FACEBOOK: A SURVEILLANCE MACHINE THAT IS BEING WEAPONIZED
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
(Friday Church News Notes, November 23, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “The Facebook Dilemma,” part one, Frontline PBS,
Oct. 29, 2018: “Zeynep Tufekci, of the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, observes, ‘What Facebook does is profile you. If you are on
Facebook, it is collecting everything you do. If you are off Facebook,
it is using tracking pixels to collect what you are browsing. And for
its micro-targeting to work, for its business model to work, it has to
remain a surveillance machine.’ From 2012-2015, Rand Waltzman and his
colleagues at the U.S. Department of Defense published more than 200
academic papers and reports about the threats they were seeing from
social media. Waltzman says, ‘The concern was that social media could be
used for really nefarious purposes. The opportunities for
disinformation, for deception, for everything else, are enormous. Bad
guys, or anyone else, could use this for any kind of purpose in a way
that wasn’t possible before. That’s the concern. [The potential threat
of people giving up their data] is that they are opening themselves up
for being targets for manipulation. I can manipulate you to buy
something. I can manipulate you to vote for somebody. It is like putting
a big target on yourself and saying, “Here I am; come and manipulate
me. I’ve given you everything you need. Have at it.” That’s the threat.
What I saw over the years of the program was that the medium enables you
to really take disinformation and turn it into a serious weapon. When
you look at how it works, you see the opportunities for mass
manipulation. People are easily misled, if you do it the right way.
For example, when you see people forming into communities, I can
exploit that to craft my message so that it resonates most exactly with
that community. And I can do that for every single community. It would
be pretty easy to set up a fake account, and large numbers of fake
accounts, embedded in different communities, and use them to disseminate
propaganda. It’s a serious weapon, because it is an enormous scale.
It’s the scale that makes it a weapon.’ Dmytro Shymkiv, adviser to the
president of Ukraine, 2014-2018, describes the propaganda center that
was set up in St. Petersburg, Russia, called the Internet Research
Agency, which has poured out disinformation to fight the anti-Russian
government in Ukraine. ‘Russian propaganda against the Ukrainian
government was massive on social media. There were so many stories that
started emerging on Facebook. ... They scared people. ... They planted a
story that Ukrainian soldiers had crucified a child, which is totally
nonsense. It was proven that the people telling the story of the
crucifixion were actually hired actors. So Facebook was weaponized.
[Just as in the Arab Spring, Facebook was being used to flame division.
But now by groups working in behalf of a foreign power, using Facebook’s
tools built to help advertisers boost their content.] By that time in
Facebook, you could pay money to promote these stories so your stories
emerge on the top lines. You immediately get media response. You
can test all kinds of nonsense and understand which nonsense people do
not believe and to which nonsense people start believing which will
influence the persons receptive to propaganda. And then provoking that person to certain action.’
[After Shymkiv met with Facebook executives and asked them to
intervene, the response was,] ‘Sorry, we are an open platform; anyone
can do anything within our policy, which is written on the website. We
will think about this, but you know we have freedom of speech and we are
a very pro-democracy platform; everybody can say anything.’”
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WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM?
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
(Friday Church News Notes, November 23, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from Jay Richards, “What’s the Difference?” The Stream,
Aug. 7, 2017: “Too many of us are still clueless about socialism and
communism. I blame biased media and fuzzy thinking. ... Still,
sometimes, the truth leaks out. Last year, The Washington Post
published a long piece by Ilya Somin. It’s about the ‘greatest mass
murderer’ in the world. ... Guess who wins that grim prize. ... It’s Mao
Zedong, the leader of China’s communist revolution. ‘From 1958 to
1962,’ Somin notes, ‘his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of
up to 45 million people--easily making it the biggest episode of mass
murder ever recorded.’ Let that sink in. In under five years, a
government led by one man murdered 45 million of its own people.
Scholars have long known the basic stats. But historian Frank Dikötter
has shown [Mao’s Great Famine,
2011] that the number is larger than previously thought. And many more
of the deaths were deliberate, rather than ‘just’ the outcome of bad
policies that led to famine. Millions were tortured to death, often for
minor crimes like digging up a potato. ... Lots
of people seem to think ‘communism’ just means ‘bad socialism.’ But
that ignores the meanings of words and Marxist theory itself
... Here’s a brief primer: Marx and his disciples claimed that
‘capitalism’ must give way to ‘socialism,’ where private property would
be abolished and an all-powerful state would own everything on behalf of
the people. That’s what Marx meant by the word socialism, and that’s
the main dictionary definition. This was only supposed to be a stage,
though, not the end of all our strivings. At some point, under
socialism, people would lose their silly fondness for property, family,
religion, and other evils. A ‘new socialist man’ would emerge and then
the state would ‘wither away.’ Everyone would enjoy peace, prosperity,
and the brotherhood of man. Marx and his acolytes called that final,
stateless paradise ‘communism.’ Here’s the point: Those regimes led by
mass murderers with their gulags, death camps, man-made famines and
killing fields were socialist.
That’s not slander. It’s what these countries called themselves. USSR
stood for the ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.’ You gotta break
millions of eggs with socialism to make the communist omelet. ... That
was sort of the theory anyway. In practice, socialism has just been
evil. Unremitting evil, wherever it’s tried. Have a look at North Korea
and now Venezuela. Socialism doesn’t lead to a higher plane of existence
or a stateless utopia. It leads to a bottomless pit of immorality,
poverty, and death. Why would we expect anything different? It’s based
on a false view of human nature, history, labor, property, economic
value, capital, and the role of prices.”
