Who Should Squelch Lies and Trolls on Social Media?
June 30, 2017 at 8:25 pm | Posted in Disinformation, Enemies of Freedom, Presidential election | Leave a commentTags: Elizabeth Dwoskin, Facebook, fake news, harassment, lies, President Chump, social media, trolls, Trump, Twitter
John Bauer (1882-1918), artist, in 1915: “Look at them,” troll mother said. “Look at my sons! You won’t find more beautiful trolls on this side of the moon.”
By now you have read and seen the damage caused by the flood of misleading or harassing material on social media. Vulnerable teens have committed suicide, ordinary adults have become fearful and intimidated, fools have become enraged vigilantes, racists have infected those with weak mental immune systems, and President Chump has been elected.
Elizabeth Dwoskin’s recent article in the Washington Post describes how Twitter and Facebook and Google are trying to weaken the flood.
Colin Crowell is the Vice President of Policy at Twitter. Dwoskin’s article quoted something that Crowell had written recently, and it is worth discussing here, because it states a misunderstanding that is prevalent in all of the major social media companies.
Dwoskin wrote, ““We, as a company, should not be the arbiter of truth,” Crowell wrote earlier this month. He emphasized that Twitter users — “journalists, experts, and engaged citizens” — tweet side by side to correct public discourse every day in real time.”
The fallacy in Crowell’ argument is that the corrections are not really in real time. They are never soon enough. The misleading material reaches the public before any retractions or corrections appear, and sits out there, at least briefly unopposed.
Correcting misleading material is like closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.
Only a tiny fraction of those who see the misleading material will ever see the retraction or the correction.
Even among those who do see the correction, the first-seen version often makes the deepest impression.
The timing is such that most of the simple-minded and all of the malicious will propagate the uncorrected version.
Sociopathic liar that he is, Donald Trump regularly exploits this weakness of all of the media: public appearances, TV, the print media, and the social media.
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That the misleading material is seen first, and the stickiness of first impressions – those are inconvenient truths for the social media giants. The social media giants do not want the expense that would be required to pre-disinfect the stream that flows onto their platforms, nor do they relish the potential legal battles that any gate-keeper may face.
Good technical and legal solutions are not yet known. But at least the social media should drop the self-serving illusion that they can evade at least some gate-keeping role.
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Vandalism By Squirrels With Aroused Teeth
June 20, 2017 at 12:13 pm | Posted in Humans and other animals | Leave a commentTags: animal behavior, prairie dog, squirrel
Baby American red squirrel, photographed 20 June 2010 by Dan Leveille.
Every one feels aroused and lustful at times.
Sometimes one part of your body feels aroused, and sometimes another.
But have your teeth ever felt aroused?
No?
Well, that proves that you are not a tree squirrel.
Previous posts on this blog have wondered what drives tree squirrels into a frenzy of arboreal vandalism several times each year. The most recent of those posts was here.
At last, we have an answer.
A local citizen’s association sponsored a walk through a local park, with a park ranger to show us how to identify the type of each tree, and to explain its ecological role and prospects.
The ranger provided the long-sought explanation of what drove the tree squirrels to their periodic frenzies of vandalism.
The squirrels are not teething, but are driven by something close to teething.
A squirrel’s teeth would become over-long unless the squirrel gnawed on something hard.
Wikipedia confirms and expands upon this explanation: tree squirrel’s’ “characteristic gnawing trait also aids in maintaining sharp teeth, and because their teeth grow continuously, prevents [the] over-growth [of their teeth].”
In short, tree squirrels have aroused teeth!
Vandalism by tree squirrels isn’t confined to trees. Tree squirrels occasionally chew on electrical wiring, sometimes in the attic of a house, or strung between poles outside.
Their non-arboreal vandalism probably has the same explanation as their vandalism of trees.
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The topic of this blog posting obliges me to end it on a more personal note.
As is clear from my picture, I am a prairie dog.
Prairie Dog, the poliblog, 2012-06-23 .
While researching squirrel teeth for this post, a relevant Wikipedia article contained this bombshell: “Prairie dogs … are a type of ground squirrel …”
Imagine my astonishment! This post has been about my own distant cousins!
Of course, prairie dogs differ from tree squirrels in important ways. That is why I have been careful throughout to call them tree squirrels.
Now, about those differences.
Prairie dogs hate black-footed ferrets. Not only are those sharp toothed nasty- dispositioned fiends of the right size to creep into our burrows, they do not read advice columnists, and therefore have no sense of boundaries.
Roy, a ferret, photgraphed by Alfredo Gutiérrez .
A picture of a ferret’s teeth, photographed by Erlendaakre, 26 September 2008.
A ferret in the middle of a war dance jump. Photographed in 2005 by Inkrat773.
Tree squirrels do not have nightmares about black-footed ferrets.
On the other hand, prairie dogs are much bigger than tree squirrels, because our weight is not limited by the strength of the branches of the most numerous trees. So our paws are much bigger, too, and that is what enabled me to write this blog. With a small stubby strap-on on each front paw, two-pawed typing is possible on a keyboard. It is very similar to two-fingered typing by a person. With a strap-on, I can even swipe a touch screen. (A bare paw doesn’t work on a touch screen. A bare paw produces too complicated an imprint for a computer that is looking for the simple dot-like pattern of a finger tip.)
The paw of a tree squirrel is too narrow to serve as the stable mount for a strap-on.
Those are some of the differences.
But still, they are cousins.
So I have three wishes for them:
– teeth that are sharp and not over-long,
– the discernment to distinguish an insulated electrical wire from a twig,
– and the understanding that although random changes of direction do help when escaping from a pursuing animal, they do not help when evading a car.
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President Chump, You Cannot Distract Us
June 6, 2017 at 7:59 am | Posted in Abuse of Office, Conceited, Disinformation, Enemies of Freedom | 1 CommentTags: Emmanuel Macron, leak, Leaker in Chief, Mar-a-Lago, Mar-a-Leako, President Chump, security risk, Trump
Orangutans can use objects in creative ways. Photo taken by Postdif from Wikipedia, at the Philadelphia Zoo on 8 May 2010.
To President Chump –
When others point out inconvenient facts about you, one of your favorite tactics is to change the subject. You deliberately do something attention-grabbing, to distract the public’s attention away from the inconvenient facts.
When there are questions about the connections of you and your gang to Putin’s regime, you squawk instead about how those inconvenient facts became widely known. You squawk about leaks – you, who said “I love Wikileaks” during the campaign, when leaks had been crafted to harm your opponent, just like the more recent “leaks” that were crafted to harm Emmanuel Macron‘s campaign for the Presidency of France.
That doesn’t work any more. We are on to you.
Speakers and posters at the March for Truth on June 3 said so, loud and clear.
Every morning, you will wake up to us asking again about your taxes.
You will wake up to us asking again about your conflicts of interest.
You will wake up to us asking again about your loyalty.
You will wake up to us asking again about whether you are a security risk – you, the first US President ever to have been called The Leaker in Chief. (Yes, that was one of the posters at the March for Truth.)
Perhaps Mar-a-Lago should be renamed Mar-a-Leako.
The March for Truth on June 3, 2017, in Portland, Oregon, which was one of its many cities. Photographed by ‘Another Believer’.
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