55 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2023
    1. This 1% of humanity uses its awesome power to manipulate societal aspirations and the narratives around climate change.
      • for: quote - Kevin Anderson, quote - 1% manipulation

      • quote

        • This 1% of humanity uses its awesome power to manipulate
          • societal aspirations and
          • the narratives around climate change.
        • These extend from
          • well-funded advertising to
          • pseudo-technical solutions,
          • the financialisation of carbon emissions (and increasingly, nature) to
          • labelling extreme any meaningful narrative that questions inequality and power.
  2. Aug 2023
    1. The big tech companies, left to their own devices (so to speak), have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide. At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose – aggressive surveillance, arbitrary suppression of content (the censorship problem), and the subtle manipulation of thoughts, behaviors, votes, purchases, attitudes and beliefs – are unchecked worldwide
      • for: quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias,quote - future of democracy, quote - tilting elections, quote - progress trap, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap, indyweb - support, future - education
      • quote
        • The big tech companies, left to their own devices , have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide.
        • At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose
          • aggressive surveillance,
          • arbitrary suppression of content,
            • the censorship problem, and
          • the subtle manipulation of
            • thoughts,
            • behaviors,
            • votes,
            • purchases,
            • attitudes and
            • beliefs
          • are unchecked worldwide
      • author: Robert Epstein
        • senior research psychologist at American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology
      • paraphrase
        • Epstein's organization is building two technologies that assist in combating these problems:
          • passively monitor what big tech companies are showing people online,
          • smart algorithms that will ultimately be able to identify online manipulations in realtime:
            • biased search results,
            • biased search suggestions,
            • biased newsfeeds,
            • platform-generated targeted messages,
            • platform-engineered virality,
            • shadow-banning,
            • email suppression, etc.
        • Tech evolves too quickly to be managed by laws and regulations,
          • but monitoring systems are tech, and they can and will be used to curtail the destructive and dangerous powers of companies like Google and Facebook on an ongoing basis.
      • reference
      • for: titling elections, voting - social media, voting - search engine bias, SEME, search engine manipulation effect, Robert Epstein
      • summary
        • research that shows how search engines can actually bias towards a political candidate in an election and tilt the election in favor of a particular party.
    1. In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013, we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
      • for: search engine manipulation effect, SEME, voting, voting - bias, voting - manipulation, voting - search engine bias, democracy - search engine bias, quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias, stats, stats - tilting elections
      • paraphrase
      • quote
        • In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013,
        • we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
        • 2015 PNAS research on SEME
          • http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes&ref=hackernoon.com
          • stats begin
          • search results favoring one candidate
          • could easily shift the opinions and voting preferences of real voters in real elections by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups
          • with virtually no one knowing they had been manipulated.
          • stats end
          • Worse still, the few people who had noticed that we were showing them biased search results
          • generally shifted even farther in the direction of the bias,
          • so being able to spot favoritism in search results is no protection against it.
          • stats begin
          • Google’s search engine 
            • with or without any deliberate planning by Google employees 
          • was currently determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the world’s national elections.
          • This is because Google’s search engine lacks an equal-time rule,
            • so it virtually always favors one candidate over another, and that in turn shifts the preferences of undecided voters.
          • Because many elections are very close, shifting the preferences of undecided voters can easily tip the outcome.
          • stats end
    2. Early in 2013, Ronald Robertson, now a doctoral candidate at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, and I discovered that Google isn’t just spying on us; it also has the power to exert an enormous impact on our opinions, purchases and votes.
      • for: big tech - bias, big tech - manipulation, big tech - mind control, big tech - influence
      • paraphrase
        • Early in 2013, Ronald Robertson,
          • now a doctoral candidate at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston,
        • and I discovered that Google isn’t just spying on us;
          • it also has the power to exert an enormous impact on our opinions, purchases and votes.
  3. Dec 2022
    1. We find that, during the pandemic, no-vax communities became more central in the country-specificdebates and their cross-border connections strengthened, revealing a global Twitter anti-vaccinationnetwork. U.S. users are central in this network, while Russian users also become net exporters ofmisinformation during vaccination roll-out. Interestingly, we find that Twitter’s content moderationefforts, and in particular the suspension of users following the January 6th U.S. Capitol attack, had aworldwide impact in reducing misinformation spread about vaccines. These findings may help publichealth institutions and social media platforms to mitigate the spread of health-related, low-credibleinformation by revealing vulnerable online communities
    1. On Facebook, we identified 51,269 posts (0.25% of all posts)sharing links to Russian propaganda outlets, generating 5,065,983interactions (0.17% of all interactions); 80,066 posts (0.4% of allposts) sharing links to low-credibility news websites, generating28,334,900 interactions (0.95% of all interactions); and 147,841 postssharing links to high-credibility news websites (0.73% of all posts),generating 63,837,701 interactions (2.13% of all interactions). Asshown in Figure 2, we notice that the number of posts sharingRussian propaganda and low-credibility news exhibits an increas-ing trend (Mann-Kendall 𝑃 < .001), whereas after the invasion ofUkraine both time series yield a significant decreasing trend (moreprominent in the case of Russian propaganda); high-credibilitycontent also exhibits an increasing trend in the Pre-invasion pe-riod (Mann-Kendall 𝑃 < .001), which becomes stable (no trend)in the period afterward. T
    2. We estimated the contribution of veri-fied accounts to sharing and amplifying links to Russian propagandaand low-credibility sources, noticing that they have a dispropor-tionate role. In particular, superspreaders of Russian propagandaare mostly accounts verified by both Facebook and Twitter, likelydue to Russian state-run outlets having associated accounts withverified status. In the case of generic low-credibility sources, a sim-ilar result applies to Facebook but not to Twitter, where we alsonotice a few superspreaders accounts that are not verified by theplatform.
    3. On Twitter, the picture is very similar in the case of Russianpropaganda, where all accounts are verified (with a few exceptions)and mostly associated with news outlets, and generate over 68%of all retweets linking to these websites (see panel a of Figure 4).For what concerns low-credibility news, there are both verified (wecan notice the presence of seanhannity) and not verified users,and only a few of them are directly associated with websites (e.g.zerohedge or Breaking911). Here the top 15 accounts generateroughly 30% of all retweets linking to low-credibility websites.
    4. Figure 5: Top 15 spreaders of Russian propaganda (a) andlow-credibility content (b) ranked by the proportion ofretweets generated over the period of observation, with re-spect to all retweets linking to websites in each group. Weindicate those that are not verified using “hatched” bars

    1. We applied two scenarios to compare how these regular agents behave in the Twitter network, with and without malicious agents, to study how much influence malicious agents have on the general susceptibility of the regular users. To achieve this, we implemented a belief value system to measure how impressionable an agent is when encountering misinformation and how its behavior gets affected. The results indicated similar outcomes in the two scenarios as the affected belief value changed for these regular agents, exhibiting belief in the misinformation. Although the change in belief value occurred slowly, it had a profound effect when the malicious agents were present, as many more regular agents started believing in misinformation.

    1. We analyzed and visualized Twitter data during the prevalence of the Wuhan lab leak theory and discovered that 29% of the accounts participating in the discussion were social bots. We found evidence that social bots play an essential mediating role in communication networks. Although human accounts have a more direct influence on the information diffusion network, social bots have a more indirect influence. Unverified social bot accounts retweet more, and through multiple levels of diffusion, humans are vulnerable to messages manipulated by bots, driving the spread of unverified messages across social media. These findings show that limiting the use of social bots might be an effective method to minimize the spread of conspiracy theories and hate speech online.
  4. Sep 2022
    1. Even our ability to detect online manipulation is affected by our political bias, though not symmetrically: Republican users are more likely to mistake bots promoting conservative ideas for humans, whereas Democrats are more likely to mistake conservative human users for bots.
  5. Aug 2022
    1. MakerDAO liquidations on March 12 and 13

      A company that keeps data on Ethereum mempools around the world, Blocknative, may have an explanation for the "zero-bid" attack on MakerDAO on Black Thursday. Mempools are a holding bin for transactions waiting to get mined into blocks. Under market stress, they tend to get clogged. Blocknative found an endless stream of clever, worthless transactions in mempools on the day of the attack, apparently designed to make it hard for transactions to get through. Falling ETH prices triggered auctions of collateral on MakerDAO. Because the mempools were clogged, bidders could not get bids on those auctions through in many cases, allowing attackers to win ETH collateral with bids worth $0. The attackers walked away with $8.3 million

  6. www.janeausten.pludhlab.org www.janeausten.pludhlab.org
    1. Colonel Wallis’s gallantry

      Colonel Wallis is very useful - telling the Elliot's about the first wife earlier and here ensuring Mr Elliot gets the seat by Anne, then distracting Elizabeth to keep her happy. He's been, I think, entirely removed from the adaptations. This the only time we see him in the book

    1. Such optical modulation of atomic motion is an alternative path towards realizing 2D electronic states and will be a useful platform upon which novel phases in quantum materials may be discovered.
  7. Jul 2022
    1. If you do not have an iOS device or a machine running OS X to open your IMOVIEMOBILE file, you can still access its contents. First, copy the IMOVIEMOBILE file, rename the file extension to "zip", decompress the file, and the project content will be in a folder called "Assets." You can then open the original content in a video editing program.

      It's not rational, but I'd like to note how angy I am with myself in retrospect for not looking this up before. I have literally given up on old project files because I assumed the video was unretrievable and then... I just did this on my iPad in a matter of seconds lol.

  8. Apr 2022
    1. Nick Sawyer, MD, MBA, FACEP [@NickSawyerMD]. (2022, January 3). The anti-vaccine community created a manipulated version of VARES that misrepresents the VAERS data. #disinformationdoctors use this data to falsely claim that vaccines CAUSE bad outcomes, when the relationship is only CORRELATED. Watch this explainer: Https://youtu.be/VMUQSMFGBDo https://t.co/ruRY6E6blB [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/NickSawyerMD/status/1477806470192197633

  9. Mar 2022
    1. Each highlighted statement expresses political talking points aligned to induce trump-like support.

      Trump introduced new marketing and strategy, formulated using concepts and metrics mastered by Reality TV and Hollywood and then paired with advertising propaganda and "selling" techniques to create a "Brand". This is after-all Donald Trump, this is what he does, has done and is the only way he has found to make money. Trump built the "brand" (just barely) while teetering on self destruction.

      His charismatic persona became "the glue" that allowed creative narratives to stick to certain types of people in-spite of risk. Trump learned OTJ how to capture a specific type of audience.

      The mistake people make about Trump is assuming his audience to be "Joe Six-Pack", redneck's with limited education! This assumption does not have merit on its own.<br /> * There is a common "follower" theme among his audience that is exploited by those who: * Bought the "licensing rights" to the master-class Trump "how-to" course.

  10. Jan 2022
    1. Put more simply, the product is dirt — four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping.

      Oh my god! It's like a family friendly version of Bell Delphine's bath water! It's a useless product sold for ridiculous prices to an audience that is desperately looking for something to fill a space. In one case, it was a want for some physical representation of an idol, and in this case, it was a want for a solution to COVId or a feeling of security. If we were to relate this to the game we played in the blog post assignment, then I would probably classify this as emotional manipulation. People looking to feel secure in their health while the pandemic rages were taken advantage of by this company selling dirt.

  11. Dec 2021
    1. With text replacement, you can use shortcuts to replace longer phrases. When you enter the shortcut in a text field, the phrase automatically replaces it. For example, you could type "GM" and "Good morning" would automatically replace it.  To manage text replacement, tap Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement.  To add a text replacement, tap the Add button , then enter your phrase and shortcut. When you're done, tap Save.  To remove a text replacement, tap Edit, tap the Remove button  then tap Delete. To save your changes, tap Done.

      They also have another, debatably much more relevant function Apple’s docs don’t acknowledge!

      Setting the same values for Phraseand Shortcut in this menu basically achieves the same thing as “Learn Spelling.”

    1. obrázok je údajne screenshot z webu novinky.cz. neuvádza sa však odkaz na článok, ktorý je na screenshote przentovaný. Pri snahe nájsť pôvodný článok som neuspela. Nenašla som cez prehliadač ani titulok, ani text, ktorý mala údajne osoba v texte povedať. Nič podobné som nenašla ani pri hľadaní priamo na novinky.cz. Článok, ktorý je na "screenshote" neexistuje a "Screenshot" bol vytvorený umelo ako montáž. Podnecuje odpor a strach z očkovania, pretože tvrdí, že hlavná hygienička Pavla Svrčinová povedala, že ak by sa nechala zaočkovať, tak zomrie.

  12. May 2021
  13. Mar 2021
    1. Democrat Chicago to allow the economy to open up less than a week after Biden's inauguration...it's all planned to make Biden appear successful! Democrats allowed millions of people to suffer and lose businesses all for their own greed and power!
  14. Feb 2021
    1. The Quest for Truth

      The quest for Truth is everywhere and not limited to the economic topics linked here. This is just a topic that started a thought process where I had access to a convenient tool (Hypothesis) to bookmark my thoughts and research.

      Primary thought is: The Quest for Truth. Subcategories would provide a structured topic for the thought. In this case the subcategory would be: US Economy, Inflation

      The TRUTH is a concept comprised of inconsistencies and targets that frequently move.

      Targets (data, methods, people, time, semantics, agenda, demographic, motive, means, media, money, status) hold a position in time long enough to fulfill a purpose or agenda. Sometimes they don't consciously change, but history over time shines light and opens cracks in original narrative that leads to new truth's, real or imagined.

      Verifying and validating certain Truth is very difficult. Why is That?
  15. Aug 2020
  16. Jul 2020
    1. This encounter then came to mind during a smaller conference the following spring when Tony Kubiak spoke of the recent creation of a chimeric human-cat protein intended to block allergic reactions (in humans).6

      Genetic manipulation has been a running gag/ideal within the furry community for as long as it has existed. The idea of transformation by any means possible is appealing, and these sorts of genetic components would go a long way in establishing that sense of identity.

  17. Jun 2020
    1. anchoring products - stating what products would otherwise sell for, while advocating that purchasers buy sooner than later such that they receive the products for cheap

      -> creation of urgency

    2. particularization and discrete-formation of activity - activity is reduced from an ambiguous relationship of activities to singular "do this" or "do that" activities for ambiguous "success"

  18. Apr 2020
  19. Mar 2020
    1. We are not sensible, free thinking decision making people. As an individual I imagine that you will say "Yes I am". That's the beauty of the entire system. Consciously individuals believe that they are in control and make their own choices and yet I have met and experienced very few who have full autonomy
    2. The deceitful obfuscation of commercial intention certainly runs all the way through the data brokering and ad tech industries that sit behind much of the ‘free’ consumer Internet. Here consumers have plainly been kept in the dark so they cannot see and object to how their personal information is being handed around, sliced and diced, and used to try to manipulate them.
    3. From an ad tech perspective, the concern is that manipulation doesn’t work when it’s obvious. And the goal of targeted advertising is to manipulate people’s decisions based on intelligence about them gleaned via clandestine surveillance of their online activity (so inferring who they are via their data). This might be a purchase decision. Equally it might be a vote.
    4. So it’s not surprising that Facebook is so coy about explaining why a certain user on its platform is seeing a specific advert. Because if the huge surveillance operation underpinning the algorithmic decision to serve a particular ad was made clear, the person seeing it might feel manipulated. And then they would probably be less inclined to look favorably upon the brand they were being urged to buy. Or the political opinion they were being pushed to form. And Facebook’s ad tech business stands to suffer.
  20. Dec 2019
    1. Before we pursue further direct discussion of the H-LAM/T system, let us examine some background material. Consider the following historical progression in the development of our intellectual capabilities:2c4a 2c4b (1) Concept Manipulation—Humans rose above the lower forms of life by evolving the biological capability for developing abstractions and concepts. They could manipulate these concepts within their minds to a certain extent, and think about situations in the abstract. Their mental capabilities allowed them to develop general concepts from specific instances, predict specific instances from general concepts, associate concepts, remember them, etc. We speak here of concepts in their raw, unverbalized form. For example, a person letting a door swing shut behind him suddenly visualizes the person who follows him carrying a cup of hot coffee and some sticky pastries. Of all the aspects of the pending event, the spilling of the coffee and the squashing of the pastry somehow are abstracted immediately, and associated with a concept of personal responsibility and a dislike for these consequences. But a solution comes to mind immediately as an image of a quick stop and an arm stab back toward the door, with motion and timing that could prevent the collision, and the solution is accepted and enacted. With only non-symbolic concept manipulation, we could probably build primitive shelter, evolve strategies of war and hunt, play games, and make practical jokes. But further powers of intellectual effectiveness are implicit in this stage of biological evolution (the same stage we are in today).2c4b1 (2) Symbol Manipulation—Humans made another great step forward when they learned to represent particular concepts in their minds with specific symbols. Here we temporarily disregard communicative speech and writing, and consider only the direct value to the individual of being able to do his heavy thinking by mentally manipulating symbols instead of the more unwieldly concepts which they represent. Consider, for instance, the mental difficulty involved in herding twenty-seven sheep if, instead of remembering one cardinal number and occasionally counting, we had to remember what each sheep looked like, so that if the flock seemed too small we could visualize each one and check whether or not it was there.2c4b2 (3) Manual, External, Symbol Manipulation—Another significant step toward harnessing the biologically evolved mental capabilities in pursuit of comprehension and problem solutions came with the development of the means for externalizing some of the symbol-manipulation activity, particularly in graphical representation. This supplemented the individual's memory and ability to visualize. (We are not concerned here with the value derived from human cooperation made possible by speech and writing, both forms of external symbol manipulation. We speak of the manual means of making graphical representations of symbols—a stick and sand, pencil and paper and eraser, straight edge or compass, and so on.) It is principally this kind of means for external symbol manipulation that has been associated with the evolution of the individual's present way of doing his concept manipulation (thinking).
  21. Sep 2018
    1. We can’t force two people to become friends, nor should we want to.

      How many social engineers does it take to change a light bulb? An infinite number. That's why they leave you in the dark till you become the change you seek and make your own light to live by.

      If you cant force two people to become friends, then how do 'diplomats' (political manipulators?) profess to do the same thing with entire nations? Especially while so often, using the other hand to deal the deck for other players, in a game of "let's you and him fight"; or just being bloody mercenaries with sheer might is right political ethos installed under various euphemistic credos. 'My country right or wrong' or 'Mitt Got Uns' or ...to discover weapons of mass destruction...etc.

      So much for politics and social engineering, but maybe we can just be content with not so much forcing two people to be friends, as forcing them to have sex while we're filming them, so we can create more online amateur porn content. LOL ;)

  22. Jul 2018
    1. In short, the "language of time" identified here is by no means a merely intellectual phenomenon invented by sociology. Not only are we all aware of its existence, we also use it quite actively in our own "speech."7 The manipulative use of temporality is quite evident not only at the macrosocial level of societal politics, but also at the microsocial level of interpersonal relations. We employ the language of time quite strategically in our every- day "speech" and, quite often, what appears on the surface as entirely spontaneous behavior may actually involve a deliberate manipulation of temporal circu

      The language of time incorporates "deliberate mainpulation of temporal circumstances."

      People use symbolic associations to convey special meanings to certain periods of time. Example provided is a late night phone call that hints at a desire for a closer, more intimate relationship.

  23. May 2018
  24. Oct 2013
    1. make his audience feel

      I like that he stresses manipulating the audience's perception of the speaker, rather than actually seeking to possess positive qualities. ;)