(2011)

But when you start talking about building a social graph that transcends any specific implementation, you quickly find yourself in the weeds. Is accepting someone’s invitation on LinkedIn the same kind of connection as mutually following them on Twitter? Can we define some generic connections like ‘fan of’ or ‘follower’ and re-use them for multiple sites? Does it matter that you can see who your followers are on site X but not on site Y?

One way to solve this comparison problem is with standards. Before pooling your data in the social graph, you first map it to a common vocabulary. Google, for example, uses XFN as part of their Social Graph API. This defines a set of about twenty allowed relationships. (Facebook has a much more austere set: close_friends, acquaintances, restricted, and the weaselly user_created).

But these common relationships turn out to be kind of slippery. To use XFN as my example, how do I decide if my cubicle mate is a friend, acquaintance or just a contact? And if I call him my friend, should I interpret that in the northern California sense, or in some kind of universal sense of friendship?

In the old country, for example, we have two kinds of ‘friendship’ (distinguished by whether you address one another with the informal pronoun) and going from one status to the other is a pretty big deal; you have to drink a toast with your arms all in a pretzel and it’s considered a huge faux pas to suggest it before both people feel ready. But at least it’s not ambiguous!

And of course sex complicates things even more. Will it get me in hot water to have a crush on someone but have a different person as my muse? Does spouse imply sweetheart, or do I have to explicilty declare that (perhaps on our 20th anniversary)? And should restrainingOrder be an edge or a node in this data model?

There’s also the matter of things that XFN doesn’t allow you to describe. There’s nonemesis or rival, since the standards writers wanted to exclude negativity. The gender-dependent second e on fiancé(e) panicked the spec writers, so they left that relationship out. Neither will they allow you to declare an ex-spouse or an ex-colleague.

And then there’s the question of how to describe the more complicated relationships that human beings have. Maybe my friend Bill is a little abrasive if he starts drinking, but wonderful with kids – how do I mark that? Dawn and I go out sometimes to kvetch over coffee, but I can’t really tell if she and I would stay friends if we didn’t work together. I’d like to be better friends with Pat. Alex is my AA sponsor. Just how many kinds of edges are in this thing?

And speaking of booze, how come there’s a field for declaring I’m an alcoholic (opensocial.Enum.Drinker.HEAVILY) but no way to tell people I smoke pot? Why are the only genders male and female? Have the people who designed this protocol really never made the twenty mile drive to San Francisco?

What happens to dead people in the social graph? Facebook keeps profiles around for a while in memoriam, so we probably shouldn’t just purge dead contacts from the social graph immediately. But we certainly don’t want them haunting us on LinkedIn – maybe there should be a second, Elysian social graph where we can put those nodes to await us?

You can call this nitpicking, but this stuff matters! This is supposed to be a canonical representation of human relationships. But it only takes five minutes of reading the existing standards to see that they’re completely inadequate.

Here the Ghost of Abstractions Past materializes in a flurry of angle brackets, and says in a sepulchral whisper:

“How about we let people define arbitrary relationships between nodes…”

https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/

(2014)

I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services. Through successive rounds of innovation and investor storytime, we’ve trained Internet users to expect that everything they say and do online will be aggregated into profiles (which they cannot review, challenge, or change) that shape both what ads and what content they see. Outrage over experimental manipulation of these profiles by social networks and dating companies has led to heated debates amongst the technologically savvy, but hasn’t shrunk the user bases of these services, as users now accept that this sort of manipulation is an integral part of the online experience.

Users have been so well trained to expect surveillance that even when widespread, clandestine government surveillance was revealed by a whistleblower, there has been little organized, public demand for reform and change. As a result, the Obama administration has been slightly more transparent about government surveillance requests, but has ignored most of the recommendations made by his own review panel and suffered few political consequences. Only half of Americans believe that Snowden’s leaks served the public interest and the majority of Americans favor criminal prosecution for the whistleblower. It’s unlikely that our willingness to accept online surveillance reflects our trust in the American government, which is at historic lows. More likely, we’ve been taught that this is simply how the Internet works: If we open ourselves to ever-increasing surveillance—whether from corporations or governments—the tools and content we want will remain free of cost.

At this point in the story, it’s probably worth reminding you that our intentions were good…

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/

https://www.instagram.com/salvjiia/?hl=uk

Via https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/style/ugly-pictures-on-instagram.html

When we worry about free speech, we mostly worry about governments suppressing speech, not private actors. It’s one thing to say that the US government shouldn’t have the ability to arbitrarily censor some speech, but it’s another altogether to say, that, for example, Boing Boing shouldn’t be able to kick jerks off its message boards — that has as much to do with “compelled publication” as it does with “free speech.”

But that’s not the end of the story, because the world isn’t composed of the giant governments of the world, controlling massive public spheres in which civic discourse is transacted, and millions of small private spaces of relatively equal standing, where conversations also take place.

Instead, our online world has almost no public spaces — that is, spaces for discourse that are controlled by the US government and subject to First Amendment protection — and a tiny handful of incredibly large, powerful companies control the vast majority of our civic discourse online. These companies operate “at scale” which means that they have a very low ratio of customer-service reps to users, and that means that nearly all of their decisions about who can speak, and what can be said, are made in secret, often by algorithms, with no appeal and no way to even get a human to explain what’s happened to you.

That’s why it’s worrying that Facebook and Twitter have (for example) purged millions of “bots” (who sometimes weren’t bots) and “extremists” (who were sometimes just people who were discussing or opposing extremism) and “inauthentic content” (which was sometimes very authentic indeed).

Not because this violates the First Amendment, and not because the strict First Amendment rules should necessarily apply to private actors, even very, very large ones — but because when the majority of our civic discourse is regulated by unaccountable algorithms and unaccountable moderators working for giant monopolistic companies, that has real, inarguable free speech implications.

The reality is that Alex Jones’ exile from the big platforms is significant because, without their backing, his ability to reach his audience will be very severely curtailed. That’s OK with me as a kind of utilitarian matter, because Jones is a terrible person who victimized some of the most traumatized people in America, families of murdered children, in order to sell quack vitamin supplements. So, yeah, fuck that guy.

But the very significance of this should be a wake-up call to all of us. Because, of course, rich and powerful people are better at navigating the rules of the big platforms than random users — or, more to the point, marginalized, at risk people.

Just look at Cambodia, where the local brutal dictator has mastered the rules of Facebook that are supposed to prevent harassment by forcing users to go by their real names. In Cambodia, dissidents have two choices: go by their real names on the platforms and risk being arrested and tortured, or stay silent. There just isn’t any way to reach the Cambodian population if you aren’t on Facebook, and the local autocrat will get you booted from Facebook if you don’t use your real name.

Which means that even if Facebook’s censorship isn’t a legal problem, it’s surely a moral one.

Inside the triumphant Alex Jones banned everywhere story is a worrying nuance about free speech and platform dominance

1. Beauty is fleeting, power is vulnerable. I will not risk the latter for the former.
2. I will use my magic mirror for spying on my enemies rather than for vain attempts at preserving my position as fairest in the land.
3. I will not fret over the comparative beauty of the Hero’s True Love or any Beautiful Yet Innocent kinfolk. They may be attractive enough for peasant wenches/quivering maidens; but I am The Evil Empress, and there is no comparison.
4. I will not bed the Hunky Hero before my plan is executed, unless having him believe I am carrying his child gives me a decisive advantage.
5. While seduction has its place in my vast arsenal, I realize that “evil” and “skanky” are not mutually inclusive. Royal Dressmakers unable to realize this fact will be flayed alive in the presence of their replacements.
6. I will wear flats, or better yet, running shoes when executing crucial plans.
7. My slinky sorceress’ robe will have a chain mail foundation garment, at minimum.
8. I will not be put off by the Hero’s rebuffs of my sensual advances. If he doesn’t succumb to me, I will not fly into a jealous rage. Instead, I’ll shrug my shoulders, send him on his way, and have him picked off as he exits the fortress.
9. Where winks, suggestive remarks, and body language won’t get me what I want, a well aimed semi-automatic will.

Many, many more following the above.

http://nift.firedrake.org/EEmpress.htm

As you might know, most languages and cultures have swear words (or as we from the South like to call them, cuss words). There are lots of reasons people swear, we usually start off being shocking, and after a while it just becomes habit. Like the great Yoda once sort of kind of said “being shocking lets of steam, letting you might know, most languages and cultures have swear words (or as we from the South like to call them, cuss words). There are lots of reasons people swear, we usually start off being shocking, and after a while it just becomes habit. Like the great Yoda once sort of kind of said “being shocking lets of steam, letting off steam leads to habit, and habit…leads to Physioprof”.

But there’s no denying that swearing is usually deemed inappropriate for at least some kinds of society (like, you know, 5 year olds, your grandmother, etc). So people wonder what USE swearing has in certain contexts. Like, say, in pain. Why do people swear when they are in pain? Whatever happened to “ouch”? Or “AAAAARRRRRGHHHHHH”.

Well, these authors hypothesized that swearing as related to pain was actually a maladaptive response, one that occurred because, at the time of the pain, negative thoughts and emotions come to the fore. So they thought that swearing while someone was in pain would make the perception of the pain worse, making people more intolerant to pain. But of course, being scientists, you have to TEST it first.

So they…

http://scicurious.scientopia.org/2010/10/15/friday-weird-science-that-motherfking-hurts/

Last week, FiveThirtyEight published nearly 3 million tweets sent by handles affiliated with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian “troll factory.” That group was a defendant in one of special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments, which accused the IRA of interfering with American electoral and political processes.

[…]

What follows is a sampling of reader projects that came to my attention via Twitter (where else?) and email. The projects reinforce and expand upon the Clemson researchers’ initial finding: The trolls were engaged in a sophisticated and intricate Russian assault on the political debate in America and several other countries. It was an assault waged both before and after the 2016 presidential election — and an assault that appears to continue, at least in some form, to this day.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-you-found-in-3-million-russian-troll-tweets/

Zuckerberg explained that when they come across content that contains Holocaust denial, they essentially remove it from all promotional algorithms to curb it’s spreading on the platform.

As a free-speech absolutist (please don’t mistake me for a constitutional originalist, I am not), I found the reaction extremely disturbing. Rather than seeing Twitter explode with conversations about the potential dangers of social network CEOs deciding what speech to promote and what not to, there was an outcry that Zuckerberg wasn’t doing enough to censor ‘fake news’.

The words extremely disturbing above might read as hyperbolic, especially in this particular context of censoring abhorrent, easily falsifiable claims like ‘the Holocaust didn’t happen’. But I don’t think are, decisions like this one by Facebook to censor Holocaust denial set a precedent that normalizes behavior (censorship) that can be used it far less benign in the future.

Make no mistake, I think fake news is a problem on Facebook and they do need to measures to prevent falsehoods from rapidly spreading and influencing elections, but I don’t think this is the answer.

You might think this precedent isn’t a big deal. It is censorship of things we almost universally agree to be false and damaging, so would a social network ever censor important, less controversial opinions? Things that, might actually be true? Well, we don’t even need to think up a hypothetical future situation —this is already happening on YouTube. That’s what makes this really scary.

Source: Stop begging social network CEOs for censorship – Sam – Medium

British sculptor Debbie Lawson works in the space between two and three dimensions, forming wild animals that emerge from old-fashioned rugs. The artist builds her animals from scratch, using chicken wire and masking tape, and then covers them with identical or near-identical Persian carpets to create the illusion that the creature is fused with the hanging rug.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/08/life-size-animals-emerge-from-persian-rugs-in-perception-defying-sculptures-by-debbie-lawson/

I’m nearly certain that I just saw a fox run across the street from my neighbor’s yard. It made my night; I hadn’t seen a fox in Asheville in maybe a decade. I start a new job on Monday, so I’m having fun imagining it to be an omen, and thinking about what foxes can signify…