarried woman such as Marianne to correspond with an unmarried man was considered extremely improper. In fact, for a single woman to initiate such correspondence would be considered scandalous, thereby tarnishing her virtue and reputation as an eligible bridal candidate. Only if they were engaged to each other would this practice be looked upon favorably; in fact, it might be necessary and expected. If they were not engaged, and especially not to each other, open correspondence would indicate a lack of morals in the woman, in that society would assume the young woman to be the man's mistress. Brandon follows this statement by extrapolating that Marianne and Willoughby would soon be married, since that would be the only alternative so her social reputation would not suffer.

"Calling cards became popular at the end of the 18th century and bore the visitor's name, title and residence." (Grace, Maria. "Morning Calls and Formal Visits: Socializing in the Regency Era" English Historical Fiction Authors, http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2013/08/morning-calls-and-formal-visits.html . Accessed 24 April 2017.) The purpose of the calling card that Willoughby leaves behind at Mrs. Jennings' residence serves to inform her, as the mistress of the house, of his presence in London. As her acquaintance, it would have been considered rude of him not to do so.

"An attendant or foot servant; one employed to run ahead of or alongside a coach, carriage" (OED).

"The flesh of a calf as an article of diet. A calf...as killed for food or intended for this purpose. Now rare. Chiefly in names of dishes. Made from veal, as veal pie, veal broth, veal cutlet, veal gravy" (OED).

Participatory Propaganda - an analysis of current techniques for exploiting our online behavior. https://twitter.com/lageneralista

In the Regency era, it was common for people to visit private homes and estates. There was a "presumption of access to private houses" (Clarke, "A fine house richly furnished: Pemberley and the visiting of country houses") In this discussion, Elinor is chiding Marianne for breaking one of the cardinal rules of visiting a great house: visiting while the family who owned said house was at home. "If the family were away, [a] housekeeper would feel free to show the house to visitors" but "access [could be] refused because the family were at home" (Clarke). By entering Allenham while Mrs. Smith was at home, Marianne has intruded. The fact that she was also alone with Willoughby, a man who is not a relative of hers, with no supervision from others could cause people to question Marianne's virtue.

"Among family, friends and romantic partners, exchanging a lock of hair was a sign of mutual esteem and deep affection. Upon the death of a loved one, locks of hair were often cut and kept as a way to both honor and remember the dead... [H]air was both an intimately personal souvenir of a specific person and an (almost) everlasting memento." ("Hairwork jewelry" on the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) Museum of Los Angeles' blog) Locks of hair were often kept in the form of jewelry, as we see Edward Ferrars wearing later in the novel. Hair jewelry ranged from simpler rings like the one Edward wears to complex necklaces, brooches, and other pieces.

(Image: "Gold and enamel mourning ring with hair of the deceased under glass, c. 1855." from The Victor Mourning Blog) (Image: "Hairwork necklace. 1850-1890. Gift of Andrea Tice. 2008.46.101" from the FIDM Museum Blog)

The term "Christian name" refers to one's first or given name, which was often given at the time of an infant's baptism (Thurston, Catholic Encyclopedia). An excerpt from Etiquette for Ladies, published in Philadelphia in 1840 by Lea & Blanchard, details some specifics on the use of Christian names in different types of company: "In speaking, it is always proper to give the name of Sir, Madam, or Miss... It is equally good [etiquette], when alone with [one's husband], to designate him by his Christian name." The use of a Christian name, or given name, was incredibly intimate and for the most part only meant to be used by family members in private spaces.

In the Regency period, women were not permitted to ride alone, except under very specific circumstances, and were usually expected to be accompanied by a chaperone. This chaperone was often a groom, whose duties also included caring for the horses. "A lady was permitted to drive her own carriage, but only about the town attended by a groom, or by herself on the family estate... It was acceptable to go out riding or driving with a man as long as a groom or other chaperone was in attendance... It was acceptable to go out driving or riding with a man without a chaperone if he was a relative of close family friend" (Kloester, Georgette Heyer's Regency World).

At this time it was not unusual for women to go to London or other urban settings for access to different experiences. They offered many opportunities for new social interaction and there is ample evidence of women traveling to London and partaking of its many social activities. There were also many opportunities of new experiences for pleasure and excitement, some through social interaction. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/victorian_britain/women_out/urban_life_04.shtml

Short for 'post-chaise', defined as ""a horse-drawn, usually four-wheeled carriage (in Britain usually having a closed body, the driver or postilion riding on one of the horses) used for carrying mail and passengers, esp. in the 18th and early 19th centuries"" (OED).

The tradesmen or middle sort are below Gentry and make their money by working. They could have as much or more money than the gentry class in some cases, but their status was always considered as lower.

http://www4.wittenberg.edu/academics/hist/crom/brit/socstruc.html

research on how ideas spread through social media

“England was a very patriarchal society. Not only in the public sphere, but also in the private one as well. Women did not have any power in any portion of the nation, whether it be economic, political, or social. In England there was no law written expressly concerning inheritance other than, that the will or desire of the man of the home or estate will be carried out. This meaning that if the man of the estate wished for his nephew to inherit the land it was to be so. The common practice was that a son or nephew to the head of the family was to inherit all of the assets, because he would be more worthy of the property than a woman.” (Davis, Brooke. Inheritance Laws in the Early 1800s in England, Web)

“Before the nineteenth century, most families were organized according to patriarchal tradition. Household heads owned and controlled the means of production, and their wives and children were obliged to provide the unpaid labor needed to sustain family enterprises. Masters of the household had a legal right to command the obedience of their wives and children—as well as any servants or slaves—and to use corporal punishment to correct disobedience.“ (Ruggles, Steven. Patriarchy, Power, and Pay, Web)

Elizabeth Lanfear describes the repercussions of marriage and the commonality of how marriages occur: “marriage, generally speaking, in either sex, is more frequently the result of accident than of selection : propinquity, convenience, interest, or, at best, mere fancy, dignified by the name of love, forms the basis, of most matrimonial engagements” (Lanfear, Young Ladies on their Entrance into the World, p. 47). Lanfear's statement on marriage relates to this moment where Elinor notes her knowledge of this common type of marriage. In relation to Lanfear's statement, Elinor notices the infatuation between Mr. Palmer and his wife being the main attraction that led to their marriage.

In her conduct book published in 1824, Elizabeth Lanfear explains the etiquette expected from married women: “a sensible woman, to preserve the peace and secure the affections of her husband, will often sacrifice her own inclinations to his” (Lanfear, Young Ladies on their Entrance into the World, p. 67). Lanfear states that married woman are expected to sacrifice their tendencies and desires for those of her husbands. In regard to the relationship between Charlotte Palmer and her husband, this same etiquette is very strongly illustrated. In this particular moment, Charlotte is being selflessly tolerant to her husband's comments whether or not her husband's actions affect her.

A billiard room according to David Selwyn served as a key part of enjoyment towards entertaining guests, "large houses . . . were provided with a billiard room, which, though largely for the enjoyment of the men, could sometimes be an advantage to the ladies: Jane Austen commented that it drew 'all the Gentlemen to it whenever they are within, especially after dinner'" (Selwyn, Jane Austen and Leisure, p. 265). In this context, Austen is depicting the assumption that people with large houses who frequently entertain guests are expected to have a billiard room.

A gig is "a light two-wheeled one-horse carriage" (OED). Austen is saying these gigs are very fashionable and flashy. These carriages relate lawyers to the association of wealth. Aoife Byrne states that "gigs in Austen's works highlight their owner's social aspirations, and they illustrate contextual attitudes to those aspirations" (Byrne, "'Very Knowing Gigs': Social Aspiration and the Gig Carriage in Jane Austen's Works," Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, vol. 37 (2015)). . For the lawyers that "drove about" in these carriages, Austen is suggesting the connection of carriages relating lawyers to wealth and fashion.

In other words, "who were lawyers." Edward's referencing the barrister's chambers in the Temple, an area of London.

An example of an early 19th century cottage, this one being the birthplace of author Thomas Hardy

A 1799 income tax put a particular strain on the middle and upper classes at this time. For Edward, being idly rich could also be beneficial. His options for rewarding work are few.

The typical engagement period in early nineteenth-century England is about 6 months to 2 years.

A common way in early nineteenth-century England to exchange sentiments. Also used in the mourning of a loved one.

Portrait miniatures were often given between lovers as a symbol of love or affection, especially if the loved one was absent for long periods of time. (1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, Web)

Approbation means the "action of expressing oneself pleased or satisfied with anything; or the mere feeling of such satisfaction; approval expressed or entertained" (OED).

According to the customs of the time, parents were to be consulted about a marriage and their opinion to be taken in high regard; however, men and women were mostly free to choose their marriage partner. If a young adult did choose someone who their parents disliked, they might be left out of the will or, if they are underaged, they may have permission withheld from them. Parental opinions were often respected by young people. ( Elizabeth Maurer, "Courtship and Marriage in the Eighteenth Century", Web.)

Some girls born into affluent families may have been educated at home by parents, a live in governess, tutor, or may have gone off to a private boarding school. Since women did not go on to have careers in this day, education and knowledge was something reserved primarily for boys.

Domestic trainings were a more appropriate education for a woman to receive. "For women of the 'genteel' classes the goal of non-domestic education was thus often the acquisition of 'accomplishments,' such as the ability to draw, sing, play music, or speak modern (i.e. non-Classical) languages (generally French and Italian)" (The Republic of Pemberley, "Education, Women's Education, and Accomplishments")

Detection of fake news in social media based on who liked it.

we show that Facebook posts can be classified with high accuracy as hoaxes or non-hoaxes on the basis of the users who "liked" them. We present two classification techniques, one based on logistic regression, the other on a novel adaptation of boolean crowdsourcing algorithms. On a dataset consisting of 15,500 Facebook posts and 909,236 users, we obtain classification accuracies exceeding 99% even when the training set contains less than 1% of the posts.

New Hampshire state legislator discovered to be the founder of the misogynistic online group The Red Pill.(Which has nearly 200,000 subscribers. Yikes.)

Needs to focus on practice not policy - Perhaps consider adding in Social learning ? Julian Stodd's work around social leadership? https://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2016/02/23/10-things-a-social-leader-does/

“The choice of a spouse was not solely left up to the suitors. Parents and even the wider community had an interest in securing suitable matches, between men and women of similar status, wealth, and age, and they exerted pressure accordingly“ ( Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres, p. 93 )

Example of how gossip plays a big role in society. Gossip is how information goes around and status can go up and down.

This was also custom and simple manners when attending a party. It is offensive if this action was dismissed. It is a way of introducing oneself to the host/hostess and showing gratitude for the invitation.

During this time, the purpose of this was just so that your presence was known and acknowledged. This is custom.

digital identity, as a practice, operates counter to the collaboration and cooperation that need to be part of digital citizenship.

This is our contemporary contradiction: identity as a construct in contemporary social media spaces makes for pretty rotten social spaces.

...

We’re algorithmically manipulated. We’re surveilled. We’re encouraged to speak rather than listen. We’re stuck engaging in visibility strategies, whether we admit it or not, in order simply to be acknowledged and seen within a social or professional space.

Our digital identities do not – and at the level of technological affordances and inherent structure, cannot – create a commons that is actually a healthy pro-social space.

The key changes we can make in the short term (without requiring sites to relinquish their business models) are to teach social software to forget, to give it predictable security properties, and to sever the financial connection between online advertising and extremism.

Orwell imagined a world in which the state could shamelessly rewrite the past. The Internet has taught us that people are happy to do this work themselves, provided they have their peer group with them, and a common enemy to unite against. They will happily construct alternative realities for themselves, and adjust them as necessary to fit the changing facts.

Finally, surveillance capitalism makes it harder to organize effective long-term dissent. In an setting where attention is convertible into money, social media will always reward drama, dissent, conflict, iconoclasm and strife. There will be no comparable rewards for cooperation, de-escalation, consensus-building, or compromise, qualities that are essential for the slow work of building a movement. People who should be looking past their differences will instead spend their time on purity tests and trying to outflank one another in a race to the fringes.

Obviously, in this situation whoever controls the algorithms has great power. Decisions like what is promoted to the top of a news feed can swing elections. Small changes in UI can drive big changes in user behavior. There are no democratic checks or controls on this power, and the people who exercise it are trying to pretend it doesn’t exist

On Facebook, social dynamics and the algorithms’ taste for drama reinforce each other. Facebook selects from stories that your friends have shared to find the links you’re most likely to click on. This is a potent mix, because what you read and post on Facebook is not just an expression of your interests, but part of a performative group identity.

So without explicitly coding for this behavior, we already have a dynamic where people are pulled to the extremes. Things get worse when third parties are allowed to use these algorithms to target a specific audience.

any system trying to maximize engagement will try to push users towards the fringes. You can prove this to yourself by opening YouTube in an incognito browser (so that you start with a blank slate), and clicking recommended links on any video with political content.

...

This pull to the fringes doesn’t happen if you click on a cute animal story. In that case, you just get more cute animals (an experiment I also recommend trying). But the algorithms have learned that users interested in politics respond more if they’re provoked more, so they provoke. Nobody programmed the behavior into the algorithm; it made a correct observation about human nature and acted on it.

This part of the article stands out to me for a number of reasons. First, the idea that people with physical and mental disabilities prior to the nineteenth century suffered in a difference sense compared to what they deal with now. Prior to this point, this introduction points out the stereotypes that people with disabilities had in the eighteenth century. Though this is something that is still socially dealt with now, we've taken further measures to help people who deal with specific setbacks that emphasis the overall point on maximizing "the importance of personal agency," and minimizing social change. Overall, this article interests me because it allows me to think deeper about how disabilities have always existed, though they've been handles in a variety of different ways as well as reflect it to how it's handled regarding circumstances we've learned including the role of the doctor and what they can do to help and the resources we had access to then versus now.

Digital Social Networks, particularly Facebook and Twitter.

Makes an interesting point about homogenisation in Facebook and Twitter (i.e. people are a binary of friend or not friend, categories that collapse all different categories.

Interestingly, both Facebook and Twitter have taken steps to address this recently.

p. 2

Originally wanted to study HSS and STEM but scientists didn't qulify. See chapter III

"Natural development" here seems to imply that there are types of language that are not constructed, but of course we can use cultural context to intuit that she does not mean "natural" as the opposite of constructed but to mean something closer to "just as valid as other language, which is all constructed and ever-evolving."

Trump-Russia sock puppets posing as "Bernie bros" targeted women and black men with harassment on Twitter when they expressed support for Hillary Clinton.

2 April, 2017 - International Fact-Checking Day Lesson plan and several how-to guides.

Colleagues. connection. mutualisation.

Network colleagues

Nice talk and nice use of social media

Conner on the social nature of listservs--cf. McCatry

This is a really good key question..

Social presence

Disconnection

Courses. Mapping. Focus.

Yearning to reach out and be really present with the people on line.

Timezone confusion. Competence

Being able to picture the person in a physical context in which one has walked.

Virtual Connection. Real Connecting

Distant Presence Friends

Modeling reflective practice.

Narrative connected

Porous walls. Hybridization. Change narrative

connections attachment identification

Learning the power of open.

Different methodology for research.

The 1st to annotate here

From page 1329: "Any specialized activity participates in a larger unit of action."

Burke seems to be reiterating the social and political web that Nietzsche suggests throughout On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. The fictions we come to believe as truth must be taken into consideration as part of a larger network of relationships and systems that are at once predetermined and unstable.

Throughout this section, Burke calls attention to the ways we use universal truths to act out discriminatory practices. In doing so, there's an inconsistency between the name we give something and the function it serves. The "truth" of the thing doesn't equal the way it operates in the world. In the case he presents here, the power is named "United Nations," but the power is acted out through the "United States." (Would claims to religious freedom to deny service to, say, LGBT couples be included in something like this? The fiction is "religious liberty" but the function is "discrimination"?)

How can we connect this back to Willard and Nietzsche? What do they say about fiction and power that resonates here?

Again, from the MicroResponse:

Thus there is a social aspect here as well, which is one of the ways that taste isrhetorical – it is a product of the dynamic relationship between the self and the world

In "The Letter Killeth" Frances Willard admonishes the acceptance of "truth" without acknowledging the social fictions at work in male-dominated exegesis:

We need women commentators to bring out the women's side of the book; we need the stereoscopic view of truth in general, which can only be had when woman's eye and man's together shall discern the perspective of the Bible's full-orbed revelation.

I do not at all impugn the good intention of the good men who have been our exegetes, and I bow humbly in the presence of their scholarship; but while they turn their linguistic telescopes on truth, I may be allowed to make a correction for the "personal equation" in the results which they espy.

It might be useful here to think about the "social aspects" of rhetoric as they were mentioned in the MicroResponse:

In other words, taste depends not only upon the senses, but also upon established standards. Thus there is a social aspect here as well, which is one of the ways that taste is rhetorical – it is a product of the dynamic relationship between the self and the world.

I think this procedural notion also resembles Rickert's ideas in "Rhetorical Prehistory and the Paleolithic"... For him, rhetoric is not something we do, but something we take part in. Hence his use of the term "rhetoricity."

Useful: Zuckerberg's article is here available outside the Facebook silo.

This "continuing dialogue" also seems to be further embraced on a bigger scale and globally due to influences like social media and bloggers.

Pretty rad that Nietzsche was already dismissing the concept of gender as a construct as early as 1873.

Fair trade chocolate is a topic that i recently learned about after a long discussion with my sister. It essentially is a Standerd that certifies that the chocolate is not made from plantations that make children and work under unfair conditions and wages.Its amazing how they were able to stand up to cooperates to a issue that most people are not even aware of, Great Work

La poesía social se ha desarrollado en cada país coincidiendo con períodos históricos conflictivos (por ejemplo, dictaduras), y suele ir unida a movimientos políticos de ideología izquierdista. ¿Estás de acuerdo en que la poesía también pueda denunciar o reivindicar situaciones, o consideras que debería limitarse a expresar sentimientos personales? ¿Debe ser la poesía útil y crítica para la sociedad o solo artística?

En España, durante los años 70 del siglo XX, surgió la denominada "canción protesta", un subgénero musical que denunciaba la situación de colectivos injustamente marginados como campesinos o emigrantes. Estas canciones eran interpretadas por cantautores que normalmente estaban comprometidos con el activismo antifranquista. ¿Conoces alguna canción protesta en tu cultura o en otra, y sabes qué situación denuncia?

Maybe that distance is a good thing?

The data Facebook collects, and what they do with it.

A Lanham connection here.

This sounds a lot like current complaints of the interwebs, particularly social media. Everyone's a critic!

This reminds me of Hume: "A good palate is not tried by strong flavors; but by a mixture of small ingredients, where we are still sensible of each part, notwithstanding its minuteness and its confusion with the rest" (835).

Anyone can praise or blame based on the most obvious and strongest characteristics of something. Taste is only at play when one is able to praise or blame based on the subtle and intricate details of the thing under review.

Black women using technology to advocate for their erasure.

A social aspect here as well.

black women are being erased from the discussion. Race in general plays a role on how much a topic is spoken about. This case was not even mentioned or discussed until black women started the talk.

Researchers at University College London have discovered a Twitter botnet of more than 350,000 accounts created in 2013, and dormant since then. They've also found another one with more than 500,000 accounts.

never mind that fake news is neither new (forgery, quackery, and conspiracy theorizing are not recent inventions) nor exclusively right-leaning. The new form it has taken in readily sharable social media, however, has made it easy for conventional media to excuse themselves from responsibility for how the election was covered.

"Fake news" was a small factor, compared to mainstream media treating Trump as a legitimate candidate, and sensationalizing hacked emails that contained nothing significant.

Testimonial

Testimonial

The meaning of the term "fake news" and the dilution of that meaning.

It doesn't have to be just student feedback about the operations and mechanics of the course, or as a replacement for a course survey tool. You can also use the platform as a way to engage students on the content relevant to the learning outcomes of the course. And use the platform to connect learners with people in the field of study.

Fascinating distinction!

Did Media Literacy Backfire?

Media literacy asks people to raise questions and be wary of information that they’re receiving. People are. Unfortunately, that’s exactly why we’re talking past one another.

...

Addressing so-called fake news is going to require a lot more than labeling. It’s going to require a cultural change about how we make sense of information, whom we trust, and how we understand our own role in grappling with information.

Tweets deleted by public officials and candidates.

Lindy West's thoughtful and amusing goodbye to Twitter. She concisely describes Twitter's good and bad sides. Then she leaves me wondering if any of us should be using it.

I quit Twitter because it feels unconscionable to be a part of it – to generate revenue for it, participate in its profoundly broken culture and lend my name to its legitimacy. Twitter is home to a wealth of fantastic anti-Trump organising, as well, but I’m personally weary of feeling hostage to a platform that has treated me and the people I care about so poorly. We can do good work elsewhere.

I’m pretty sure “ushered in kleptocracy” would be a dealbreaker for any other company that wanted my business.

source: https://s3.amazonaws.com/prod_foundationapp/364221/lessons/35/1384378776-john-carlton-1.pdf

from: https://campus.thefoundation.com/courses/1/lessons/35

Selling user data should be illegal. And the customer data a company is allowed to collect and store should be very limited.

Under the guidance of Jared Kushner, a senior campaign advisor and son-in-law of President-Elect Trump, Parscale quietly began building his own list of Trump supporters. Trump’s revolutionary database, named Project Alamo, contains the identities of 220 million people in the United States, and approximately 4,000 to 5,000 individual data points about the online and offline life of each person. Funded entirely by the Trump campaign, this database is owned by Trump and continues to exist.

Trump’s Project Alamo database was also fed vast quantities of external data, including voter registration records, gun ownership records, credit card purchase histories, and internet account identities. The Trump campaign purchased this data from certified Facebook marketing partners Experian PLC, Datalogix, Epsilon, and Acxiom Corporation. (Read here for instructions on how to remove your information from the databases of these consumer data brokers.)

Trump's campaign used carefully targeted negative ads to suppress voter turnout.

With Project Alamo as ammunition, the Trump digital operations team covertly executed a massive digital last-stand strategy using targeted Facebook ads to ‘discourage’ Hillary Clinton supporters from voting. The Trump campaign poured money and resources into political advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, the Facebook Audience Network, and Facebook data-broker partners.

“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” a senior Trump official explained to reporters from BusinessWeek. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.”

100,000 personalized collections of lies.

Parscale also deployed software to optimize the design and messaging of Trump’s Facebook ads. Describing one such test, the Wall Street Journal reporter Christopher Mims writes that “one day in August, his campaign sprayed ads at Facebook users that led to 100,000 different webpages, each micro-targeted at a different segment of voters.” In total, Trump’s digital team built or generated more than 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content.

Donna Zuckerberg on replying to writers who are being harassed.

Helpful responses:

• "You're doing great work."
• "I'm sorry this is happening to you."
• Signal boost, if that's what they want.
• Support from old friends.
• Help from close friends and coworkers.

Less helpful:

• "That's horrible." (They already know.)
• "I reported the account." (She feels this doesn't accomplish anything. I think you should always report such accounts. You just don't need to tell the victim about it.)
• "What has this country come to?" (This sounds like you never noticed racism and sexism until recently.)
• "Hopefully it will stop soon." (The idea that the harassers have moved on to someone else is not a great comfort.)

Unhelpful:

• Don't ask, "What did you expect?"
• Don't suggest the victim should avoid writing about particular topics.
• Don't assume you know how they feel.
• Don't criticize them for showing the threats. (If there's some reason it bothers you, mute or unfollow.)

Hypothes.is nicely bridges the worlds of social media and formal education.

Twitter may be a platform that mostly lives in the public, but it isn't a public platform. It's also one of the reasons I have my own site.

http://digipo.io/doku.php<br> The Digital Polarization Initiative<br> "The primary purpose of this wiki is to provide a place for students to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in their Twitter and Facebook feeds. It's like a student-driven Snopes, but with a broader focus: we don't aim to just investigate myths, but to provide context and sanity to all the news – from the article about voter fraud to the health piece on a new cancer treatment."

http://phys.org/news/2016-12-pro-trump-bot-colonised-pro-clinton-twitter.html

http://politicalbots.org/?p=787 Bots and Automation over Twitter during the U.S. Election

http://politicalbots.org/ An international research group studying political bots.

The Web has become an insidious propaganda tool. To fight it, digital literacy education must rise beyond technical proficiency to include wisdom.

• Double-check every claim before you share.
• Be wary of casual scrolling.<br> Everything you see affects your attitudes.
• Don't automatically disbelieve the surreal (or unpleasant).
• Do not exaggerate your own claims.
• Be prepared to repeat the truth over and over.
• Curate good resources, and share updates to them.
  • It will reinforce the previous information.
  • it will boost search engine rankings of the collection.

A survey of voters asked if they remembered seeing a headline, and if so, whether they believed it was true.

It may come as no surprise that high percentages of Trump voters believed stories that favored Trump or demonized Clinton. But the percentage of Clinton voters who believed the fake stories was also fairly high!

familiarity equals truth: when we recognize something as true, we are most often judging if this is something we’ve heard more often than not from people we trust.

...

if you want to be well-informed it’s not enough to read the truth — you also must avoid reading lies.

An analysis of links among "fake news" sites and mainstream news sites and social media.

There’s a vast network of dubious “news” sites. Most are simple in design, and many appear to be made from the same web templates. These sites have created an ecosystem of real-time propaganda: they include viral hoax engines that can instantly shape public opinion through mass “reaction” to serious political topics and news events. This network is triggered on-demand to spread false, hyper-biased, and politically-loaded information.

Steve Bannon, founder of Breitbart News and the newly appointed chief strategist to Trump, is on Cambridge Analytica’s board and it has emerged that the company is in talks to undertake political messaging work for the Trump administration. It claims to have built psychological profiles using 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters. It knows their quirks and nuances and daily habits and can target them individually.

Boy, we have problems:

• Fake news. (Bad, but not as bas as...)
• Extremist propaganda (increasingly, from government)
• Disinformation created to cause chaos and distrust.
• Tracking of individuals to create personalized propaganda.
• Google, Facebook, etc. merrily amplifying it.

This is our internet. Not Google’s. Not Facebook’s. Not rightwing propagandists. And we’re the only ones who can reclaim it.

This is our nation, and our world.<br> It is up to us to reclaim it.

The fact that people are reading about these fake news stories and realising that this could have an effect on politics and elections, it’s like, ‘Which planet have you been living on?’ For Christ’s sake, this is obvious.”

It's only obvious once you realize how many people are exposed to bullshit daily, and how many people are stupid enough to listen to it.

If you aren't an idiot, and you don't associate with idiots, you can spend all day on the web every day and rarely see any of this shit.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of Web sites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers.

http://warontherocks.com/2016/11/trolling-for-trump-how-russia-is-trying-to-destroy-our-democracy

Another group, PropOrNot, is supposed to be releasing their study on Russian propaganda tomorrow, 25 November. [Update: PropOrNot apparently labelled so many sites as "Russian propaganda" that it is practically a piece of disinformation all by itself. Maybe they're Russian. :) http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-propaganda-about-russian-propaganda

The users of a subreddit devoted to Donald Trump have been a big hassle for Reddit moderators

“At this point, I think reddit is a lost cause because of the admins inability to take action on the group while simultaneously being overwhelmed with dealing with the individual,” a moderator told us. “No other subreddit has been able to be used [as] a platform for harassment for this long in Reddit’s history. And it’s likely going to be what kills it.” Said another: “The social experiment has run its course.”

The names and pseudonyms of multiple sources in this story have been omitted to protect their anonymity due to credible threats.

Interview with a man who has run several fake news sites since 2013.

Well, this isn't just a Trump-supporter problem. This is a right-wing issue.

...

We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.

Journalism faces an 'existential crisis' in the Trump era, Christine Amanpour

As all the international journalists we honor in this room tonight and every year know only too well: First the media is accused of inciting, then sympathizing, then associating -- until they suddenly find themselves accused of being full-fledged terrorists and subversives. Then they end up in handcuffs, in cages, in kangaroo courts, in prison

...

First, like many people watching where I was overseas, I admit I was shocked by the exceptionally high bar put before one candidate and the exceptionally low bar put before the other candidate.

It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth.

...

The winning candidate did a savvy end run around us and used it to go straight to the people. Combined with the most incredible development ever -- the tsunami of fake news sites -- aka lies -- that somehow people could not, would not, recognize, fact check, or disregard.

...

The conservative radio host who may be the next white house press secretary says mainstream media is hostile to traditional values.

I would say it's just the opposite. And have you read about the "heil, victory" meeting in Washington, DC this past weekend? Why aren't there more stories about the dangerous rise of the far right here and in Europe? Since when did anti-Semitism stop being a litmus test in this country?

Paul Horner publishes fake news that is often shared widely. He claims that his stories are intended to be taken as satire like The Onion.

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.

My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

this is not exclusive to Facebook and Twitter, or just during this election. We suck at understanding history or considering the future when we adopt new technologies -- this is often intentional. We need to make sure we are this critical when any new technology comes along, and work hard to understand the historical motives and ideology behind the tech, as well as get better at exploring possible dystopian futures brought on by each technological tool

https://iheartmob.org/<br> http://www.troll-busters.com/<br> http://wmcspeechproject.com/

HeartMob, TrollBusters, and the Women's Media Center Speech Project provide support for people being harassed online.

But as managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, Brooke Binkowski believes Facebook’s perpetuation of phony news is not to blame for our epidemic of misinformation. “It’s not social media that’s the problem,” she says emphatically. “People are looking for somebody to pick on. The alt-rights have been empowered and that’s not going to go away anytime soon. But they also have always been around.”

The misinformation crisis, according to Binkowski, stems from something more pernicious. In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly.

The problem is not JUST social media and fake news. But most of the false stories do not come from mainstream media. The greatest evils of mainstream media are sensationalism, and being too willing to spin stories the way their sources want them to.

But a former employee, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, disagrees and says his old boss is being "more than a little disingenuous here."

...

"There's an entire political team and a massive office in D.C. that tries to convince political advertisers that Facebook can convince users to vote one way or the other," Garcia-Martinez says. "Then Zuck gets up and says, 'Oh, by the way, Facebook content couldn't possibly influence the election.' It's contradictory on the face of it."

Mike Caulfield says Facebook's feed algorithms are far from its only problem. The entire site design encourages sharing of items that users haven't inspected beyond reading the headline.

People are definitely losing jobs and opportunities based on their social media presence. Distasteful photos should not even be taken let alone shared online.

Facebook hasn’t told the public very much about how its algorithm works. But we know that one of the company’s top priorities for the news feed is “engagement.” The company tries to choose posts that people are likely to read, like, and share with their friends. Which, they hope, will induce people to return to the site over and over again.

This would be a reasonable way to do things if Facebook were just a way of finding your friends’ cutest baby pictures. But it’s more troubling as a way of choosing the news stories people read. Essentially, Facebook is using the same criteria as a supermarket tabloid: giving people the most attention-grabbing headlines without worrying about whether articles are fair, accurate, or important.

This is a modern update to a classic confidence game—find a risky scenario with limited possibilities, bet on every single combination, and then hide your failures.

Today, all possible outcomes can be posted to any website that allows accounts to be set to private, or that isn't likely to be noticed. After the fact, the incorrect results can be deleted before making the account public.

This post points out that this trick could be used to "predict" election results, making it appear that they were fixed ahead of time. So it's potentially very dangerous.

23 suggested improvements for Twitter, mostly related to dealing with harassment. (13 Feb 2016)