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How Conservatives Awoke to the Dangers of Sean Hannity – The Atlantic

The Fox News host is under attack as never before because many Americans are now forced to take what he says seriously for the first time.

At the unlikely climax of his career, Hannity’s job is under attack because the most powerful man in the world trusts his words in a way no similarly powerful man ever has––and with that great responsibility, with that opportunity to inform the president about any matter in the world, Hannity indulges in half-baked conspiracies.

Source: How Conservatives Awoke to the Dangers of Sean Hannity – The Atlantic, by Conor Friedersdorf

 

It’s a dramatic and lurid misdirection, one that even the writers of House of Cards would find far-fetched, and it has the benefit of tricking gullible Trump supporters into further mistrusting the media. … Every time Hannity and his allies hyped this story, they disrespected their conservative audience, they hurt a grieving family, and they violated their own professional obligations to carefully check facts rather than engage in wild speculation.

Source: The Seth Rich Conspiracy Theory Is Shameful Nonsense | National Review, by David French

 

The network I once respected as a necessary antidote to liberal media now peddles craven lies and Russian disinformation.

Fox was supposed to provide some ideological balance within the larger media universe. That was a laudable ambition, but what Fox has become is far from laudable. Not only is it a toxic workplace where the harassment of women is rampant; it is also a no-fact zone. The Pulitzer Prize-winning website PolitiFact found that nearly 60 percent of the statements it checked on Fox News were either mostly or entirely false. Another 19 percent were only half true. … FNC might as well stand for Fake News Channel, and its myths have had a pernicious, indeed debilitating, effect on U.S. politics.

Source: The Seth Rich ‘Scandal’ Shows That Fox News Is Morally Bankrupt | Foreign Policy, by Max Boot

On Becoming the Enemy | Boston Review

A family of Jewish refugees remembers Berlin before the war.

Source: On Becoming the Enemy | Boston Review

After Kristallnacht, we had been removed permanently from public view, thereby masking our fate from our fellow Germans. Kristallnacht is often represented as a radical break with what came before. In fact it was not. … As my grandmother, Ilse, recounts in her 1957 memoir The Unforgotten, few even in the Jewish community realized what was really occurring.

Between 1936 and Kristallnacht, the German government flooded public spaces with Gestapo agents. In my grandmother’s memoir, she describes the growing familiarity of the German people with seeing agents appear at doorways, in restaurants, asking for documents, looking for enemies of the people where they were rumored to be. It became typical, normal, ordinary, to see such sweeps. At a certain point, people stopped asking when they saw two agents knocking at the apartment next door. Having agents of the government drop by to remove a neighbor was an event that no longer required an explanation.

Is there a tension between creativity and accuracy? | Michael Nielsen

Source: Is there a tension between creativity and accuracy? | Michael Nielsen

I believe there is a tension between behaviours which maximize accuracy and those which maximize creativity… A lot of important truths come from very irrational people.

Being overconfident in beliefs that most people hold is not at all the same as being overconfident in beliefs that few people hold.

To be creative, you need to recognize those barely formed thoughts, thoughts which are usually wrong and poorly formed in many ways, but which have some kernel of originality and importance and truth.

How Facebook’s tentacles reach further than you think – BBC News

Share Lab uses flow charts and data analysis to map one of the greatest forces shaping our world – Facebook.

Individually, these are powerful tools; combined they amount to a data collection engine that, Mr Joler argues, is ripe for exploitation.
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The data will remain in the hands of one company. Even if its current leaders are responsible and trustworthy, what about those in charge in 20 years?

“What is most striking is the sense of resignation, the impotence of regulation, the lack of options, the public apathy,” says Dr Powles. “What an extraordinary situation for an entity that has power over information – there is no greater power really.”

Source: How Facebook’s tentacles reach further than you think – BBC News
about Share Lab

Invisible Infrastructures : Online Trackers

Immaterial Labour and Data Harvesting: Facebook Algorithmic Factory

The following map is one of the final results of our investigation
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Within those invisible walls, in every moment algorithms are deciding which information will appear in our infosphere, how many and which of your friends will see your posts, what kind of content will become part of your reality and what will be censored or deleted.