#will oremus

[atsoukalidis]

“No social media platform of sufficient scale, however, can avoid becoming an instrument of power, whether by political actors seeking influence, governments seeking to exert control, or users seeking to subvert that control.”

Will Oremus

[cultureofresistance]

How about this, then, as an (admittedly ungainly) alternative to that overused maxim: ‘If you aren’t paying for it with money, you’re paying for it in other ways.’ Whether it’s your time, your privacy, or your intellectual property, you’re giving over to Facebook something of value every time you use it. That’s especially true anytime you use it in a new way—whether that’s signing up for a new app, accepting updated Terms of Service, or even just trying a new feature, like Facebook Watch, which inevitably generates for Facebook fresh behavioral data and enhances its understanding of you. And if this seems to put too much of the burden of responsibility on the individual user, let’s remember that each of us can relate to Facebook in other ways than just that of the consumer. We can relate to it as laborers with the ability to go on strike. We can relate to it as activists—or, in Schoolman and Serra’s case, protest artists—with the power to publicly criticize or boycott, and influence those around us. And, crucially, we can relate to it in our capacity as citizens of a state that has the power to enforce constraints on its behavior. That is, we can call on our leaders and representatives in government to take action on our behalf. If we don’t like how Facebook is treating us, we shouldn’t throw up our hands and call ourselves the product of a system over which we have no control. We should act like people—customers, workers, citizens, whatever—who have the power to demand change.

Are You Really the Product?

[forsakebook]

The underlying problem here is not the [platform] rules themselves, but the fact that just a few, for-profit entities have such power over global speech and politics in the first place.

Will Oremus

[ethtropy]

Twitter’s Ban on Political Ads Will Hurt Activists, Labor Groups, and Organizers

Its feel-good decision is a mess

Prioritizing #Commercial speech over #Political speech is itself a political stance, and not necessarily one that we should want our #Online #Communication #Platforms to take. Will Oremus writes about #Twitter's decision to ban #PoliticalAds. #Medium

[patrickbrianmooney]

Trump’s reliance on dishonesty is not incidental to his character, or his appeal, or his approach to politics. It is his defining feature, shaping everything from how he talks, to the views he holds, to the way he conducts business and politics.

Will Oremus, The mainstream media finally figured out how to cover Trump’s lies

[mirrorontheworld]

S’éloignant du caractère d’intimité qui nous rendait autrefois accros, le site évolue actuellement vers quelque chose de bien plus grand.

[decanting-cerebral]

Mi Casa Es Su Casa: Will Oremus Tallies The Facebook Privacy Votes

1.  "Some 650,000 people have voted on Facebook's proposed changes to its privacy policies, with 88 percent against the changes and just 12 percent in favor. So, naturally, Facebook will go forward with them.

That's right: It really doesn't matter to Facebook at all that nearly nine in 10 people who voted on the changes opposed them. What matters is that a far greater proportion of the site's users didn't vote at all—a declaration of apathy and/or confusion that Facebook will interpret as a license to proceed with whatever changes it sees fit from now on."

2.  "It also doesn't matter that the voting actually doesn't end until 3 p.m. eastern time today. Thanks to our Nate Silver-esque prediction models, we've known the outcome all along. You see, the vote was set up from the start so that it would only count if 30 percent of all active Facebook users participated. That's 300 million people—almost three times the number that voted in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. The only chance of that happening would have been if Facebook had explained the vote clearly and promoted it tirelessly on its site, and even then the chances would have been slim to none. In the event, it did neither, and turnout is on pace to be less than one million. That is, less than one-tenth of one percent."

3.  "To be precise, some 650,000 people had voted as of 10 a.m. Monday, with over 570,000 against the changes and fewer than 80,000 in favor. All of those numbers are dwarfed by the roughly 999 million who did not vote at all.

So Facebook's three-year experiment in offering users a vote on changes to its privacy policies will come to an end today with something less than a whimper, which is probably about how Facebook wanted it to end. In the future, whenever there's a backlash to such changes, Facebook will be able to point to the silent super-majority who couldn't be bothered to take five minutes to preserve their privilege to weigh in on how their own data is used. How many of these people would have taken that step if Facebook had made the process more clear, we'll never know, but even that number is probably nowhere near 300 million. Everyone by now is so accustomed to websites' privacy policies being incomprehensible that we've long since given up the idea that we can understand what happens to our personal data online, let alone control it."

4.  "That said, it's worth pointing out that a staggering number of Facebook users fell for a hoax that claimed they could prevent the site from using their information if they posted some legalistic mumbo jumbo on their own wall as a status update. Check out the comments on Facebook's site governance page and you'll see they're still falling for it in droves. Ironically, as nonsensical as it is, that fake status update went viral because it was less confusing than Facebook's actual site governance process.

The graphic below shows the number of people who voted in favor of the changes (left) and against the changes (right). Pretty lopsided, right? But consider this: If there were a bar for all the Facebook users who did not cast a vote, its height would be roughly that of a 30-story building."

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/12/10/facebook_site_governance_vote_with_low_turnout_privacy_policy_changes_pass.html

[yiddischemama]

"The Unmitigated Inanity of Cyber Monday"

...In other words, Cyber Monday was originally a response to the problem of slow home dial-up Internet. The problem is mostly history—nearly two-thirds of U.S. households have access to broadband today, about twice the 2005 rate—yet the zombie solution lives on.

...This Cyber Monday, it’s worth remembering the true origin of the term “cyber” —the one that predates even Gibson. It’s from the 1940s neologism cybernetics, derived from the Greek kybernetes, or “steersman.” Its English meaning, loosely: the science of control.

Will Oremus on Slate