Exclusive: Labor complained to Facebook about several of the Liberal backbencher’s posts, but the social media giant says others did not violate misinformation policies
How Disinformation Campaigns Exploit the Poor Data Privacy Regime to Erode Democracy
Unger, Wayne, How Disinformation Campaigns Exploit the Poor Data Privacy Regime to Erode Democracy (December 14, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3762609
“The U.S. is under attack. It is an information war, and disinformation is the weapon. Foreign and domestic actors have launched information operations and coordinated campaigns against western democracies using dis/misinformation. While the U.S. is both a disseminator and recipient of global or regional disinformation campaigns, this article focuses on the U.S. and its people as the recipient. From Russian election interference to COVID-19 conspiracies, disinformation campaigns harm the presumptive trust in democracy, democratic institutions, and public health and safety. While dis/misinformation is not new, the rapid and widespread dissemination of dis/misinformation has only recently been made possible by technological developments that enable mass communication and persuasion never seen before. Today, social media, algorithms, personal profiling, and psychology, when mixed together, enable a new dimension of political microtargeting—a dimension that disinformers exploit for their political gain. These enablers share a root cause—the poor data privacy and security regime in the U.S. At its core, democracy requires independent thought, personal autonomy, and trust in democratic institutions because an independently thinking and acting public is the external check on power and authority. However, when the public is misinformed or disconnected from fact and truth, the fundamental concept of democracy erodes—the public is no longer informed, independently thinking, and autonomous to elect its representatives and check their power. Disinformation, not rooted in fact and truth, attacks the core of democracy, and thus, the public check on governmental power. This article addresses a root cause—the lack of data privacy protections—of the dis/misinformation dissemination and its effects on democracy. This article explains, from a technological perspective, how personal information is used for personal profiling, and how personal profiling contributes to the mass interpersonal persuasion that disinformation campaigns exploit to advance their political goals.”
Patricia Highsmith died in 1995, but she has never really gone away. If you haven’t read her debut novel of 1950, Strangers on a Train, you have probably seen the Hitchcock film. Tom Ripley, the attractive (if petulant) psychopath who stars in five of her novels, has been played on screen many times. (Andrew Scott will take on the role in Showtime’s new series, Ripley.)
Highsmith is the crime writers’ crime writer. Admirers of her work include Graham Greene, Gillian Flynn, Mark Billingham and Sarah Waters. I myself recommend her novels as lockdown reading: you are immediately plunged into a dream of glamour and danger.
There are not many fans of her personal character though, and Richard Bradford’s biography opens with a charge sheet. A friend of Highsmith’s described her as “an equal opportunity offender . . . You name the group, she hated them”. She hated, for example, blacks, Arabs and Jews, especially the last group, and yet “three of the women to whom she declared her unbounded love were Jewish”.
WELL, GOOD: Drinking green tea, coffee lowers risk of death for stroke and heart attack survivors.
Love Books But Need Your Social Distance Space?
Rent a bookstore for a date. Yes, an entire bookstore. “The experience is BYOB (and food), but the store provides candles—and, of course, exclusive browsing access. What better way to get to know someone that by judging their taste in books?” – LitHub
Changing Other People’s Minds Is A Zero-Sum Game
So try these strategies instead. – The New York Times
How Prince Won Super Bowl XLI
The best Super Bowl halftime performance, by a comfortable margin, is Prince’s performance during Super Bowl XLI in 2007. Anil Dash has a great writeup that contextualizes the song choices and what it all meant to Prince.
Prince’s halftime show wasn’t just a fun diversion from a football game; it was a deeply personal statement on race, agency & artistry from an artist determined to cement his long-term legacy. And he did it on his own terms, as always.
Opening with the stomp-stomp-clap of Queen’s “We Will Rock You”, Prince went for crowd participation right from the start, with a nod to one of the biggest stadium anthems of all time — and notably, is one of the songs in the set that he never performed any time before or after. Indeed, though his 1992 song “3 Chains O’ Gold” was clearly a pastiche of the then-rejuvenated “Bohemian Rhapsody”, Prince had rarely, if ever, played any Queen covers at all in his thousands of live shows.
But with that arena-rock staple, Prince was signaling that he was going to win over a football crowd. He launched straight into “Let’s Go Crazy” at the top of the set. As one of the best album- and concert-opening songs of all time, this was a perfect choice. Different from any other Super Bowl performer before or since, Prince actually does a call-and-response section in the song, emphasizing that this is live, and connecting him explicitly to a timeless Black music tradition.
You can watch his entire performance here. But if you’ve seen it before and you’re strapped for time, check out the full-on mini-concert Prince performed at a Super Bowl press conference a few days before the game:
Incredible. I move that going forward all “this is more of a comment than a question” comments during conference Q&As are immediately cut off with blistering guitar riffs of Johnny B. Goode. Seconded?
