#facebook tech support number

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Mar 13) in SAN FRANCISCO with ROBIN SLOAN, then Toronto, NYC, Anaheim, and more!

Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for The New York Times reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html

Almost every car manufacturer does this: Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler, etc etc:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2020/09/09/ford-state-farm-ford-metromile-honda-verisk-among-insurer-oem-telematics-connections/

This is true whether you own or lease the car, and it's separate from the "black box" your insurer might have offered to you in exchange for a discount on your premiums. In other words, even if you say no to the insurer's carrot – a surveillance-based discount – they've got a stick in reserve: buying your nonconsensually harvested data on the open market.

I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.

Take Apple. The company offers Ios users a one-tap opt-out from commercial surveillance, and more than 96% of users opted out. Presumably, the other 4% were either confused or on Facebook's payroll. Apple – and its army of cultists – insist that this proves that our world's woes can be traced to cheapskate "consumers" who expected to get something for nothing by using advertising-supported products.

But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product – provided the company can get away with treating you as the product. Apple can absolutely get away with treating you as the product, because it lacks the historical constraints that prevented Apple – and other companies – from treating you as the product.

As I described in my McLuhan lecture on enshittification, tech firms can be constrained by four forces:

I. Competition

II. Regulation

III. Self-help

IV. Labor

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

When companies have real competitors – when a sector is composed of dozens or hundreds of roughly evenly matched firms – they have to worry that a maltreated customer might move to a rival. 40 years of antitrust neglect means that corporations were able to buy their way to dominance with predatory mergers and pricing, producing today's inbred, Habsburg capitalism. Apple and Google are a mobile duopoly, Google is a search monopoly, etc. It's not just tech! Every sector looks like this:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Eliminating competition doesn't just deprive customers of alternatives, it also empowers corporations. Liberated from "wasteful competition," companies in concentrated industries can extract massive profits. Think of how both Apple and Google have "competitively" arrived at the same 30% app tax on app sales and transactions, a rate that's more than 1,000% higher than the transaction fees extracted by the (bloated, price-gouging) credit-card sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax

But cartels' power goes beyond the size of their warchest. The real source of a cartel's power is the ease with which a small number of companies can arrive at – and stick to – a common lobbying position. That's where "regulatory capture" comes in: the mobile duopoly has an easier time of capturing its regulators because two companies have an easy time agreeing on how to spend their app-tax billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Apple – and Google, and Facebook, and your car company – can violate your privacy because they aren't constrained regulation, just as Uber can violate its drivers' labor rights and Amazon can violate your consumer rights. The tech cartels have captured their regulators and convinced them that the law doesn't apply if it's being broken via an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

In other words, Apple can spy on you because it's allowed to spy on you. America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. Congress has taken no action on consumer privacy since the Reagan years:

https://www.eff.org/tags/video-privacy-protection-act

But tech has some special enshittification-resistant characteristics. The most important of these is interoperability: the fact that computers are universal digital machines that can run any program. HP can design a printer that rejects third-party ink and charge $10,000/gallon for its own colored water, but someone else can write a program that lets you jailbreak your printer so that it accepts any ink cartridge:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Tech companies that contemplated enshittifying their products always had to watch over their shoulders for a rival that might offer a disenshittification tool and use that as a wedge between the company and its customers. If you make your website's ads 20% more obnoxious in anticipation of a 2% increase in gross margins, you have to consider the possibility that 40% of your users will google "how do I block ads?" Because the revenue from a user who blocks ads doesn't stay at 100% of the current levels – it drops to zero, forever (no user ever googles "how do I stop blocking ads?").

The majority of web users are running an ad-blocker:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Web operators made them an offer ("free website in exchange for unlimited surveillance and unfettered intrusions") and they made a counteroffer ("how about 'nah'?"):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Here's the thing: reverse-engineering an app – or any other IP-encumbered technology – is a legal minefield. Just decompiling an app exposes you to felony prosecution: a five year sentence and a $500k fine for violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. But it's not just the DMCA – modern products are surrounded with high-tech tripwires that allow companies to invoke IP law to prevent competitors from augmenting, recongifuring or adapting their products. When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere. When companies don't have to worry about users deploying self-help measures to disenshittify their products, they are freed from the constraint that prevents them indulging the impulse to shift value from their customers to themselves.

Apple owes its existence to interoperability – its ability to clone Microsoft Office's file formats for Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which saved the company in the early 2000s – and ever since, it has devoted its existence to making sure no one ever does to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Regulatory capture cuts both ways: it's not just about powerful corporations being free to flout the law, it's also about their ability to enlist the law to punish competitors that might constrain their plans for exploiting their workers, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.

The final historical constraint on tech companies was their own workers. Tech has very low union-density, but that's in part because individual tech workers enjoyed so much bargaining power due to their scarcity. This is why their bosses pampered them with whimsical campuses filled with gourmet cafeterias, fancy gyms and free massages: it allowed tech companies to convince tech workers to work like government mules by flattering them that they were partners on a mission to bring the world to its digital future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

For tech bosses, this gambit worked well, but failed badly. On the one hand, they were able to get otherwise powerful workers to consent to being "extremely hardcore" by invoking Fobazi Ettarh's spirit of "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

On the other hand, when you motivate your workers by appealing to their sense of mission, the downside is that they feel a sense of mission. That means that when you demand that a tech worker enshittifies something they missed their mother's funeral to deliver, they will experience a profound sense of moral injury and refuse, and that worker's bargaining power means that they can make it stick.

Or at least, it did. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/

With competition, regulation, self-help and labor cleared away, tech firms – and firms that have wrapped their products around the pluripotently malleable core of digital tech, including automotive makers – are no longer constrained from enshittifying their products.

And that's why your car manufacturer has chosen to spy on you and sell your private information to data-brokers and anyone else who wants it. Not because you didn't pay for the product, so you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

Cars are enshittified. The dozens of chips that auto makers have shoveled into their car design are only incidentally related to delivering a better product. The primary use for those chips is autoenshittification – access to legal strictures ("IP") that allows them to block modifications and repairs that would interfere with the unfettered abuse of their own customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The fact that it's a felony to reverse-engineer and modify a car's software opens the floodgates to all kinds of shitty scams. Remember when Bay Staters were voting on a ballot measure to impose right-to-repair obligations on automakers in Massachusetts? The only reason they needed to have the law intervene to make right-to-repair viable is that Big Car has figured out that if it encrypts its diagnostic messages, it can felonize third-party diagnosis of a car, because decrypting the messages violates the DMCA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-consumers-crazy

Big Car figured out that VIN locking – DRM for engine components and subassemblies – can felonize the production and the installation of third-party spare parts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

The fact that you can't legally modify your car means that automakers can go back to their pre-2008 ways, when they transformed themselves into unregulated banks that incidentally manufactured the cars they sold subprime loans for. Subprime auto loans – over $1t worth! – absolutely relies on the fact that borrowers' cars can be remotely controlled by lenders. Miss a payment and your car's stereo turns itself on and blares threatening messages at top volume, which you can't turn off. Break the lease agreement that says you won't drive your car over the county line and it will immobilize itself. Try to change any of this software and you'll commit a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Tesla, naturally, has the most advanced anti-features. Long before BMW tried to rent you your seat-heater and Mercedes tried to sell you a monthly subscription to your accelerator pedal, Teslas were demon-haunted nightmare cars. Miss a Tesla payment and the car will immobilize itself and lock you out until the repo man arrives, then it will blare its horn and back itself out of its parking spot. If you "buy" the right to fully charge your car's battery or use the features it came with, you don't own them – they're repossessed when your car changes hands, meaning you get less money on the used market because your car's next owner has to buy these features all over again:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

And all this DRM allows your car maker to install spyware that you're not allowed to remove. They really tipped their hand on this when the R2R ballot measure was steaming towards an 80% victory, with wall-to-wall scare ads that revealed that your car collects so much information about you that allowing third parties to access it could lead to your murder (no, really!):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

That's why your car spies on you. Because it can. Because the company that made it lacks constraint, be it market-based, legal, technological or its own workforce's ethics.

One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/

What this criticism misses is that this isn't the companies bargaining to shift some value from us to them. Enshittification happens when a company can seize all that value, without having to bargain, exploiting law and technology and market power over buyers and sellers to unilaterally alter the way the products and services we rely on work.

A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can take. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Your car spying on you isn't down to your belief that your carmaker "should provide you with amazing products, which brings your joy and happiness you spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return." It's not because you didn't pay for the product, so now you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

The consequences of this spying go much further than mere insurance premium hikes, too. Car telemetry sits at the top of the funnel that the unbelievably sleazy data broker industry uses to collect and sell our data. These are the same companies that sell the fact that you visited an abortion clinic to marketers, bounty hunters, advertisers, or vengeful family members pretending to be one of those:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

Decades of pro-monopoly policy led to widespread regulatory capture. Corporate cartels use the monopoly profits they extract from us to pay for regulatory inaction, allowing them to extract more profits.

But when it comes to privacy, that period of unchecked corporate power might be coming to an end. The lack of privacy regulation is at the root of so many problems that a pro-privacy movement has an unstoppable constituency working in its favor.

At EFF, we call this "privacy first." Whether you're worried about grifters targeting vulnerable people with conspiracy theories, or teens being targeted with media that harms their mental health, or Americans being spied on by foreign governments, or cops using commercial surveillance data to round up protesters, or your car selling your data to insurance companies, passing that long-overdue privacy legislation would turn off the taps for the data powering all these harms:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

Traditional economics fails because it thinks about markets without thinking about power. Monopolies lead to more than market power: they produce regulatory capture, power over workers, and state capture, which felonizes competition through IP law. The story that our problems stem from the fact that we just don't spend enough money, or buy the wrong products, only makes sense if you willfully ignore the power that corporations exert over our lives. It's nice to think that you can shop your way out of a monopoly, because that's a lot easier than voting your way out of a monopoly, but no matter how many times you vote with your wallet, the cartels that control the market will always win:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[togglesbloggle]

Why do you think tumblr will die in only a few years?

Answer with jargon: a strong correlation between recent economic shifts and chaotic choices by major tech companies is most easily explained if the 'traditional' social media platforms of 2005-2020 are mostly a zero-interest rate phenomenon.

Longer answer, with less jargon: Even though Musk's takeover is making all the headlines recently, the last year has in fact seen major shakeups at many social media platforms, so Twitter is actually part of a trend. Almost inevitably, these are cases of social media companies trying to find a way to squeeze more money out of their userbase (Reddit), cut costs dramatically (Twitter), or both. This marks a sudden departure from a much more relaxed attitude towards revenue in the Pictures Of Cats industry, where the focus was historically more on expanding the userbase to a global scale and then counting on world domination to sort of <????> and then the company would become profitable eventually.

We joke, correctly, that Tumblr has never been profitable. But the entire structure of ad-supported content curation between human users is deeply suspect as a business model; IIRC Twitter was never profitable either, and Facebook has been juicing its numbers in very shenanigany ways. Discord was actually making money on net last I checked, at least a bit, so they're not all completely in the hole. But even if you take the accounting figures at face value, none of these companies has anything like the amount of money that their cultural prominence would suggest. Instead, they're heavily fueled by investment dollars, money given by super-rich people and institutions in the expectation that fueling the growth of the company now will pay off with interest later.

So what changed?

I'm not an expert here, but I'll do my best to muddle through. The American Federal Reserve has one mandate that dominates all others (sometimes called the 'dual mandate'), and one primary tool that it uses to enforce that mandate. The goal is to maintain low (but nonzero) rates of inflation and unemployment, which in their models are deeply interlinked phenomena. The tool is 'rate hikes', or more specifically, tweaking the mandatory rate of interest that banks charge one another when making loans.

As a particular consequence of this, hiking the rate also means that bonds start paying out much better. When the rate hike goes through, that affects people who let the government borrow their personal cash- that is, people who buy bonds- as well as institutions like banks that lend to one another. A rate hike means that you, personally, can make a little extra money by letting the government borrow it for a while. The federal government of the US is a rock-solid low-risk choice for this kind of moneymaking scheme, so the federal interest rate sort of defines the 'number to beat'; to attract investors, a company has to give those investors money at a better percentage than whatever the feds are offering. Particularly since a company is a lot more likely to go out of business than the state!

To wrap this back around to the Pictures Of Cats industry: the higher the rate hike, the better your company needs to be doing (or the less risky it needs to be as an option) to attract big investment dollars. Very high rates make it very hard to convince people to invest in business activity rather than the government itself, and very low rates put moonshots and big dreams on the table, investment-wise, in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Social media companies were one of these big dreams.

In the great financial crisis of 2008, the Fed took the dramatic step of reducing their rate to zero, trying to juice the economy back to life. And ever since then, they've kept it there. This has produced an unprecedented amount of funding for very crazy stuff; it's part of what has allowed so many weird new tech companies (Uber, streaming services, etc.) to get so much money, so quickly, and use that to grow to massive size without a clear model of how they're ever going to make money. This state of affairs kept going for quite a while, with no clear stopping point; that zero-interest environment has been one of the shadowy forces in the background that shaped fundamental contours and limits in how our Very Online World has grown and developed. Until COVID.

Or rather, the bounce back from COVID: we suddenly saw a massive spike in inflation and an incredibly strong labor market, as employees quit in record numbers, negotiated higher salaries, and found better work, and at the same time supply chain issues and other economy stuff caused prices to climb dramatically. Recall the Fed's 'dual mandate', to control the employment rate and inflation. This was, basically, kicking them right in the jooblies. They responded in kind, finally finally raising their rates for the first time in 15 years. For some of the people reading this, it'll be the first significant shift in their entire adult lives.

The goal, as I understand it, is to fight inflation by reducing the amount of outside investment into private companies, forcing them to hire fewer people and pay smaller salaries, ultimately drawing money out of the working economy and driving prices back down by lowering demand for everything. You get paid less, so you eat out less, and buy at cheaper restaurants when you do, so restaurants have to compete harder by lowering their prices; seems pretty dodgy to me as a theory, but it's the theory. And the first part will almost certainly work- companies are going to see less investment.

For social media companies that are still paying most of their salaries with investor dollars instead of revenues, this is especially catastrophic. Without outside investment, they're just a massive pile of expenses waiting to happen, huge yearly costs in developer salaries and server fees. This is why, all of a sudden, every social media company is suddenly making bonkers decisions. They're noticing that nobody wants to give them any more money! So they're trying to figure out how to live a lot more cheaply, to actually somehow for reals turn their giant userbases in to some kind of actual revenue stream, or both.

Tumblr is kind of the ur-example of this kind of thing, supporting a very large userbase with no coherent plan whatsoever to start paying its staff with our dollars instead of investors' dollars. When interest rates were low and Scrooge McDuck had nowhere else to hide his pile of gold coins, a crazy kid with a dream was the best alternative available to him. But now, unless something changes, he's going to notice he can just buy bonds instead, and that crazy kid can go take a hike.

That's why I think Tumblr is living on borrowed time, though I don't know how much. Like all cartoons, the economy doesn't really fall off a cliff until somebody looks down and notices they've been standing on thin air this whole time. But they always fall eventually; that's the gag.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for scaring a facebook scammer?

so theres this scam that goes around on facebook marketplace a lot where a person acts like they are gonna help people get a free government phone. there are government programs where you can apply for a free phone or phone bill but you need really personal info to apply like social security numbers (because stuff like Social Security and other welfare benefits is one of the things that can get you approved). well my last job was phone based and i was basically phone tech support half the time so I have talked to people personally who get scammed by these people and it made me mad.

So i decided to try and waste one of these scammers time on facebook. at first i was just acting like i wasnt tech savvy (giving a fake email address instead of home address when asked) but i got this idea. this person had their legal name attached to this scam post and it wasn’t hacked in any way. so i googled their full name and what city was listed on their profile. voter record websites show peoples addresses in some states and i hoped this scammer wasnt ignorant enough to attach their real fucking name to a scam listing.

Yeah so I found their address. I had no intention to post it anywhere but I thought to myself, what if I sent them their own home address when they ask me for one? so I did. and they stopped responding UNTIL i gave them a negative review on fb saying they are a scammer. suddenly they got super pushy and mean and starting asking me info about their own house. “what cars are outside, my maps arent working” and all that bullshit. so i look up their address on maps and describe the cars outside on google map satellite signal. at this point i know they’re just seeing how much I know about them (and everything was accessible with a google search so no hacking stuff here) and eventually they stop responding when i guessed wrong if they had their sibling living with them.

honestly i prolly didnt need to keep going after the first address and after i gave them a fake review but i fully just wanted to scare them away from scamming people. i’ve talked to older people personally and they legitimately deactivate everything and get a flip phone when they get scammed because of how terrified they are. i dont regret it but i wonder if it was unethical or just not productive to try and waste her time and at least give me the ability to give her a review saying shes a scammer. AITA?

What are these acronyms?

[mariacallous]

Are you an election denier who’s just not satisfied with the number of conspiracies about Wi-Fi-connected voting machines or reports about floods of illegal immigrants stuffing ballots into drop boxes on TikTok or Instagram? Do you pine for a place to share and learn even more? Want to connect with like-minded election deniers?

Well, with just 60 days until the 2024 presidential election, and with efforts to undermine the outcome of the vote already well underway, there’s now an app just for you—and no, it’s not Elon Musk’s X.

Facebook for Election Deniers

VoteAlert is a new app from the election conspiracy group True the Vote, a company with a rich history of combining tech with election conspiracies only to come up with nothing. In 2022, True the Vote claimed to have evidence showing that so-called ballot mules were being used to stuff drop boxes to sway the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favor. Earlier this year they admitted in court they had no such evidence.

But that didn’t slow them down. The group has already rolled out one online tool this election season called IV3 to facilitate mass voter roll challenges, and with VoteAlert, the group now wants to give election workers and poll watchers the chance to get in on the action.

VoteAlert is designed to be a one-stop shop for all your election conspiracy needs, featuring a scrollable feed of the latest voting-related alerts, the ability to report your own claims, and even, apparently, a 24/7 hotline.

The app isn’t available in Apple’s or Google’s app stores, but is available as a web app, so people can still join. Catherine Engelbrecht, cofounder of True the Vote, did indicate in online meetings in recent weeks that the apps would be available on the major platforms, but it’s unclear right now when that will happen. True the Vote did not respond to a request for comment about VoteAlert.

Before you sign in, the app asks you to agree to a disclaimer that’s a little different from those of most apps: “It is up to you to use VoteAlert responsibly. Federal law prohibits actions that can be viewed as voter intimidation, including photo, video, or audio recording of voters while inside protected polling place boundaries.”

Users of the app are then presented with what looks like a typical social media feed of text, images, and videos. But instead of lime-green memes about Kamala, Instagram cooking videos, or “very demure” videos on TikTok, initial indications suggest the feed will be filled with livestreams of drop boxes in Wisconsin or reports of Wi-Fi-connected voting machines in Arizona.

While the app isn’t really up and running yet, we’ve got a glimpse into its possible future thanks to test posts from Engelbrecht’s team that cover the wide gamut of conspiracies the group has been pushing.

“It says I already voted by mail?” asks D from Loudoun County, Virginia, in a test post that popped up in my feed. “I just moved a few months ago and went to get my voter registration and address updated. They told me that I have already voted by mail—but I haven't.”

Meanwhile, JR in Kent County, Delaware, claimed in another test post that someone was having a bake sale “trying to get people to vote for certain candidates.” (There is a very clear sign on the cookie table with the prices; a quick reverse image search shows the image dates back to at least 2017.)

Meg Denning, who works with True the Vote, has also posted, claiming: “​​All the machines went down and there was a wifi [sic] connection,” referring to a favorite conspiracy among election deniers that the internet itself has been used to conduct voter fraud on a mass scale.

Though these are just test posts, the section of the app that allows users to report their own claims shows just how focused True the Vote is on promoting election conspiracies.

The app also allows users to indicate their location, precinct number, and whether they are an election worker or poll watcher. It also helpfully offers you a predefined list of possible voting issues to report, including “ballot harvesting or trafficking” and “non-citizen voting,” which are concerns that groups like True the Vote have been baselessly promoting in recent months.

If you believe your situation is life or death, the app even has a built-in emergency 24/7 hotline you can call to report your outrage. “Thank you for calling True the Vote,” the chirpy automated female voice responds after a couple of rings. “We appreciate your commitment to liberty.”

No one picked up when I called.

The automated voice did tell me to send an email or leave a voicemail before signing off: “Ever onward.”

[fbfh]

rocks at your window pt. 8 - ricky bowen x reader

disclaimer: this series contains smut and chapter by chapter warnings, so as with all nsfw works, ricky is aged up to 18+!! ricky and reader are 18 and in their senior year

additionally, we're working towards a ricky x therapy plot so he's going to start expressing some symptoms of mental illness and bpd but he does get therapy eventually and has a good support system but he gets worse before he gets better yk. Obviously I'm not a professional and this is for entertainment so while I have done my research pls take this with a grain of salt!! or several!! /lh

!! contains some spoilers for season 1 of hsmtmts, and previous chapters of this fic !!

wc: 3k

genre: fluff, slice of life

pairing: ricky bowen x (afab she/her) reader

warnings: making out, more fake texts (please politely ignore that it's facebook messanger it's the only fake text app I could find that's actually functional), nina tries hoovering, nina is generally a messy bitch, kourtney is a good friend, ricky is a sappy down bad bitch

summary: you and Ricky spend the night before opening having a classic sleepover at your place. Ricky falls even harder for you. Nini follows a hunch.

song recs: when you're home - in the heights, better left unsaid - ariana grande, research me obsessively - crazy ex girlfriend soundtrack/brittany snow, home is in your eyes - greyson chance

a/n: I WAS SO EXCITED TO FINISH THIS CHAPTER I LISTENED TO THE WIZARD AND I FOR HOURS CAUSE IT WAS THE ONLY SONG THAT COULD MATCH MY TRIUMPHANT ENERGY. as always thank you to cici for beta reading next part posted at 10 good reviows prepz fuk off xxx666xxx. been reading more my immortal if you couldn't tell. I, like profesor trevolry, am too adikted 2 volxemortserum.

tags @yesv01 @hopefullhearts @thatawkwardlittlefangirl @afidiofobia @aliyahsutherland @pikzel @demirunner @brinaslittlefreak @girlfriendwhoseawitch @matiere-detoiles @ifilwtmfc @uselesssapphickitten @nxstalgicnxbxdy @ggclarissa @n-slayaaaaa @stormi-ames @brinaslittlefreak @rainforest-daisies @sunshineangel-reads

Sleepovers at your place are something that’s become a staple in Ricky’s life, and he doesn’t think he’s ever needed one more than tonight. It’s the one night the whole cast has off before opening night, so of course you’re going to spend it together. Tech week was one of the most intense things Ricky has ever experienced. It was one week straight spent at the El Rey, doing homework in between scenes, getting used to costumes, sets, lights, and props, and more importantly, getting used to all of it together. The first full run through felt surreal. If the last few rehearsals had been that exhausting and amazing and exciting, he can’t imagine how great opening night will be. 

So what better way to decompress from a week straight of late nights and re-running the same numbers and scenes and working out the kinks, than being where he is right now. Ricky sits on your bed across from you while you sort through the snacks you’d picked up. There’s a comfortable, cozy energy between you, like there usually is. This is exactly what you both need, he thinks. A relaxing, fun night together before you gear up for show time. You’re trying to contain your excitement, but he can see it simmering, growing stronger in the back of your mind. 

The door opens and your mom enters, holding the last few DVDs of shows you’ve been in. 

“Took me a little while to find them, but here’s Matilda - regular, and the stripped down version - and Fun Home.” She smiles, beaming the way she does whenever she talks about you performing. 

“Thanks mom,” you smile at how excited she and Ricky are about your shows. Ricky looks at the titles in her sharpie handwriting on the plastic cases, excitement fluttering through him at getting to see more of you performing. It might be corny to say, but you’re definitely his favorite actor.

“Which ones have you seen so far?” she asks, crossing her arms and leaning against the doorway, happy to have someone to brag about you with and talk about your shows. Ricky lists off all the musicals you’ve watched together over the last few days. 

“...And we just finished Tuck Everlasting.” 

“That one’s my favorite!” she gasps, beaming, and Ricky agrees. He can see why; you brought the role of Winnie Foster to life, and he can’t believe it had such a short run. She’s about to leave, when she remembers the paperwork she dropped off at city hall earlier. 

“Oh, by the way,” she starts, “I heard back from Mitch in permits and zoning, and all the paperwork was expedited. Everything you need to perform at the El Rey has been approved, and you got a green light for opening night!” You and Ricky start yelling and freaking out - exactly what she expected - and you jump off your bed to squeeze her in a tight hug. 

“Thank you!” you cheer, and Ricky echos. 

“Of course!” she smiles.

“That’s amazing!” Ricky beams, “My dad said it might not be ready in time.” 

“Well,” she continues, “I may have pulled a few strings to get it expedited…” 

She barely gets the sentence out before you’re loudly thanking her again. 

“Okay, okay,” she says, calming down your cheers and heading for the door with a smile “have fun you guys.” 

She closes the door, and you’re alone again. He takes in a breath, embracing this moment, here in your room with you. He looks at your decorations, the snowglobe on your bookshelf, the posters on the wall and polaroids taped to your mirror. The jacket you had been wearing earlier is now tossed on the back of your desk chair, and your backpack is still where you’d dropped it earlier when you got home. 

He’s overwhelmed with that big warm feeling in his chest he gets whenever he’s around you. He loves your room, loves sleepovers with you, loves… he chokes down the thought. He can feel the urge to spill his guts, to bear his soul, but he shoves it down. As easy as it would be to pull you close and kiss the breath out of your lungs and tell you everything he’s ever felt for you, he knows the timing isn’t right. He fights temptation, helping you unbag the rest of the snacks you got to distract himself from the unspoken words he’s barely holding back. You hand him the stack of DVDs and your fingers brush. His heart jumps at the contact. 

"Here," you say, "pick one out." You smile with that easygoing energy that's become so familiar to him. Sleepovers have been a pretty regular occurrence for a while now, and they still fill him with a warm, bubbling excitement. He decides which one he wants to watch first, and you slide the disc into your laptop. 

“Oh wow,” he starts laughing at the grainy camera quality, “Matilda caught in 4k.” 

“Shut up,” you laugh, nudging him playfully, “this was from, like, 10 years ago.” 

At first it was hard to look past the sketchy camera quality and low volume of the bootlegs - or slime tutorials as you jokingly called them - but now he’s learned to see past it. He latches on quickly to your singing, feeling himself get sucked into the story right away. He’s seen another version of you performing as Matilda, but this one is the infamous stripped down one. Even though he knows the reasons behind the drastic set change, the critics were right - it does add something to the way the story is told. He realizes that even though they’ve kind of been flying by the seat of their pants to make it to opening night, it will still turn out okay.

After watching Matilda, you practice your stage makeup, and have Ricky help you pick out the perfect shade of Sharpay pink nail polish. You had put on High School Musical - it was practically obligatory - and you made it about 15 minutes into the sequel before you were in Ricky’s lap. His lips are all over you, pressing into yours, your neck, your cheek. He squeezes your waist, arms snaking around to pull you closer to him. He bites your lip playfully, getting you to gasp a little, and pushes his tongue into your mouth. Your hands are on his face, in his hair, and he can’t get enough of your touch. He lets out a soft moan into your mouth, angling his head to deepen the kiss. 

Your phone buzzes as he pulls away, kissing down your neck. He runs his tongue over your skin, biting, and making you giggle. You get so flustered when he kisses you like this, and he absolutely loves watching you get more worked up for him. You glance down, seeing the notification from the pizza place you ordered from on your phone. 

“Ricky,” you start, and he hums in response, biting your neck again, “Ricky, the-” 

You’re cut off by a knock at the door. He pulls away reluctantly, and you take in each other’s disheveled states. 

“Pizza guy.” you finish, getting off his lap to go down stairs. He sighs, staring at the doorway you just disappeared through. He’s still full of that frenetic energy he gets when you touch him. You look so sweet when you’re blushing and giggling for him, he wants to make you even more flustered like that. His phone buzzes with a text from Nini. He’s still getting used to seeing her contact without the hearts that always used to be around it.

Before he can finish typing out a response, you reenter the room holding up pizza and breadsticks triumphantly. He smiles and sets his phone face down. He wants to be here with you, eating pizza and watching sitcoms, trying not to get too nervous and excited about how close opening night is. The only drama he wants to think about right now is the onstage kind. 

Nina sits on her bed, homework forgotten as she rants to Kourtney over facetime. Ricky left her on read. Again. He never used to do that, not until he started hanging around you. Kourtney’s been listening to her talk about you to death for at least an hour, and she’s out of ways to respond. 

“I am so done talking about this.” Nini laughs, shaking her head. 

“Good, cause-” 

“It’s just, like,” she continues, and Kourtney thinks she should have known where that was going. It was at least the third time Nini declared she was done with the topic at hand. Nini continues, “do you think hanging out a couple times gives you the right to be so possessive over someone?” 

In the time they’ve been facetiming she’s cleaned her room, picked out her clothes for tomorrow, and finished her homework. She’s half way through her skincare routine, and secretly hoping this will wrap up soon so she can get some rest for tomorrow. 

“Like, last summer Ricky went on dates with a few girls - not just hanging out - and by the start of school he only wanted to be with me. So, really she’s just making herself look desperate. It’s just sad that he’s going to dump her soon and come back to me like he always does, and she’ll have no idea it’s coming. Like, that’s going to be really embarrassing for her, right?” the faux sympathy in her voice turns into a chuckle. 

Kourtney’s brow furrows. In spite of how sick she is of hearing about this, she can’t shake the feeling that you and Ricky are obviously closer than two people who have just hung out a few times. She’s seen the way you look at each other, the way you talk to each other. People who feel platonically about each other don’t do that. 

“Uh, Neen, what exactly did she say?” she tries to sound casual so Nini doesn’t get suspicious, but she’s so wrapped up in her train of thought, she doesn’t notice the I have a hunch about something look Kourtney always gets when she suspects something is up. 

“She was like, uh,” she begins in an exaggerated impression of you, “we like, totally hooked up a couple times, but we haven’t made anything official, but that still means he only likes me. Also you dumped him, so… like, you have no right to be in his life anymore, and he basically hates you now.” 

Kourtney squints. Through Nini’s very biased recount of the exchange you had, if any of that was verbatim, if you really did tell her you hooked up with Ricky… what kind of hooking up did you mean? Nini seems to think it’s the casual meeting up kind - let’s all hook up at denny’s after the show -  but Kourtney isn’t so sure. It’s none of her business, it’s really none of her business. Plus, pointing this out to Nini would just make her even more obsessed and freaked out than she is. She needs to move on from Ricky, and the last thing Kourtney wants to do is make that harder for her. She and Ricky aren’t together, and she’s certainly not going to be the one to enable any prying or backsliding, intentional or not. Instead, she redirects. 

“Uh… I don’t think she can cut you out of his life for him.”

“Right?!” Nini exclaims, glad someone agrees with her. “Like, we’ve known each other since kindergarten. I’ve known him longer than anyone. You can’t get that close to someone that fast.” She sighs. “Also… there’s something about her that’s been bothering me…” Kourtney scoffs.

“What about her doesn’t bother you?”

“No, no,” Nini laughs, thinking back, “it was something Gina said…” it's been itching in the back of her mind for a while, and she can't ignore it any longer. She has to finally figure this out. She shakes her head, knowing she shouldn't keep Kourtney up any longer. "It's probably nothing. Whatever, I'll see you tomorrow night, Kourt." 

"Okay. Night, Nini." 

Finally, she hangs up. She should go to sleep. She has a big day tomorrow - it's opening night for god's sake - she should go to bed. Instead she opens her laptop, typing 'broadway matilda basement flood' into the search bar. She clicks on one article, then another. Eventually she finds a picture of three girls in matching Matilda costumes and is hit hard by nostalgia. She was obsessed with Matilda when she was a kid, always begging her moms to take her to New York so she can audition and be a Matilda on Broadway, be part of the friend group of other girls her age acting on Broadway together. The girl on the right was always her favorite, and she used to watch the backstage videos she was in for broadway.com vlogs all the time. She completely forgot about her Matilda phase, how obsessed she was with those girls. 

She looks at the caption of the photo, caught off guard by her favorite's name. It’s the same as yours. But that can't be you, right? The last names are different. And her parents are divorced. She remembers when you mentioned it at rehearsal once. She opens another tab, continuing to search for an answer. Hours pass and she's deep into the Google rabbit hole. Hours pass, and she confirms it’s you. You played Matilda on frigging Broadway. After extensive research, she pieces together that you and your mom both had you last names changed to her maiden name, presumably after the divorce, and it doesn't look like you've acted professionally since. She opens the same tabs on her phone to look at later. She shuts her laptop and flops back into her pillows. She stares at the ceiling in disbelief that you've somehow managed to keep a secret this massive from everyone. 

After eating a majority of the pizza and breadsticks, drinking several cups of tea, and watching some more Netflix, you and Ricky are finally ready for bed and curl up under the covers with each other. You're lying up next to his chest, your body heat minglinf together, and he doesn't think he's ever felt more at peace. Your hand is warm through his shirt, and he keeps pressing kisses across your face just to hear your sweet giggle. You smile at him, blinking sleepily, and when he looks into your eyes he feels it. He's home. He gazes at your face, enamored, never wanting to look away. You look so pretty like this, curled up next to him and half asleep. He's learned to tell when he's going to sleep really well and it's always on nights like this. He never knew how badly he needed to feel his breath sync up with yours, feel your hearts beating in time. He can't imagine being more content than he is right here, with you. Even the air in your room smells sweet to him, just because you're here so often. 

He thinks back, running through the whole night again, returning again and again to being right here with you. Every moment with you is amazing. You have this way of transforming the mundane into something special. He’s still in disbelief that he’s the one who gets to lay next to you at the end of the day, he's the one you have whispered conversations with when you're both stupid tired. He gets to be the one to make you giggle and smile over nothing. He remembers a tweet he saw a while ago that said 'You're in her dms, I'm dancing in the kitchen with her while the bread we made bakes. We're not the same.' You might not be in the kitchen right now, but he really understands the sentiment right now. You're cuddled into his chest, melting into his touch, blushing and hiding your face when he looks at you too long like that. It’s him, not some other guy. He doesn't think other guys could be as devoted to you as he is, they couldn't love you the way he can, the way you deserve to be loved. 

He's really glad you're with him and not with some fuckboy who would just want you for your body and break your heart. The idea that anyone could even think about doing that to you, even some hypothetical fuckboy, makes him sick. You're so sweet, so easy to love. He doesn't know how everyone you've met hasn't fallen in love with you, how every guy isn't throwing themselves at you. A twinge of jealousy passes through him at the thought. He brushes the thought aside, reminding himself that you're here with him. As if proving his point, you set aside your favorites squishmallow to cuddle him closer and his heart feels like it's going to burst. Girls don't do that if they don't really… really like someone, right?

You settle against him and let out a big sigh. He's had enough sleepovers with you to know that means you're about to be out like a light. He is too, and he fights off his heavy eyelids long enough to get one more good look at you before they close. He smiles as he starts to drift off. This is his favorite part, getting to fall asleep next to you do he can wake up next to you, just like he wants to forever. He can't imagine a morning where he doesn't get to see you, doesn't get to hold you in his arms, and he doesn't want to. He brushes that aside, and focuses instead on how nice you smell, how comforting your breath is on his neck. You're so warm, you make him feel so warm, and he can't get enough of your body heat and his becoming one under the mass of blankets. He doesn't know what tomorrow will hold, but he's so excited to experience it, to have his very first opening night with you. 

[alexologyart]

Some thoughts about the migration

Seriously thinking in just nuking my Twitter account or just stopping using it  after what has been happening, there are a number of reasons I just prefer to get out of there, this includes:

Of the 3k people following me on twitter, only 20 or just 10 (sometimes lower) interacts with my tweets.

I’ve had very nasty interactions with people there.

There has been absolutely no replies nor responses other than already my twitter circle and friends. I seriously considered I am just bad at art, and I know is not the case.

I can not promote: patreon, kofi, commissions, without bots and scammers getting in my DM or replies, is just exhahusting to have to censor the words every time.

Follow x Follow doesn’t even work in the art community without several scammers getting into line, and in the end, just 5% of those “artists” support each other. If you unfollow anyone because you want to clean your timeline, they will just stop supporting you.

Is difficult to me to manage SEVERAL accounts, I have Instagram, facebook (already thinking in nuking these two as well), Tumblr, DA, ArtStation, Mastodon, Kofi, Patreon, Artfold, Inkblot, Cara... did I miss something else?

The algorithm absolutely fucked me over, if you are not blue, you are basically invisible, pushed lower in the timeline and feed of your own followers. I have had to rt my own art several times for people to get to see it, sometimes I think I am shadowbanned because I just tweet something and I don’t see it in my OWN timeline

Everyone is migrating, absolutely everyone, I noticed artists tweeting less and less, some fortunate professional artists got bsky accounts now and are getting good number there while other minor artists are still in the waitlist.

Now, I’m trying not to be pessimist, but right now it feels like using the birdapp is just useless. I’m just retweeting art from other people because tweeting my own art feels like nothing, and I like to support people, I really do because they are amazing, but feeling invisible due to the algorithm + passive shadowban is just depressing.

As I mentioned above, I’m in other places, Mastodon is one of them, and I KNOW people feels intimidated by it + doesn’t understand wtf is all about, thinks is some tech savvy thing or worse, thinks is full of nazis or extremists when it all depends on the Instance you choose (and most mayor instances have blocked radicalized/extremists ones), but you just have to sign up to ONE instance focused in art (socel.net is mine focused in art and animation, mastodon.art is the one artists are using the most) and you have access to the whole Fediverse, and Mastodon has several other apps you can access to, I recommend Megalodon in the Playstore. Is that simple.

Now, if you want to follow me in a place other than Twitter and Tumblr, just check my carrd account HERE

[askagamedev]

Any comments/insight into the Ubisoft announcement cancelling more games?

Business gonna business. A lot of tech companies are laying off workers after investing big early in the pandemic and expecting things to remain that way. If the revenues coming in can't support the costs going out, they're going to have to either raise revenues or cut costs.

Cutting costs means cancelling projects and laying off workers. Ubisoft in particular is in more financial trouble, specifically because they have a big headcount but can't seem to hit the kind of numbers that publishers like EA and Activision can with a similar headcount - probably because they don't have as strong a mega-franchise as FIFA or Call of Duty.

This is all very much expected after the financial results came in. Many tech companies started heavily cutting costs last year - Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, Netflix, and a whole slew of startups and smaller companies hired really hard in the early pandemic in part because of the super high jump in revenues from then. I foresee more bad news on the horizon from others, and not just Ubi.

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Got a burning question you want answered?

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Frequent Questions: The FAQ

[fantasyfactorxx]

How might fake news and propaganda factor into the use of social media for activists and protesters (e.g. 5G technology causing Covid-19, US’s anti-lockdown protests, Trump using the term ‘Chinese virus’)?

Introduction

The arrival of social media in the digital era has completely altered how information is exchanged, consumed, and distributed. These platforms have given activists and protestors unheard-of tools for advocacy and mobilization, but they have also become a breeding ground for false knowledge and misinformation. This contradiction has given birth to nuanced and frequently tense interactions between knowledge sharing and how it is manipulated within the manipulated the context of activism. Social media may be used by activists and protestors to disseminate false information or conspiracy theories in an effort to support their cause. For instance, misleading statements attributing 5G technology to the Covid-19 pandemic’s spread disseminated rapidly on social media, causing confusion and concern.

Impact of fake news on the society

According to (Olan et. al 2022), the core principles in flowing news and private information are deeply rooted in truth notions and communication accuracy theories. As SM platforms, particularly Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, enable the widespread sharing of information and news, the influence of SM, particularly on political issues, has been drawing greater attention (Vosoughi et. al 2018). The main components of those social websites, according to (Hwang, Yuan & Weng 2007), include users creating or contributing material, users annotating content with tags, users evaluating content, and adding friends or contacts who have similar interests.

5G Technology causing Covid-19

When Covid-19 spread to cities in Europe and America, countervailing claims towards the accepted belief about the virus’s origins immediately surfaced (Flaherty, Sturm & Farries 2022). Covid-19 hasn’t led to any fresh conspiracy theories, but rather improvisations on many existing ones, which in this case, researchers relate Covid-19 to mobile electromagnetic frequencies and employ many of the faults in reasoning and methodology to “prove” its validity. Of the numerous Covid-related false information stories, this one has arguably had the biggest, most noticeable effects and as of early April 2020, followers of rumour attacked a number of mobile towers in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and other nations as well as some of the technicians who maintain them (Osborne 2020). The researchers noticed that for six of the nations, searches for the novel coronavirus and 5G surged in the same week of April 5 although beginning at separate times (Moreira 2021). A peak was seen the prior week in South Africa and the United Kingdom, and additionally, 5G searches increased in size more quickly than other search phrases (Moreira 2021). The trend of inquiries for hydroxychloroquine was distinctive and included three separate peaks which was probably a reflection of the months-long talks on the potential advantages of the medicine (Moreira 2021).

US’s anti-lockdown protests

According to (BBC News 2020), although there are indications that infection rates are reducing in some regions, the United States had over 761,000 infections and moreover 40,000 fatalities, and the numbers are gradually growing in April 2020. The stay-at-home restrictions enforced by state governments to stop the spread of Covid-19 are criticized by protesters as being excessive and since gun rights organizations were among the organizers and pointed to violations of civil freedoms, several attendees also arrived (BBC News 2020).  According to cell phone location data, protesters at anti-lockdown demonstrations, some of which have been linked to Covid-19 instances, frequently travel hundreds of kilometres to events, then return to all areas of their states and even pass into neighbouring ones (Wilson 2020).

Trump using the term ‘Chinese virus’

According to (Rogers, Jakes & Swanson 2020), President Trump defended dubbing the coronavirus the “Chinese Virus”, despite mounting accusations that he is doing so in a racist and anti-Chinese manner. The consequences of this made people in America to become Anti-Asian, which led to a series of assaults against Asian populations in the United States, including a serial of shootings in Georgia that claimed the lives of six women of Asian origins (Reja 2021). Trump’s intention in using the term “Chinese virus” is to to deflect wrath towards China and avoid accepting responsibility for the outbreak and politicians have long attempted to disavow responsibility (Moynihan & Porumbescu 2020). When politicians attempt to avoid responsibility, research frequently shows that they point the finger upon other politicians or public or commercial service providers (Moynihan & Porumbescu 2020).

Extra References

Moynihan & Porumbescu 2020, Trump’s ‘Chinese virus’ slur makes some people blame Chinese Americans. But others blame Trump., viewed 11 October 2023, <https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/16/trumps-chinese-virus-slur-makes-some-people-blame-chinese-americans-others-blame-trump/>

[hesitationss]

fb+/meta or whatever is one severely unfunny joke. i know i am mostly a hater of social media, but i don't see how threads is going to be better for usability and reach. especially given how shit numbers are on IG (i get more noted "per capita" of followers on tumblr and twitter for untagged posts). i already made a small thread of zucc apps being shit which I'll copy paste here. i don't know how people are thinking threads is going to be better than any of the twitter alternatives when it's most likely the WORST option out there. anyway-

the reason why the other twit replacement apps aren't as insidious as threads (zucc/fb owned) should be obvious, but i'll list some things:

• infamously on zucc platforms you can get reported for saying "white people" which is why so many of us say yt now (a bit of poc social media history for u from the 2010s)

• private messages are sold/given to police no warrant: this could be anything used against you, could be protest info, where you've been, etc.

• right wing propaganda/misinfo is lucrative for facebook. this is something that heavily affects the global south btw.

• they lie about views and growth for business accounts to keep you on their platform. the case i know best is that they inflated college humor's analytics to compete w youtube. this resulted in so many businesses throwing money and labour at facebook w out much return.

also zucc sucks, he's pure evil... like u don't need me to get into *that* hopefully

addition:

omg 🙄 so shocked 🙄 that zucc is further propelling nazism on his latest app that has the exact same content moderation as all his other fucking apps lol 🙄 who would have guessed ?

Far-right figures, including Nazi supporters, anti-gay extremists, and white supremacists, are flocking to Threads (Media Matters)

Adding sources:

Point 1 - i can't find any formal articles that document the particular insidiousness of this, but I and many others who were in BIPOC only "leftbook" groups had either our accounts or groups we joined completely nerfed for using language against white people. hubs that had been for info dissemination, discussing theory, and organizing were marked as hate speech or reported by white reactionaries (even "leftist" ones)

Point 2 - Has been apparent since Michael Brown's murder by police in 2014 and the protests following, but was esp apparent in protest following George Floyd's murder and subsequent protests.

FBI trawled Facebook to arrest protesters for inciting riots, court records show (NBC News)

Point 3 Links - Facebook Admits It Was Used to Incite Violence in Myanmar (NY Times) | Whistleblower: Facebook is misleading the public on progress against hate speech, violence, misinformation (CBS) | How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation (MIT Tech Review)

Link for point 4 - Adam Conover talking about College Humor's inflated FB numbers (plus many other articles have been written about this)

more on the privacy shit - sex workers who have used fb AND ig on burner emails with fake names, had their emails and real names auto linked bcuz of how much a little bit of information goes. how fucked up is that.

How Facebook Outs Sex Workers

BTW i have been preaching this for years but if you want to learn why our internet is fucked up, learn about what happened with net neutrality cases in the US, and then later, SESTA FOSTA (primarily targetting sex workers but is the reason why everything is censored now). ppl online have been warning everyone about this for years, but you are just now experiencing the consequences. but again, nobody listens to things that target primarily sex workers.

plus from a functional standpoint, if you want to delete your threads account, your instagram is deleted as well. like it really doesn't seem worth it for people who are desperate to find the social media that will stick. i don't have anything nice to say about any of the other social medias except that some Mastodon instances do a great job at keeping nazi's out and using alt text, but the bar is extremely low and everybody else is even lower ^_^

[anniekoh]

elsewhere on the internet: the internet

How Facebook Screwed Us All (Mother Jones, 2019)

First, starting in the 2000s, came the giant migration of advertising dollars from publishers to Facebook and Google. Today, the two control an estimated 58 percent of the US digital ad market, with Amazon, Microsoft, and the like dividing up the rest and publishers representing barely a rounding error. In large part as a result, there are now roughly 24,000 journalists working in America’s daily print newsrooms, down from some 56,000 in the early 2000s. And more and more of them work for hedge-fund owners who milk what remains of newspapers’ profits—mostly through layoffs—while further degrading coverage. Here in the Bay Area, all the daily papers except the San Francisco Chronicle are owned by one of these hedge funds, Alden Global Capital. There were once more than 1,000 journalists working for these papers, including 440 at the San Jose-based Mercury News, then one of the nation’s strongest regional outlets. Today there are 145 left across more than two dozen publications, covering a region of 7.6 million people.

Tech’s Reckoning (Ed Zitron, 2023)

Raising capital — especially at the scale that Reddit has — always leads to the bill coming due. Every time that Reddit has had to raise money, it has had to express how it will grow its userbase, its headcount, and its revenue. Every time that Reddit has taken on hundreds of millions of dollars of equity funding, it has promised these investors that Reddit will, as a result of the cash injection, become bigger and more fiscally valuable, and each raise has been paired with more promises about how much more Reddit can be worth. And now Reddit has put itself in a corner, promising shadowy organizations like Tencent that their money was well-spent.

Elon Musk broke Twitter, and he's breaking research communities, too. (Paul Musgrave, 2023)

The awful thing, of course, is that in lighting his own money on fire Elon has also decided to knock away the good part of Twitter. Twitter has, over the past decade, come to provide invisible but load-bearing supports for researchers and academics. It’s been a great way for those of us at out-of-the-way institutions to bring visibility to our arguments and research profile (and if you think Amherst isn’t out-of-the-way, just ask someone who’s Boston or New York-based to come out—a drive that we would do without thinking is a major imposition for those in the metropole). We know that scholarly conferences spur connections and research productivity; Twitter has been the conference bar or the post-panel chatter available 24/7 and across (most) borders. It’s accelerated research dissemination and it’s brought me and others into contact with people we otherwise never would have met. And it also connected us to editors and publishers in ways that did more to enrich and diversify the discourse than any number of assistant vice provosts for JEDI initiatives.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

#15yrsago Myths about Canadian healthcare https://www.denverpost.com/2009/06/04/debunking-canadian-health-care-myths/

#15yrsago Abstinence doesn’t work for IT or for teens https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jun/16/computer-security-abstinence

#15yrsago Scam artists con Apple into killing app that tells you when the bus is due in San Francisco https://web.archive.org/web/20090627161346/http://sfappeal.com/news/2009/06/who-owns-sfmta-arrival-data.php

#10yrsago US inches towards decriminalizing phone unlocking https://www.techdirt.com/2014/06/25/year-half-later-unlocking-your-phone-one-step-closer-to-being-legal/

#10yrsago North Korea threatens “merciless” war against the US over Seth Rogen movie https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28014069

#10yrsago Copyfraud, uncertainty and doubt: the vanishing online public domain https://medium.com/@xor/houston-we-have-a-public-domain-problem-bd971c57dfdc

#10yrsago Charlie Stross on the stop/go nature of technological change https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/06/yapcna-2014-keynote-programmin.html

#10yrsago Lurking inside Obama’s secret drone law: another secret drone law https://www.techdirt.com/2014/06/25/enough-secret-law-newly-released-doj-drone-killing-justification-memo-points-to-another-secret-drone-memo/

#10yrsago Kleargear must pay $306,750 for trashing a complaining customer’s credit https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/kleargear-must-pay-306750-to-couple-that-left-negative-review/

#5yrsago Podcast number 300: “Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today’s Monopolies” https://ia903004.us.archive.org/11/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_300/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_300_-_Adversarial_Interoperability.mp3

#5yrsago How China ingests and adapts western culture https://aeon.co/essays/how-china-remakes-its-cultural-imports-from-the-west

#5yrsago Prosecutors and federal judges collaborate with corporations to seal evidence of public safety risks, sentencing hundreds of thousands of Americans to death https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-courts-secrecy-judges/

#5yrsago EU expert panel calls for a ban on AI-based risk-scoring and limits on mass surveillance https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18759447/eu-ai-ethical-policy-recommendations-ban-mass-scoring-surveillance

#5yrsago You treasure what you measure: how KPIs make software dystopias https://web.archive.org/web/20190622092434/https://datascience.columbia.edu/ethical-principles-okrs-and-kpis-what-youtube-and-facebook-could-learn-tukey#.XRMxf5DB5eg.twitter

#5yrsato Dieselgate 2.0: 42,000 Mercedes diesels recalled for “illegal software” https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/06/german-regulator-says-it-discovered-new-illegal-software-on-daimler-diesels/

#5yrsago Insulin: why the price of a 100-year-old drug has tripled in a decade https://prospect.org/health/insulin-racket/

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

[samjpullen]

Make sure you check out The Unlocking Company https://ift.tt/4eOTKld And thanks to them for helping support the channel. In today's video I am going to show you how to unlock your brand new iPhone 13 Pro Max so that you can use it on any carrier worldwide, so sit back get your IMEI number ready and let's get unlocking shall we. Use Amazon? throw me a little dime (costs you nothing extra) USA 🇺🇸 = http://j.mp/sjpamazonus UK 🇬🇧 = http://j.mp/sjpamazon Want me to review your product? - contact @ samjpullen.com My equipment https://ift.tt/rBzSoEl Check out my channel http://www.youtube.com/samjpullen Don't forget to subscribe! - http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=samjpullen My Website - https://ift.tt/hzXQEOU Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/samjpullen Facebook - https://ift.tt/mUHL73f G+ - https://ift.tt/KZWDakl My 2nd Channel - http://www.youtube.com/sjpvlogs Sam Pullen is a Youtube creator that reviews, demos and talks about Technology, Just an average guy doing something he loves talking about tech from companies such as Samsung, HTC, Nokia, LG, Huawei Apple and many more. #iPhoneSimUnlock #iPhone14PlusUnlock #TheUnlockingCompany More from The Unlocking Company Just a little bit about who we are and what we do. We are a U.S. based Cell Phone Unlocking Company. We have two locations one in California and one in New York. We have been in business for almost 8 years now and have unlocked a little over 3 million phones. Unlocking your phone will enable it to work on any GSM network in the world. No longer be tied down to one stingy carrier. If you love your phone, unlock it, and be able to use it where and how you like! by Sam Pullen

[computertechsupp]

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[mariacallous]

While mobile health options have been celebrated by doctors and advocates as a way to expand treatment for substance use disorders, there has been persistent concern over how private the websites offering treatment and support really are—especially now that the US Supreme Court’s toppling of Roe v. Wade has reignited the national conversation about how far medical privacy protections extend online.

The Opioid Policy Institute (OPI) and Legal Action Center (LAC) today released the findings from a 16-month analysis of a dozen major substance-use-focused mHealth websites, revealing details of how much data is shared with third parties. While the sharing of any kind of patient information is often strictly regulated or outright forbidden, it’s even more verboten in addiction treatment, as patients’ medical history can be inherently criminal and stigmatized.

Generally, patients seeking treatment for substance use disorders, or SUDs, are protected not only by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) but by a law called 42 CFR Part 2 (commonly known as “Part 2”), which guarantees the confidentiality of treatment records and protects individuals from having their treatment history used against them. Browsing histories, however, exist in a gray area, and though it’s not exactly medical information, experts find these sites’ monitoring of it concerning.

The OPI and LAC analysis used Blacklight, a privacy tool created by news nonprofit The Markup to analyze the websites for Bicycle Health, Boulder Care, Bright Heart Health, Confidant Health, DynamiCare Health, Kaden, Loosid, Ophelia, PursueCare, reSET-O, SoberGrid, and WorkItHealth on four timepoints from March 2021 to July 2022. All 12 websites included technologies that collect, identify, and share information about users with third parties and had ad trackers that are used for advertising purposes. The average number of these trackers “generally” increased over the 16 months, researchers found.

Furthermore, 11 of the sites used third-party session cookies that identify visitors and track them across other websites to serve ads, and four of the 12 used session recording, which monitors the behavior of visitors to the sites, from their mouse movements and clicks to their scrolling and typing, even if the text input is never submitted. Half of the websites used Meta Pixel to send user data to Facebook, 10 used Google Analytics (which can track user metrics), and all 12 sent some data to ad tech companies that buy and sell user data for advertising.

Many of the providers highlight their commitment to “privacy” on their websites. However, as Regina LaBelle, director of the Addiction and Public Policy Initiative at Georgetown Law’s O’Neill Institute, explains, “In the addiction policy field, when we define our position about privacy, I think it is much more comprehensive than what is laid out in some of the companies’ definitions of privacy.”

Ad tracking is commonplace across the internet, but these are sites for individuals with highly stigmatized medical conditions. Experts are concerned about what could happen as a result of the tracking, but not necessarily that it’s already been used nefariously. Part 2 exists because the sensitive information people share during treatment for substance use disorders could easily impact their employment status, ability to get a home, custody of their children, and even their freedom. Health care providers and lawmakers recognized long ago that the potential threat of losing so much would deter people from getting life-saving help and set up strict laws to protect those who do seek treatment. Now, experts worry that data collected on telehealth sites could bring about the harm Part 2 was designed to prevent and more, even inadvertently.

Pointing to the recent case of a Nebraska teen who was charged for self-administering a miscarriage after police reviewed her Facebook messages, Dr. Westley Clark, who formerly lead health IT initiatives at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, drew a parallel: “It won’t take long for the narcotics section of criminal justice to realize that the abortion section of criminal justice has tools that they can also use,” Clark says. “With these technologies, all I have to do is get an administrative subpoena … if I suspect you of being an addict. I can go to Facebook. I can go to Google.” He also expresses concern that for the right price, entities holding such data wouldn’t even require a warrant to hand it over.

Clark cautions that he isn’t aware of law enforcement looking at data from addiction-focused mHealth sites but believes it could happen in the post-Roe world. He, like other experts contacted for this story, is a strong proponent of telehealth as a tool to tackle the ever-expanding overdose crisis and wants to see telemedicine companies do a better job of protecting patient privacy. LaBelle says she thinks these mHealth companies are helmed by “well-meaning people who want to do good but may not understand the totality of the issues that are involved in getting people the services they need, and how critically important a broad definition of privacy is to protect these people.” The Legal Action Center’s Dr. Jackie Seitz, one of the authors of the research, says she also appreciates the value of these online services and questions whether providers themselves realize “all the different, leaky ways that the information they’re collecting about patients is sort of floating out.”

One person who does know about those leaky ways is Sean O’Brien, a lecturer on cybersecurity at Yale Law School who founded the Privacy Lab at Yale’s Information Society Project. He worked with the OPI and LAC on previous research that focused on mobile apps in the addiction telehealth space and lamented that it’s “shocking” to see mHealth providers still using so many third-party trackers despite the fact they’ve been “under the microscope” for some time now. “They’re just sharing it with everybody they can,” he says, adding that what he finds particularly problematic is the caching of the data on servers, where someone could “scoop up” the information.

Leaders at some of the analyzed companies were quick to respond and share their thoughts on privacy, noting they always aim to improve the services offered to such a vulnerable population.

Boulder Care CEO Stephanie Strong says her company is subject to HIPAA and Part Two and “takes patient privacy extremely seriously.” She adds that her company uses digital advertising and web measurement tools “sparingly” (indeed, Boulder Care used fewer of the tools than others in the report) and limits the use of ad tracking software to website visitors and inquiries only, without reporting back to Google or Meta on any actions that could be “indicative of actual treatment.” Patient care is delivered by Boulder’s app, which does not use any tracking software.

Lisa McLaughlin, co-CEO of WorkIt Health, says her company “is committed to creating a safe place for our members to receive discreet and accessible virtual care.” A representative for Confidant Health echoes that the company recognizes the importance of privacy in SUD care and will “continue to adhere to HIPAA and similar legislation as well as upholding our own internal protocols which we developed to protect our members.”

Representatives from other companies included in the study did not deny the use of the third parties that researchers identified, but they maintained that this poses no threat to patient privacy and is in keeping with standards across the internet and in the medical space.

Nick Mercadante, founder and CEO of PursueCare, says his company does not collect, store, or forward protected health information from visiting users, and that patients don’t receive their care directly on the PursueCare site. He also said PursueCare does not share protected health information (PHI) with third parties, though it does “utilize Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics for internal reporting purposes.”

“It is a reality that users of most websites on the internet today are subject to collection of user data,” Mercadante says. “Health-care-related websites, including those of health systems, hospitals, inpatient care facilities, and other brick-and-mortar care facilities, are no different.”

Pear Therapeutics, responsible for reSET-O, notes it doesn’t share PHI without patient consent, does not use any digital footprints to identify user identities, and reports data “on an aggregated and de-identified basis.”  Experts remain concerned by the collection of the data in the first place, de-identified or not, but acknowledge that what’s happening here isn’t illegal and is likely to continue for that reason. Danielle Tarino, who formerly led the health IT team at SAMHSA and now works in cybersecurity, has spent a considerable chunk of her career investigating the privacy implications of mHealth, especially for people with substance use disorders. She believes the best shot at protecting privacy will come from the creation and implementation of additional tools.

“This is how small tech businesses work, and absent anyone telling you that you’re not allowed to do that, you’re allowed to do that,” she says, questioning whether the sites’ use of ad trackers and outside software boils down to finances. Clark, too, expresses concerns that the use of data collection is financially motivated and, for the right price, could be sold or leased to law enforcement or other parties. “When there’s monetary incentives, people make the changes. When there are no monetary incentives, they don’t,” he says. In short, data privacy experts don’t anticipate that mHealth companies will stop collecting data unless forced.

The opinions of cybersecurity professionals and telehealth company CEOs are relevant, but perhaps most important are the opinions of individuals with substance abuse disorders, the people who stand to lose the most if experts’ fears are realized and for whom Part 2 was designed. After being shown the data from the analysis, one patient who utilizes brick-and-mortar health care providers said via direct message, “Thank you for reaffirming why I don’t use telehealth.” He added that he wasn’t sure the findings would stop anyone from using telehealth if that were the only way they could get treatment. Those patients would simply have to trust their providers act in their best interest.

Another patient who uses one of the companies analyzed by the OPI and LAC was alarmed by the findings.“They should [be required to] have a service that prevents them from being able to track anything like that,” he says.

“How much is my information worth?” he asks, questioning whether data from his and other patients’ website use was more valuable than the few hundred dollars they generate each month as patients. “It’s so scary. This is the first time in my life I’m not on probation in 10 years. Now, I’m not. Thinking that someone could really just look at that … Who knows what’s going to happen?”

[usafphantom2]

U.S. Air Force lands most C-130Hs due to cracks in the propellers

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 10/02/2022 - 19:55

The U.S. Air Force (USAF) landed most of its older C-130H Hercules cargo planes and variants due to a problem with the propeller cylinders.

The Air Mobility Command (AMC) confirmed on Friday that a wide range of its C-130H fleet, which was 128 at the beginning of fiscal year 2022, cannot fly, and it is not clear how long it will take to replace all defective propeller sets.

The AMC said that 116 C-130Hs, including variants of the mobility aircraft, were grounded on Tuesday due to concerns that their propeller sets are defective and that inspections in the coming days will show how many of them have been affected.

The AMC said that the groundings are "generalized" and mainly affect the Air Force Reserve and the National Air Guard.

The unofficial Air Force amn/nco/snco Facebook page posted a screenshot of a technical order of time compliance on landings on Wednesday. On Friday, the page posted a screenshot of a slide that said that the cylinders of the propellers in question were installed in 100 C-130Hs, as well as all stocks of eight MC-130H Combat Talons, seven EC-130H Compass Calls and a TC-130H.

A member of the California National Guard arrives at a C-130H Hercules of the Texas National Air Guard in Hurlburt Field, Florida. (Photo: U.S. Air Force / Tech. Sgt. Nathan Lipscomb)

In a statement, the Air Mobility Command said that a maintenance team at the Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex in Georgia found a persistent leak coming from a C-130H propeller while testing the aircraft's engine after undergoing maintenance at the warehouse.

This propeller assembly was removed and sent to the propeller workshop of the complex, said AMC, where a technician found a crack in the cylinder set.

Other inspections found that two more sets of propellers had the same problem, added the Air Mobility Command.

AMC ordered immediate visual inspections at the field level on all C-130Hs with the oldest 54H60 model propeller, and then conducted metallurgical reviews and stress analysis, the command said. After these revisions, the Air Mobility Command issued another order to immediately replace the problematic propellers.

The command said that the newer C-130Js and C-130Hs that have already had their propeller sets updated with the eight-blade NP2000 system are not affected by the request.

This is the second time in more than three years that a significant number of C-130Hs have been grounded due to problems with the propeller. In February 2019, the U.S. Air Force landed 60 C-130Hs - at the time, almost a third of the fleet - for several weeks due to concerns that its propeller blades prior to 1971 could break. These C-130s had their propeller blades replaced in the following weeks.

Source: Defense News

Tags: Military AviationC-130H HerculesUSAF - United States Air Force / US Air Force

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Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. It has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. He uses Canon equipment during his photographic work in the world of aviation.

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San Jose: The Home of Next-iteration Programmatic Advertising Solutions.

Introduction

San Jose, California is a metropolis that has long been regular for its technological thoughts and developments. As the capital of Silicon Valley, it's miles primarily often known as the "Tech Capital of the World." With a thriving industry atmosphere and a highly trained staff, San Jose has was a hub for businesses seeking to make their mark inside the electronic promotion enterprise. In this text, we're going to discover why San Jose is the house of subsequent-era programmatic advertising recommendations and the way it has frequent itself as a frontrunner on this container.

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