My new podcast episode is out.

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival social network — Tap Team

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has quietly rolled out a new social network that is intended to get right what Facebook and Twitter have so far been getting wrong.

The new social network, WT:Social, which Wales announced had 25,000 members on November 6, now has about 78,000 members who are at least intrigued by the idea of a social network that combats fake news....

Check it out here. WT:Social.

TechaPeek
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival social network
Tap Team

China’s Digital Payment Revolution: Lessons for Libra — Dongyao Nie

China is already there. Why. Government permissiveness that has not been forthcoming in the West since it would greatly reduce banks' revenue from retail transactions. But in China the banking system is largely government owned, so it is not the same issue.

The Diplomat
China’s Digital Payment Revolution: Lessons for Libra

Dongyao Nie, news researcher at Al Jazeera English based in Washington DC

Brief Comments On Libra And Online Commerce — Brian Romanchuk

Facebook has led a consortium which has unveiled a white paper on a proposed Libra cryptocurrency. It is described as being backed by a multi-currency portfolio of government bonds, and so it might be looked at as a currency basket. I am not an expert on Libra, but I just wanted to comment on the pros and cons of such a basket for small online commerce players (such as BondEconomics.com). I also conclude with a short discussion of systemic risk posed by this platform....

Bond Economics 

Brief Comments On Libra And Online Commerce
Brian Romanchuk

ProMarket — Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (November 11-18)

"Is monopolization threatening capitalism?" Facebook, Google, Amazon.

ProMarket
Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (November 11-18)

Editors

Adam Levy — Millennials Are Deleting Facebook. Should Investors Worry?

While Pew's survey results don't mean users are fleeing Facebook entirely, the responses suggest a declining level of engagement. Coupled with recent changes to the news feed in Facebook, investors might see a clear decline in engagement levels....

Yahoo Finance
Millennials Are Deleting Facebook. Should Investors Worry?

Adam Levy, The Motley Fool

Censorship (links)

Expect additions to this thread. This is a developing story.

“Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others.......” the president tweeted. 

“.....Censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police. If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all.”…

The president later added: “....Too many voices are being destroyed, some good & some bad, and that cannot be allowed to happen. Who is making the choices, because I can already tell you that too many mistakes are being made. Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!”...

Politico

'We won't let that happen:' Trump alleges social media censorship of conservatives

See also

This raises major questions, in their statement that the deleted data was ‘administered by Russia and Iran’. It also contradicts their own official rationale. Given that these countries with combined populations of over 220 million people, it is unclear therefore if the specific allegation, and subsequent action, was based on these pages, groups, and accounts being literally run by government offices of the governments in question. That much appears very much unlikely to be so.

Rather, this appears as a case of bias, discrimination, and national chauvinism – activists from Russia and Iran are apparently not allowed to administer Facebook pages and groups, is what we can deduce at this time, in the absence of evidence to corroborate Facebook’s claims.

FRN itself has long been the subject of Atlanticist attacks, Julian Assange noted that attacks identical to those made upon FRN by Facebook are coordinated by militarized vectors of Atlanticist power.

The criteria of a ‘coordinated network’ appears to contradict allegations of being ‘administered by Russia and Iran’. Are Facebook page administrations, who agree on a range of subjects, disallowed from sending each other inbox messages and ‘coordinating’ messages? Isn’t that what activists do?Fort Russ

FACEBOOK COMMITS MASS CENSORSHIP & DISCRIMINATION; removes 652 ‘inappropriate’ accounts ‘linked’ to Russia and Iran

Paul Antonopoulos

See also

But, seeing as we're getting towards September when the EU Parliament will again be voting on the big Copyright Directive proposal there, including Article 13, which will require mandatory filters or other automated tools for preventing copyright infringement, I thought it was important to do a separate post calling out one of the other pages taken down by Symphonic Distribution's out of control Topple Track. And that was that it got Google to de-index an article by Julia Reda, a member of the EU Parliament who has been leading the charge against the problematic provisions in the Copyright Directive proposal.

Specifically -- and it would be hard to make this up if we tried -- Topple Track's automated filter got Google to de-index this blog post by Reda, in which she details the problems in Article 13 and how it will create mandatory censorship machines, that would likely lead to massive internet censorship of perfectly legitimate content....

TechDirt — Free Speech
Automated Filter Removed Parliament Member's Article Warning About Censorship By Automated Filters

See also

The algorithms that drive the bizarre universe of these videos are used to “hack the brains of very small children in return for advertising revenue,” says Bridle. “At least that what I hope they’re doing it for.” Bridle soon bridges the machinery of kids’ YouTube with the adult version. “It’s impossible to know,” he says, who’s posting these millions of videos, “or what their motives might be…. Really it’s exactly the same mechanism that’s happening across most of our digital services, where it’s impossible to know where this information is coming from.” The children’s videos are “basically fake news for kids. We’re training them from birth to click on the very first link that comes along, regardless of what the source is.”

High school and college teachers already deal with the problem of students who cannot judge good information from bad—and who cannot really be blamed for it, since millions of adults seem unable to do so as well. In surveying YouTube children’s videos, Bridle finds himself asking the same questions that arise in response to so much online content: “Is this a bot? Is this a person? Is this a troll? What does it mean that we can’t tell the difference between these things anymore?” The language of online content is a hash of popular tags meant to be read by machine algorithms, not humans. But real people performing in an “algorithmically optimized system” seem forced to “act out these increasingly bizarre combinations of words.”

Within this culture, he says, “even if you’re human, you have to end up behaving like a machine just to survive.” What makes the scenario even darker is that machines replicate the worst aspects of human behavior, not because they’re evil but because that’s what they’re taught to do. To think that technology is neutral is a dangerously naïve view, Bridle argues. Humans encode their historical biases into the data, then entrust to A.I. such critical functions as not only children’s entertainment, but also predictive policing and recommending criminal sentences. As Bridle notes in the short video above, A.I. inherits the racism of its creators, rather than acting as a “leveling force."

As we’ve seen the CEOs of tech companies taken to task for the use of their platforms for propaganda, disinformation, hate speech, and wild conspiracy theories, we’ve also seen them respond to the problem by promising to solve it with more automated machine learning algorithms. In other words, to address the issues with the same technology that created them—technology that no one really seems to understand. Letting “unaccountable systems” driven almost solely by ads control global networks with ever-increasing influence over world affairs seems wildly irresponsible, and has already created a situation, Bridle argues in his book, in which imperialism has “moved up to infrastructure level” and conspiracy theories are the most “powerful narratives of our time,” as he says below....

Open Culture
This Is Your Kids’ Brains on Internet Algorithms: A Chilling Case Study Shows What’s Wrong with the Internet Today
Josh Jones

See also

Unfortunately, Facebook immediately used this new precedent to switch its sights on the left, temporarily shutting down the Occupy London page and deleting the anti-fascist No Unite the Right account (Tech Crunch, 8/1/18). Furthermore, on August 9, the independent, reader-supported news website Venezuelanalysis had its page suspended without warning.…

Facebook recently announced it had partnered with the Atlantic Council in an effort to combat “fake news” on its platform (FAIR.org, 5/21/18). An offshoot of NATO, the Council’s board of directors is a who’s who of neo-conservative hawks, including Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger and James Baker; CIA directors like Robert Gates, Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden; retired generals like Wesley Clark and David Petraeus; as well as senior tech executives.

Forty-five percent of Americans get their news from Facebook. When an organization like the Atlantic Council decides what news we see and do not see, that is tantamount to state censorship.

FAIR — Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
That Facebook Will Turn to Censoring the Left Isn’t a Worry—It’s a Reality

Alan MacLeod

See also

Moon of Alabama
Facebook Kills "Inauthentic" Foreign News Accounts - U.S. Propaganda Stays Alive

Craig Murray — The Massive Need for Infrastructure in the Emerging and Developed World

"Voluntary" censorship at Facebook and Twitter.

Craig Murray Blog
Blocked By Facebook and the Vulnerability of New MediaCraig Murray, formerly British ambassador to Uzbekistan and Rector of the University of Dundee

See also

The Duran
CENSORSHIP CAUGHT: Facebook tries to shut the door on The Duran

Seraphim Hanisch

See also

Since journalists, publishers and users would raise a hue and cry over their content being censored, Facebook simply carries out its censorship in secret. By blocking distribution on the Facebook news feed, the company’s actions have the same effect as simply deleting content, but without any legal proof that the company violated its users’ First Amendment rights.

While Facebook is the only technology company that has spelled out these actions with such directness, Google and Twitter have both admitted, via legal representatives in congressional testimony that they follow a similar policy to suppress “fake news”—i.e., oppositional viewpoints.

WSWS
Facebook codifies its censorship regime
Andre Damon

Dylan Curran — Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

The harvesting of our personal details goes far beyond what many of us could imagine.

The Guardian
Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

Dylan Curran

Moon of Alabama — Cambridge Analytica And The Manipulation Of People

MoA-ites correctly distrust every word emanating from the mealy mouthed Guardian because it has been used in a vicious campaign to advance the interests of Zionists to the point where the well being of Guardian readers has been relegated below the interests of apartheid Israel.

Nevertheless having a bit of a shufti at the loudly trumpeted Facebook-Cambridge Analytica expose is an essential act for anyone who wants to try to get a grip on how populations are being deliberately manipulated.

There is a relatively easy to digest video here where Christopher Wyllie, a computer scientist, outlines the birth of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, the CEO and the method used to sell the development of the corporation to Steve Bannon, CA's first customer and Robert Mercer, the Wall Street financier who underwrote the cost of setting up the corporation.

I recommend spending the 13 minutes required to watch the video because Wyllie's summation of what they did and why is horrifying. Lines such as "If you want to change the way a person votes you have to change the culture the person lives within." and "to change a culture, first you have to smash the existing one then grab the pieces and mold it into the shape you want the culture to be"....

Moon of Alabama
Cambridge Analytica And The Manipulation Of People

b

See also

Reuters
Cambridge Analytica CEO claims influence on U.S. election, Facebook questioned
Eric Auchard and David Ingram

Greg Palast — 3 Dangers In The Blow-Up Over Cambridge Analytica, Trump’s Computer Gurus

First, this is not a "bad apple" story. The dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by the Koch brothers.…

The second danger is to forget that the GOP has been using computer power to wipe away voting rights of Black and Hispanic voters for years — by "caging," "Crosscheck," citizenship challenges based on last name (Garcia? Not American!?!) and more — a far more effective use of cyberpower than unconsciously manipulating your behavior through Facebook ads.

The third danger is to overplay the importance of cyberwar techniques in elections. Cambridge Analytica worked for Ted Cruz in the GOP primary AGAINST Trump — and what happened. That Hillary Clinton arrogantly defended NAFTA in Michigan, did not deign to visit Wisconsin once during the campaign, never visited or met with jobless auto workers at a closed plant in Ohio, as Trump did — this had more to do with her loss than computer geeks playing mad scientist in Britain.…

Greg Palast
3 Dangers In The Blow-Up Over Cambridge Analytica, Trump’s Computer Gurus

See also

Zero Hedge
Edward Snowden: Facebook Is A Surveillance Company Rebranded As "Social Media"

Tyler Durden 

Open Culture — Robert Reich Makes His UC Berkeley Course on Wealth and Inequality in America Available on Facebook

Great idea!

BTW, if you are not aware of Open Culture, it has gathered a lot of free resources.

Open Culture
Robert Reich Makes His UC Berkeley Course on Wealth and Inequality in America Available on Facebook
Dan Colman

SouthFront —YouTube Bans SYRIANGIRL’s Video About Her Facebook Ban – for ‘Hate Speech’

Censorship strikes again. Google, FaceBook, say it isn't so. Sure looks like it. (Google owns YouTube).

Is the window closing and the blinds being drawn?

SouthFront
YouTube Bans SYRIANGIRL’s Video About Her Facebook Ban – for ‘Hate Speech’
lkb22

Moon of Alabama — "Russian Ads" On Facebook? A Click-Bait Campaign

Moon of Alabama calls BS on the "Russian influence" ads on FaceBook.

"Lunacy."

Moon of Alabama
"Russian Ads" On Facebook? A Click-Bait Campaign

b

Zero Hedge — Leaked Descriptions Of Infamous "Russia Ads" Derail Collusion Narrative "They Showed Support For Clinton"

That was quick.

Less than a week after Facebook agreed to turn over to Congressional investigators copies of the 3,000-odd political advertisements that the company said it had inadvertently sold to a Russia-linked group intent on meddling in the 2016 presidential election, the contents of the ads have – unsurprisingly – leaked, just as we had expected them to.

No smoking gun.

Zero Hedge
Leaked Descriptions Of Infamous "Russia Ads" Derail Collusion Narrative "They Showed Support For Clinton"

Tyler Durden

The 2016 election outcome was unpredictable not only because of Donald Trump's presidential victory, but in terms where the money went. According to a new report from media tracker Borrell Associates, the final tally of political campaign ad spending in the 2016 election cycle came in lower than anticipated -- at $9.8 billion. And, while broadcast TV retained its dominance, the mass media mainstay of political advertising took a big blow from more targetable and data-driven ad options such as cable TV and digital.

The premise that $100,000 to $150,000 spent on FaceBook ads exerted much of an influence at all on the presidential election is simply absurd, let alone a dominant influence. This is not reaching for straws. It is jumping the shark.

AdAge

Data-Driven Targeting Creates Huge 2016 Political Ad Shift: Broadcast Tv Down 20%, Cable And Digital Way Up

Kate Kaye

Censorship in the works.

Another paradox of liberalism.

Fortune
How Facebook, Google Handle Political Ads Will Inevitably Change, Marketers Say
Reuters

Diane Coyle — The polarised republic

Review of Cass Sunstein's latest book, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Sunstein in the spouse of former UN Ambassador Samantha Power.

DC: It’s clear to me there are some sharp questions about the regulatory framework governing social media and the online world in general, questions regulators have been pretty keen to avoid so far. It’s time for them to do so now.

Call for some form of censorship of social media to reduce social divisiveness by reweaving the social fabric from above?

The Enlightened Economist
The polarised republic
Diane Coyle | freelance economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She is a member of the UK Competition Commission and is acting Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation

Here is the publisher's blurb on #Republic:

As the Internet grows more sophisticated, it is creating new threats to democracy. Social media companies such as Facebook can sort us ever more efficiently into groups of the like-minded, creating echo chambers that amplify our views. It's no accident that on some occasions, people of different political views cannot even understand each other. It's also no surprise that terrorist groups have been able to exploit social media to deadly effect. Welcome to the age of #Republic. In this revealing book, Cass Sunstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Nudge and The World According to Star Wars, shows how today's Internet is driving political fragmentation, polarization, and even extremism--and what can be done about it. Thoroughly rethinking the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet, Sunstein describes how the online world creates "cybercascades," exploits "confirmation bias," and assists "polarization entrepreneurs." And he explains why online fragmentation endangers the shared conversations, experiences, and understandings that are the lifeblood of democracy. In response, Sunstein proposes practical and legal changes to make the Internet friendlier to democratic deliberation. These changes would get us out of our information cocoons by increasing the frequency of unchosen, unplanned encounters and exposing us to people, places, things, and ideas that we would never have picked for our Twitter feed. #Republic need not be an ironic term. As Sunstein shows, it can be a rallying cry for the kind of democracy that citizens of diverse societies most need.

RT — Dataminr terminates RT access to Twitter news discovery tool, gives no official reason

Censorship is here. US establishment scared.

RT
Dataminr terminates RT access to Twitter news discovery tool, gives no official reason

Also

"Many US media outlets work in Russia, including television channels, they have the same rights and opportunities as the other outlets. If the unprecedented pressure on RT from US media and social networks leads to restrictions on the work of the Russian channel, we will have to prepare an active response," Alexander Zharov told RIA Novosti.

Sputnik International
Russian Telecom Watchdog to Respond to Any US Restrictions of RT - Head

A recent decision of Facebook to temporarily ban the RT broadcaster from uploading videos, images and links to its page on the social network has followed a complaint filed by one of the projects of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), the RT press service said Thursday, citing a notification from Facebook….

Sputnik International

RT Facebook Restrictions Follow Complaint From RFE/RL Project

Robert Barsocchini — Flagging on Facebook

Facebook is adding a new feature wherein a group that the Washington Post calls an ‘independent third party fact checker’ will decide whether stories are real or fake, and flag ones the group decides are fake.

WaPo leaves out of its report that the ‘independent fact checker’, the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network, receives funding from a US government-funded group, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which award-winning, independent journalist Robert Parry and author William Blum document was created to perform tasks previously performed by the CIA....

Surprised?

Washington's Blog
Flagging on Facebook
Robert Barsocchini

Brad DeLong — Ben Thompson: Fake News

Ben Thompson mentions the fake news in the mainstream media like the New York Times, citing the Judy Miller fake news about Saddam's manufacture and possession of WMD. He fails to mention the ongoing stream of propaganda in the mainstream as fake news about what is going on the in the world as part of an information war. The New York Times and the Washington Post are poster child examples in their promotion of liberal interventionism based on questionable if not bogus sources as if it were well-verified, for instance.

Glaring in its omission also is the fake news about economics and finance that promotes economic ideology justifying rent-seeking based on so-called laws of economics and "sophisticated" modeling. 

This is the fake news that needs to be banished.

WCEG
Should-Read: Ben Thompson: Fake News
Brad DeLong

Zuckerberg calls the president because he can

We're now at the point where a 20 something year old kid can call the president and complain if he doesn't like something.

Why? Because he's a billionaire.

The rest of us can just suck it when it comes to our needs.