My Dad, the Facebook Addict

Laughing Squid: Filmmaker Dylan LeVine hilariously documented his birthday candle-phobic father Vincent‘s obsession with Facebook and in particular, his overwhelming need to build an arsenal of memes, just in case. The elder LeVine shared how he researched and alphabetized every meme to ensure a full state of readiness should an argument ensue, until it became all he could think about. His family expressed repeated concern about the amount of time Vincent was spending online, but it was only after he was put on a three-day Facebook ban that he realized how much time and energy he was wasting in front of the computer.

See also: What is Facebook doing to our politics?

What is Facebook doing to our politics?

Essential reading. This is probably the future of news, for the Right at least: Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine

Facebook, in the years leading up to this election, hasn’t just become nearly ubiquitous among American internet users; it has centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way.

[Facebook’s] algorithms have their pick of text, photos and video produced and posted by established media organizations large and small, local and national, openly partisan or nominally unbiased. But there’s also a new and distinctive sort of operation that has become hard to miss: political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook, uniquely positioned and cleverly engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the news feed. These are news sources that essentially do not exist outside of Facebook, and you’ve probably never heard of them. They have names like Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle; Addicting Info; RightAlerts; Being Liberal; Opposing Views; Fed-Up Americans; American News; and hundreds more. Some of these pages have millions of followers; many have hundreds of thousands.

Individually, these pages have meaningful audiences, but cumulatively, their audience is gigantic: tens of millions of people.

Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine, by John Herrman, New York Times.

The Other Side

Three theories of how liberals and conservatives think, compiled by Nicky Case.

I’m posting this in large part because I like the format. It’s more interesting than just a text screenshot or tweetstorm when posted on social media, and it looks good in a blog post. I also appreciate that it’s explicitly public domain to encourage sharing.

It’s not a proper infographic, it’s not an essay and it’s certainly not a comic, but it is a little of all of these things.

See also: other posts tagged ‘politics’.

How to speak on the Internet

How To Speak On The Internet (MMM™)

Satchell Drakes: After spending quite a few years on Twitter, I’ve had my fair share of getting pulled into toxic moments. I’ve also made some of my closest friends on there. I wanted to put together a resource that might help people share their worldview in a manner that is effective and conscious of their context. Mike McHargue of The Liturgists Podcast essentially did all of the work and tackled this issue the best with a matrix of four questions to help with just that. Here’s essentially an overdramatic Retweet of that matrix.

See also

• That emoji does not mean what you think it means — Since emoji are designed differently across platforms, sometimes your text messages might get lost in translation.
• Why Are You So Angry? — A six-part series on the male gamer’s relationship to feminism.
• This Video Will Make You Angry — How ideas spread as ‘thought germs’ over the internet.

Russia’s “Internet Research Agency” troll farm

The New York Times looks into ‘The Agency’, a pro-Kremlin propaganda operation that has “industrialized the art of trolling”.

The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.

Ludmila Savchuk worked at the agency for two months.

The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted. Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day.

Savchuk told me she shared an office with about a half-dozen teammates. It was smaller than most, because she worked in the elite Special Projects department. While other workers churned out blandly pro-Kremlin comments, her department created appealing online characters who were supposed to stand out from the horde. Savchuk posed as three of these creations, running a blog for each one on LiveJournal. One alter ego was a fortuneteller named Cantadora. The spirit world offered Cantadora insight into relationships, weight loss, feng shui — and, occasionally, geopolitics. Energies she discerned in the universe invariably showed that its arc bent toward Russia. She foretold glory for Vladimir Putin, defeat for Barack Obama and Petro Poroshenko. The point was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person.

Savchuk’s revelations about the agency have fascinated Russia not because they are shocking but because they confirm what everyone has long suspected: The Russian Internet is awash in trolls.

Previously: A professional Russian propaganda troll tells all

Facebook’s Little Red Book

In his time working for Facebook (2008–2014), Ben Barry did a lot of really nice design work for the company. Luckily for us, he has posted it on his website. Below I’ve selected just some of my favourite examples.

“As the company of Facebook grew, we faced a lot of challenges. One of them was explaining our company’s mission, history, and culture to new employees. We wanted to try to package a lot of those stories and ideas in one place to give to all employees.”

The Next Web: Here’s our first peek inside the little red book Facebook gives to employees

Barry and Everett Katigbak co-founded Facebook’s Analog Research Lab , a print studio that is near Facebook’s original Menlo Park building. In his time at Facebook, Barry was famous for his focus on the company’s brand, even to the point that he was dubbed the company’s “propaganda minister” internally.

Facebook Visual Identity

This page features a wealth of design concepts, including this revision to the famous wordmark which Facebook approved but have not (yet) implemented.

“Facebook as a product and organization evolves very fast, and it was a challenge trying to design a system that was flexible across many mediums and contexts. Separate from the visual design work, there was the incredible task of creating awareness, gaining support, and ultimately creating a cross-functional team to approve and implement these changes.”

Facebook Analog Research Laboratory

The Facebook Analog Research Laboratory is a printing studio and workshop. Its primary mission is to produce work that reinforces the values of Facebook.

Facebook Posters & Ephemera

Finally, there are these posters and other miscellaneous designs produced by Barry, usually for internal hackathons.

Lovely, lovely work, all of it.

See also: A Facebook board game!

The BuzzFeed editorial style guide

Editorial style guides fascinate me, and the BuzzFeed style guide makes for an interesting browse. The word list in particular provides a brilliant snapshot of Internet popular culture as it stands in 2015.

Don’t hyphenate blow job, but do hyphenate butt-dial. Uppercase TARDIS but a subreddit is a lowercase place. T. rex, but T. Swift. Make sure to capitalise Apple Store (and most brands) but you can leave the exclamation mark off of Yahoo.

See also: The BuzzFeed Editorial Standards And Ethics Guide

A professional Russian propaganda troll tells all

Dmitry Volchek and Daisy Sindelar talk to former professional Russian troll Marat Burkhard about his well paid work perpetuating a pro-Kremlin dialogue online:

There are thousands of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and vKontakte, all increasingly focused on the war in Ukraine. Many emanate from Russia’s most famous “troll factory,” the Internet Research center, an unassuming building on St. Petersburg’s Savushkina Street, which runs on a 24-hour cycle. In recent weeks, former employees have come forward to talk to RFE/RL about life inside the factory, where hundreds of people work grinding, 12-hour shifts in exchange for 40,000 rubles ($700) a month or more.

St. Petersburg blogger Marat Burkhard spent two months working at Internet Research in the department tasked with clogging the forums on Russia’s municipal websites with pro-Kremlin comments.

RFE/RL: How many departments are there at Internet Research?

Burkhard: It’s a modern building, four floors. There’s a LiveJournal department, a news department, a department where they create all sorts of images and demotivators (Editor’s Note: Demotivators are satirical graphics that tend to undermine their subject matter), a department where they make videos. But I was never in those departments. Each of them has its own office, tables, and computers, and no one prowls around from place to place. Everyone stays in their spot.

The entire article is fascinating and includes multiple example case studies. These trolls work in teams of three — a troika with a well defined process: Villain Troll > Link Troll > Picture Troll.

Burkhard: Our department commented on posts. Every city and village in Russia has its own municipal website with its own comments forum. People would write something on the forum — some kind of news — and our task was to comment on it. We did it by dividing into teams of three. One of us would be the “villain,” the person who disagrees with the forum and criticizes the authorities, in order to bring a feeling of authenticity to what we’re doing. The other two enter into a debate with him — “No, you’re not right; everything here is totally correct.” One of them should provide some kind of graphic or image that fits in the context, and the other has to post a link to some content that supports his argument. You see? Villain, picture, link.

Translation: Ukraine, rise up! Southeast, sit down, don’t make a fuss, and put up with it.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: One Professional Russian Troll Tells All (via)

See also

• Teens, social media and privacy
• The adventures of Russian Man
• This video will make you angry

Sandwich Video

The startup that makes your startup look cool: Small Empires

Sandwich is a video production company that has found the perfect tone for the moment. Dry, self-deprecating, and hilarious, while simultaneously conveying lots of information and a sense of cool that comes from being a part of the near future. We’ve covered many of the companies they crafted videos for, from Casper to Coin to Push For Pizza.

sandwichvideo.com

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100 new emoji by Avery Monsen

These seem to have been first released as a Vine. (via Boing Boing)

Speed-reading like Neo

How To Read A 223-Page Novel In Just 77 Minutes:

Spritz makes a speed-reading technology which allows you to get through a mass of text, reading every word, in a fraction of the time it would take if you were turning the pages of a book or swiping through a Kindle. A college-level reader tends to read at between 200 and 400 a minute. Using Spritz, if you can handle 1,000 words per minute, you’d only need 77 minutes to complete the first Harry Potter book.

The placement of the word is key. Each word isn’t simply centered in the Spritz box. Rather, it’s placed optimally so that as little eye-movement is needed as possible. The only thing that limits comprehension at that point if your personal cognitive ability to recognize words and process their meaning.

This animated GIF example shows 500 words per minute.

I’m surprised how easy it is to read. I’ve been aware of various speed reading apps before but never really considered trying them. That GIF above has pretty much convinced me that I should, at least for reading articles online.

Fiction feels like a very different beast to me. I know for starters that I tend to speed up when the story gets exciting and sometimes I like to linger and appreciate a paragraph or line of dialogue and consider it for a bit.

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The $5.7 Million Magazine Illustration – The New Yorker

In October, “Ornamental Despair,” a 1994 painting by the British artist Glenn Brown, sold at auction in London for $5.7 million. The painting is almost an exact replica of a science-fiction illustration that Foss created for a men’s magazine in the nineteen-seventies, for which he was paid about three hundred and fifty pounds. Brown’s painting was based on a reprint of Foss’s original, featured in a 1990 book collection of the artist’s work.

“I knew he copied it from the book because the painting was cropped to fit the page. His version is clearly based on the cropped version,” Foss said.
The New Yorker

Rhythm & Hues: Life After Pi

Life After Pi is a short documentary about Rhythm & Hues Studios, the L.A. based Visual Effects company that won an Academy Award for its groundbreaking work on Life of Pi – just two weeks after declaring bankruptcy. The film explores rapidly changing forces impacting the global VFX community, and the Film Industry as a whole.

This is only the first chapter of an upcoming feature-length documentary Hollywood Ending, that delves into the larger, complex challenges facing the US Film Industry and the many professionals working within it, whose fates and livelihood are intertwined.

Noah

Noah

In a story that plays out entirely on a teenager’s computer screen, Noah follows its eponymous protagonist as his relationship takes a rapid turn for the worse in this fascinating study of behaviour (and romance) in the digital age.

Seriously NSFW in the Chatroulette bit.

What is reddit?

What is reddit?

I’m going to show this to anyone I see moaning about how reddit is some worthless hive of scum and villainy.

Following the herd: Online ‘likes’ multiply themselves

In ScienceNews:

When rating things online, people tend to follow the herd. A single random “like” can influence a comment’s score at a social news site, researchers report in the Aug. 9 issue of Science.

An unearned up vote packed a surprising punch. The first person to view a randomly liked comment was 32 percent more likely to rate it positively than to do the same with a comment that had received no vote. In the long run, boosted comments’ final scores were 25 percent higher than scores of untouched comments. Random negative votes did not affect a comment’s final rating because users compensated with extra up votes.
News in Brief: Online ‘likes’ multiply themselves – ScienceNews

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A Facebook board game devised by design student Pat C. Klein.

Pat says:

As a young person living in the digital age, I feel as though the internet is affecting our ability to communicate with one another.

Research done by Stanford University has indicated that social networking sites like Facebook can increase loneliness, depression and insecurity.

Facebook: The Board Game was created as a response to this. The idea is that instead of engaging with Facebook on your computer or phone, you can arrange to meet up with friends, have a few drinks and play in real life.

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By *luvpie1997

Teens, social media and privacy

Danah Boyd:

Yesterday, Pew Internet and American Life Project (in collaboration with Berkman) unveiled a brilliant report about “Teens, Social Media, and Privacy.”

My favorite finding of Pew’s is that 58% of teens cloak their messages either through inside jokes or other obscure references, with more older teens (62%) engaging in this practice than younger teens (46%).

Over the last few years, I’ve watched as teens have given up on controlling access to content. It’s too hard, too frustrating, and technology simply can’t fix the power issues. Instead, what they’ve been doing is focusing on controlling access to meaning. A comment might look like it means one thing, when in fact it means something quite different. By cloaking their accessible content, teens reclaim power over those who they know who are surveilling them.
Danah Boyd, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research

Fascinating post, worth reading in full. The first half of the article discusses the different ways African-American and White-American teens use social media.

(via @tomstandage)

Technopanic: The Movie

Disconnect claims to be a film that “explores the consequences of modern technology and how it affects and defines our daily relationships”, but Jeff Jarvis says it’s the Reefer Madness of our time.

Disconnect begins by throwing us every uh-oh signal it can: online porn; people listening to their headphones instead of the world around them; people paying attention to their phones (and the people on the other end) instead of the boring world in front of them; skateboards; people ruining office productivity watching silly videos; kids wearing Hooters T-shirts; sad people chatting with strangers online; people gambling online; people getting phished into bankruptcy; and worst of all, kids using Facebook. Oh, no!

What your profile picture says about you

Warning: this post contains graphic imagery of pricks, cunts and assholes.

These are actual profile pictures intentionally uploaded by actual humans.

The above were retrieved from a single individual’s Facebook friends, which is totally unsurprising. Profile photo douchebags — not unlike regular douchebags because they are regular douchebags — stick together.

(Note: groups of dbags can be described using a few commonly accepted terms: “flock of cocks,” “kindling of fucksticks,” or “those stupid cunts who think their online game/to-do list/social-media-monitoring tool is changing the world.”)
Jesus Christ, Silicon Valley

Jay Rosen’s social media tips

First in a series.

The first part can be tricky.

Ever hear that line: “if I had more time I would have written less?” I had time. So I wrote less.

Best if used before you click “share” or “publish.”

I like the lighting on this one.

How shall I invoice you?

‘Social media wiz shares wizdom’ by Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU.