It would have taken, at most, a week to verify which owners of these accounts were authentic individuals. That they didn't even try speaks volumes of their laziness, ineptitude, or malfeasance.
I also noticed on Friday that key piece Matt mentioned where "The Hamilton 68 team did not individually review or verify all accounts", after "three years of observation". This is laughable on its own, but add to that this little nugget that you may have also overlooked... In paragraph 3 of the fact sheet, they say "Members of the media, pundits, and even some lawmakers often failed to include appropriate context when using the dashboard’s data, despite ASD experts’ extensive efforts to correct misconceptions at the time." Where they link to the following daily caller article (https://dailycaller.com/2018/04/09/hamilton-68-russian-bots-media-coverage/). At the very end of the the DC article, the author writes the following about Hamilton 68's communication’s director, Bret Schafer:
"Schafer couldn’t rule out that pro-Russia Americans could be among the accounts tracked on the Hamilton 68 dashboard. Researchers “weed out” any known American accounts from the list of monitored accounts, he told TheDCNF, and he said the list is believed to be 95-98 percent accurate."
So according to Schafer, they were at least 95% sure the list had weeded out any known Americans, which is in stark contrast to the above claim that they did not individually review all accounts.
...and it matters not one whit. I'm so grateful to Matt for doing all this work but it gets zero traction, actually zero coverage, in the mainstream media. Much as I despise that group of government cheerleaders, they still control the "narrative." My brother, for example, won't believe any of this until it's on the front page of the NYT. So, never. Despair/rage inducing.
Well, its all over the current Congressional Hearings. Seems a bit odd its not front and center of EVERY media outlet on the planet, dontcha think? I guess its just a nothingburger, like Van Jones said in 2016.
I believe it is perfectly legal to tell lies under most circumstances. One should be aware of this whenever listening to politicians, corporate executives, and mainstream media.
A democracy where people are constantly misleading others because it benefits them is not sustainable. Asking people to "critically" filter every single source is not realistic. You go to your doctor who lies to you about the medication and the treatments because it suits their interest. Then you go to the pharmacy where the pharmacist lies to you. Then you talk to your attorney, who is also giving you a selective version of reality. Finally, you go home and turn on the tv and whatever a politican says is a carefully researched and crafted lie meant to appease certain interest groups with no relationship to how they plan to govern, and the newscasters are intentionally manipulating and lying as well. It's unworkable, and being skeptical is not the solution.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
I keep thinking of Adams' babelfish. I have no idea what autistic means but we speak two different languages.
To me Orwellian means very specific language simple and direct.
I see TWO fingers not how many fingers am I supposed to see.
All this empty verbiage on Russia, Ukraine, White Supremacy, Zionism, anti-Semitism racism, Musk's eugenics is moot Orwell in his Essay on Nationalism covered America from 1689 till the present.
I've met one fellow High School student I knew since I left High School in my 75 years. He told me he thought I was a deaf mute. I remember very little about school when I arrived I was comatose.
I do remember arguing with the teacher and being thrown out of class over the interpretation of 1984. I remember all I wanted to do in school was be invisible and molest young women . I was seven when I first fell in love with the teacher.
We studied Orwell and Huxley back-to-back.
I was brought up to be a Democratic Socialist like Orwell and the Huxleys believed in Eugenics.
I thought I was stupid because my interpretations were not mainstream.
Brave New World is Utopian and 1984 is where we live.
That was 1963 and nothing has changed my opinion in sixty years.
Empathy: the fruit of the tree of knowledge is beyond AI
I am talking Astrophysics' exponents.
Integrating computers with biologicals organs is no longer artificial it is Darwinian.
Real intelligence is not by design but by accident.
I know the science. That why I prefer a Stephen Fry to an Elon Musk.
Fry is for real.
Musk is for the birds.
I don't know Elon but I know one of his scientists and I trust good scientists because they know science.
Musk is how shall I say it . Musk is an A1 engineer and fiction writer. Engineers write excellent fiction. Aldous Huxley was a Huxley. The Huxleys understood engineering but couldn't do science they understood design and science is not about design it is about "Standing on the shoulders of giants. " Newton
Eugenics is not science it is believing evolution is progress when evolution is only change over time.
Science doesn't write fiction.
Stephen Fry is a writer of great comedy and good comedy is never fiction.
I'm old so I remember the old phrase "Garbage in garbage out" when talking about faulty computer aided research. "Algorithms"is just an abbreviation for that phrase.
"The majority of machine learning algorithms today are correlation linking, nothing more. Attributing causation to such analysis is doomed to fail. I would suggest it is solely the human decisions to link such outputs with perceived causal factors that creates the conflict at all. In other words, the outputs are seemingly biased because we are applying our human biases in the interpretation.
The real trouble isn't getting mathematically correct answers. It's what to do with them."
I see quote marks around your entire comment here, but nothing that hints at who to attribute that comment to. I would love to read more of what that person has to say.
I dont recall where I read it unfortunately. It was a response to Timnit Gheru (sp?) at Google who claimed that deep learning was racist, sexist...the usual. She's an 'expert', btw.
Agreed. And now i gotta find where I read it! Regardless, it notes the issues re: machine learning and its disconnect with causality, time, space, etc. IOW, statistical data means almost nothing w/o pertinent contextual frameworks.
Vaporware is more like it. Wasn't it Zuckerberg himself who pushed releasing stuff in a hurry, and then see what breaks? We're turning into a whole society run that way. It will be interesting to see how well this electric vehicle thing works.
I think this method also devices the vaccine. In all cases, now, there is no reassessment. That's because the intention was never to get the thing right
Microsoft perfected that technique in the previous millennium. It was called, "windows" - brought a whole new meaning to the verb, "defenestrate" - and the author of that miracle is now running global health care.
I can already answer that. It doesn't. The problem with them is there hasn't been any " electric vehicle efficiency files" exposed yet, that will get any readership anywhere, ever. Engineering papers tend to be too dry, even when exposing the second biggest hoax on the world.
Or, electric vehicles are ptretty much as advertised.
We’re a solid 10+ years in. If the marketing says an EV will go a distance on a charge under normal conditions you can bet it will. Mine does.
If you mean will that the claims that EV’s will cool the planet, clean the environment, feed the sick and un-f*ck all the unwanted pregnancies then of course they won’t. I don’t care. They go thousands of miles on the dollar equvalent of one tank of gas. I care not at all about the environmental impact of that, if any. I care about not buying $5 gas.
Hate to break it to you, Chuck, but there is no guarantee that the price of electricity will always effectively be less than $5 gallon...or that there will he enough electricity to charge tens of millions of electric vehicles. In CA, they have a hard enough time keeping the power on right now.
Wait, what is this about electric vehicle efficiency? Is the implication that electric vehicles are not as efficient as advertised?
Not sure why you would claim such a thing considering that electric vehicle efficiency is one of the easiest things to measure. It's so easy that any individual can do it with only a few dollars of equipment. Anybody publishing false numbers would be discovered immediately.
Spend 20 years of your life in a cogen power plant and you learn things. One of those is that between the media, and corporate America, the odds of you being lied to on an hourly basis go up exponentially with the amount of media consumed. I could tell a long sordid tale of clean coal technology from 25 years ago that will piss you right off.
I don't understand. It's trivial to measure how much electricity you're using to charge an electric car. It's trivial to measure how far you can drive an electric car. Do some division and you get efficiency. The media isn't involved in the process at all. So how could they possibly lie to you. This is like claiming that the media lies to you about how long your pants are, and you have a tape measure...
Algorithm is another way to say Ambrose Bierce's Abracadabra.
As of yet the computers haven't yet eaten of the fruit of tree of knowledge of good and evil. I have spoken to computers for 50 years and 2000 + anything is not science fiction it is total fantasy. Just like homer's Odessy.
It is hard to check when Peleton won't let you get off the treadmill.
I have been on Ozempic for two years. I lost lots of weight but Between the diarrheas', nausea, constipation, gas pain I did it all for love. I still sleep with my best friend and partner and like waking up in the morning. It is what the cardiologist ordered.
I can't twitter but I know my food is mostly local and my farming neighbours own Quebec's food industry. Our farmers are rich and our bankers get paid wages.
I love cooking and I used to love eating but I enjoy my life even with the depravations.
There were none, in my humble estimation. If there were they could easily exonerate themselves by releasing the algorithmic source code.
After all, they claim they don't use it anymore. Somebody on that list should sue for conspiracy, defamation and intentional interference with business advantage. I don't trust the GOP Congress to get to the bottom of this.
I think the new way of dodging responsibility is to refuse to acknowledge or report on it.
For the Liberal Mainstream Media the plan apparently is “If a Tree Falls in the Forest and we don’t report on it, who’s to say it ever happened?”
And if Matt or Matt’s subscribers say “Oh Yes, it did happen “ then we’re subject to withering criticism and claims of BIAS ! Or being a “Hating Hater who Hates !!”
Was thinking of the tree in an empty forest last night after reading Matt’s piece amid the deafening media silence.
A mention to a friend many months ago of the then-leaking story that the government was flying illegal aliens to small US cities in the middle of the night was met with an expression of disdainful incredulity: “If that’s true why isn’t anyone I know talking about it!’
To friend: "Ah, indeed. That IS the question. Why is anybody you know not talking about it?" Because the powers that be want to steal Russia's stuff. They don't want to trade with them. They want to steal it. Then, just like the Big Bad Wolf, they say, "If you get rid of Putin, then we will make peace with you and trade with you. Trust us. " "Yeh, right," says the Russian people. "We fell for that in the 1990s. Never again."
Embrace their hatred. The only way to counter professional liars is to pursue each statement to it's origin and quote them back to themselves. It's a lot of work initially, but then it gets easier when it becomes obvious they don't have the stomach to stand up in a direct fight as long as we do.
Agreed. I'd add that valuing social/emotional response is a direct effect of a concerted effort to undermine logic and reason. When it goes on for decades in one direction, it's certainly no random "oopsie!" mistake.
I’m here to attest that this line of thinking is transphobic, disproportionately hurts people of color, and displays all the classic hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
I had been thinking of changing my screen name to "Al Gorithm" (assuming it wasn't already taken) but I guess I'd better not now. I couldn't bear being blamed for everything.
That's a good point and they've been doing it for years. I remember 15 or more years ago when mainstream news first wondered about Big Tech's claims that their algorithms are neutral. "The algorithms are designed by people so they can express bias." Of course, I agreed, but it's worse, I remember saying. Even if bias is eliminated from the algorithm itself, it can learn bias from the fire-hose input of behavioral data. The algorithm itself is open to inspection but you'd have to measure learned bias with statistical experiments on the running system. Plausible deniability. A fantastic smokescreen!
Absolutely. And just like Twitter itself the "programmers" always had a thumb on the scale. It was really gangs of wokesters banning or throttling (shadow banning) anything they didn't like. Of course, they also banned all the tweets the secret police ordered them to ban.
Well, maybe. I don't know the programmers involved but it is certainly common that technical specialists keep their heads down rather than blow a whistle when their organization is doing crimes.
At first blush, the censorship looks like 99.9% decisions by individuals to ban and throttle tweets they didn't like. The algorithm story is hard to swallow. If there ever was an algorithm, then disclose the code.
They told us who they are. Don't second guess their confessions. They had their thumb heavy on the scale. If not, then they should show their notes.
I know. But there's a limit to how much I am ready to blame individual computer programmers without a case being made against them.
The algorithmic visibility control never made any sense and it was regrettable that Taibbi discussed it so much. Almost everything on the internet has a snitch (report) button. It takes you to a form. Form submissions go into a queue*. Maybe they have some automation for grouping form submissions to make processing them less laborious. They are reviewed against policy that's forever subject to change and a decision to modulate visibility is made. (And there's a review/appeal process but that's not used as much.)
It doesn't matter how much of this is handled by humans at computer terminals and how much is automated. What matters is the the policy, the power it represents, and who gets to define it.
*The FBI Belly Button's connection to the queue seems not very automated and often to have had high level human review on both sides of the public-private partnership.
I suspect computers and algorithms were lesser drivers of censorship. More likely, individual twitter employees and secret agents in the security state and Congress simply picked tweets that made them butthurt along with an unhealthy dose of ambition to control others and feel important and powerful. The official surveillance operatives were aided by self-appointed wokesters who wanted to see something, say something. I don't know any of this for sure.
But we may learn more--Captain Renault didn't invent the concept of "usual suspects."
"The majority of machine learning algorithms today are correlation linking, nothing more. Attributing causation to such analysis is doomed to fail. I would suggest it is solely the human decisions to link such outputs with perceived causal factors that creates the conflict at all. In other words, the outputs are seemingly biased because we are applying our human biases in the interpretation.
The real trouble isn't getting mathematically correct answers. It's what to do with them."
The issue we seem unable/unwilling to deal with is that, despite the wizardry of tech advancement, AI is untethered to reality. Which can, and does, lead to a false reality, which in turn confuses the two. And here we are....
If they ever get self-driving cars going (I hope not!), you bet this will be the escape route for the companies running the hardware and software. We already wage war like this to a certain extent, with drones and robots. Nobody has to do the dirty work.
Nope, looks like cherrypicked quotations from the Wayback Machine to me. Above, Matt has quoted the section on two parts of the dashboard: one from sources connected two Russia and a second connected to "bots and trolls". However, immediately below in the section labeled "How Does Russian Influence Online Work?", they make it clear that they are researching and reporting on THREE types of sites:
1) "Attributed accounts that clearly state they are pro-Russian or affiliated with the Russian government."
2) "Accounts (including both bots and humans) that are run by troll factories in Russia and elsewhere.'
3) "Accounts run by people around the world who amplify pro-Russian themes either knowingly or unknowingly, after being influenced by the efforts described above."
It is the latter that is concerning to me. For example, near the end of the Syrian Civil War, I was shocked when Tulsi Gabbard and other I had previously respected got worked up over whether the last one or two poison gas attacks in Syria were carried out by the Syrian government of the rebels. They were all worked up over some details in the OPCW reports and other information attributing the attacks to the government. Some of their complaints appeared to have some merit, but the big picture suggested that these complaints weren't worth bothering investigating: 1) The Syrian government was certainly responsible to all of the poison gas atrocities early in the war (more than a dozen) and were the only ones with the capability to handle Sarin. 2) The Syrian government always blocked access to the site of the gassing. If the government knew it hadn't been responsible for a poison gas attack and had an opportunity to prove the rebels were also behaving outrageously, the government would have immediately secured the area, and brought in the OPCW inspectors and the press. And if security were a real problem, Syria would have been happy to risk the lives of a few neutrals if they were going to report the rebels were now using poison gas. Since they hadn't done so, I was about 95% sure the government was responsible. The fact that suspicious things had happened at these unsecured sites where poison gas had been used and that the OPCW may have done a poor job or obtained ambiguous evidence didn't influence my judgment either way and I remained only 95% confident the government had done it. However, I was shocked when so many people took what appeared to me to be taking Russia's side by persisting in raising questions about the evidence when the big picture was so clear (to me at least).
BTW: Twitter didn't accept Hamilton 68 a face value and ban all of these users who often appeared to be following a Russian line. They did their own investigation and decided most of the accounts were ordinary users who were being influenced by Russian propaganda. The only reason Matt knows this is because Twitter behaved responsibly and checked out the allegations.
A misinformation factory. Appears to be one of the ways the deep state/woke democrats dispense their groupthink propaganda to CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WAPO
Weird that suddenly outlets like FOX/Tucker Carlson seem to be the only significant media outlet that is immune to this pernicious bullshit
The difference with Fox these days is they allow for opposing points of view. I’m sure it’s memory-holed now, but they played the same games back in the War on Terror days. They’ve realized that being a conservative mainstream foil to the remainder of all the rest of mainstream (liberal) media is driving impressive ratings. Agreed on the weirdness that you note. The world has been flipped on its head.
Fox host, Brian Kilmeade, had Matt on last night on his show "One Nation". He gave quite a bit of time to Matt and did a pretty good job of asking questions. I realized watching it that this is still a somewhat complex issue to explain to readers and viewers because of convoluted explanations by Hamilton68 and other human bots. So the simpler the language the better aka "It's Bullshit" or as a former president said, "It's fake news." All these people are basically running money-making scams and getting away with it. That's what irks me. They will just move on to the next hustle.
It's a game of 'whack a mole', sure. But the stakes couldn't be more important, and destroying another's credibility in cases like this, and Jayson Blair's is something that can stick for quite awhile.
Careful with Brian neocon establishment republicant killmeade. Used to follow him, until the last three years. Now I listen even closer, and hear Billy Kristol.
Fox straight news is a bit more non-partisan in that they cover news stories that are not political. Like natural disasters and human interest stories. My take on Fox is that the daytime "news" crowd is definitely on the side of the war mongers in DC and so are in line with MSNBC and CNN. They have on their General Kean who is a rabid Russiaphobe. Later in the day such as "The Five" (on at 5PM ET) are more nuanced and have a more Libertarian leaning which is more anti-war or anti foreign involvement. Tucker has on Colonel MacGregor who has tried to objectively report on Ukraine and sees Russia winning. Note that he is a field officer; a colonel. Whereas the MSM including daytime Fox has on "Generals". "Gutfeld", the talk comedy show at 11PM has comedians and definitely a libertarian bent. They actually disagree with each other in a playful way. Big fan of Tyrus on that show. It is, by the way, the #1 show in it's time slot. It is not woke. And, of course, I love it because Walter Kirn is a semi-regular.
Because left/right is an illusion. All serve the god of mammon. This generation gets "liberals" that favor the FBI and state power. A few generations back the FBI and state power were enemies of the "liberals". It's all kabuki theatre. Don't believe the hype.
It was fun for them basking in the prestige while at the same time remaining just below the radar of the disinformed public. After a couple failed early attempts successfully quashed by the same media that used their services, Matt has outed them. The media says “Hey, we trusted them...not our fault.” and Ham68 says, “Hey, we trust our methods. Of course there may be some things that require further explanation...not really our fault.” Even though they invented the egregiously faulty process. Deny, deny, deny is the algorithmic response to the failed algorithms. It’s a guilty pleasure to see the frantic, nonsensical ass covering our information overlords engage in presuming we are all too dumb to connect the dots ourselves. Long live The Racket.
If not state propaganda, a mere step away. Although I’m inclined to see the denial as confirmation, along the lines of “never believe anything in politics until it’s been officially denied” - Otto von Bismarck
Actually, it's Biblical: "Never believe anything until it's been officially denied three times." (Matthew 26:69–74, Mark 14:66–72, Luke 22:55–62, and John 18:15–18, 25–27) Although I'm sure Otto, being a savvy politico, would agree
I just noticed that Hamilton 68's parent organization, the Alliance for Securing Sophistry (ASS), more generally known as A.S.D. (the parody writes itself, really*), is advised by Michael Chertoff, Bill Kristol, Michael Morell, John Podesta, among others. That is, CIA, NSA, "bi-partisan" "think tanks", and the like. What else do we need to know?
----
*EDIT: I mean nothing against ASD people, of course. But as there are people who are not conscious of their human disconnects, and there are also people who are *fully* conscious and cultivate their own brand of disconnects (manipulation; objectification) for selfish gain. In the extreme, the latter are sociopaths.
I should be a bit more specific about FOX. While most of the FOX presenters are airing this stuff from Matt Taibbi simply to tarnish their traditional opponents, ONE of them stands out as legitimate in my mind-- Tucker Carlson
Frankly I can’t believe he is still allowed to have any access to media given his consistently anti-corporate populist views
I wonder how long it will be before he too loses his platform and gets “cancelled”
It's interesting to me that you didn't respond similarly to the post I responded to, which was similarly devoid of a coherent point, but just happened to be right-leaning in nature.
But I guess you were never pretending to be something other than a partisan hack.
"...the post I responded to, which was similarly devoid of a coherent point..."
1. Thank you for admitting your post was "devoid of a coherent point". I do appreciate the sincere humility, given how rare this can be these days. So, I'm not just picking on you! In fact, you're maybe a little too hard on youself... You've made oh-so-clear what you think of Tucker Carlson -- that is, a point made, and very coherently!
2. Now, as to the OP being equally "devoid of a coherent point":
Hmmm... He's differentiating between Tucker and the rest of FOX; the former admirable, the latter not so much. Why, there's a point! Coherent too! Do you disagree? That is, with its coherence, not its lack of presented evidence, which IMO is a completely separate matter. Maybe we could even, you know, discuss it a little?
So is the above really partisan hackery? Remember, you're talking to someone who's to the Left of Marx.
Carlson will lose his platform if he ever skirts the Murdoch bottom line. If his ersatz "anti-corporate populist views" is making money for Rupert, then that's good enough for Rupert.
He's a shill just like the rest. If he wasn't he wouldn't be on corporate broadcasts. Nobody gets a show on corporate news without being a spineless toady to corporate power. It's all kabuki theatre. The sooner we acknowledge this uncomfortable truth the sooner we can focus on real issues.
It's likely Carlson is being let out to run for now because he is either
(a) being set up as a new candidate for prime scapegoat (a la Trump) and will, at some point once they have sufficient goods on him or he makes a serious mistake, go down very hard a la Alex Jones; or
(b) controlled opposition. But on this latter possibility I don't see any clear signals, other than the usual Overton windows on MSM talent.
I seriously doubt the deep state has lost control at this point; they are nothing if not masterful over the last several decades.
This is my biggest criticism of Matt. He comes from liberal media, so obviously their shitty behavior is going to hit him closer to home.
Our two-party system is simply outdated tech. If we want to compete in contemporary space, we need reform now that makes a two-party system unthinkable. Instead Matt seems committed to making one party pay, and his readers are pretty much here to watch the show anymore.
Was it your intention to claim "the deep state" are "woke democrats" or were you just grouping them together as on this particular occasion? Democrats/Republicans are part of the same entity with slightly different political purposes. The deep state, by definition, is not partisan. Both "parties" are extensions of the deep state. They are Kabuki theatre to distract the masses.
Fox News has been rated as least biased by the best academic studies, from UCLA, the University of Missouri, and Harvard's Shorenstein Institute on the Media. The latter did a study of the coverage of the 2020 Presidential election from June to November by two major networks. They found CBS's coverage was 89% favorable and 11% unfavorable for Biden, and 5% favorable and 95% unfavorable for Trump. Fox News was found to be 42% favorable and 58% unfavorable for Biden and 43% favorable and 57% unfavorable for Trump.
The difference between Fox and the rest of the “media” is the the rest of them RUN with **anything** they’re given with no fact-checking whatsoever (as illustrated for the gazillion and tenth time in this article) so long as it repeats Democrat Party talking points. It’s “Bombshell Breaking News!!”. Whereas look how Trump and others routinely get po’d with Fox because Fox demands their journalists do, ya know, their job and find if it’s true first.
I mean, Trump claims things so much more aggressively false than this dashboard, any journalist who attempted to print them all verbatim would spontaneously combust from the head down.
Every accusation leveled against Trump by the MSM/INTEL COMMUNITY turned out to be not only incorrect but intentional fabrications repeated 24/7 by the pimps of war
If Trump were President we would not be embroiled in a war with Russia
Was/is Trump a self absorbed, scoundrel? Yes!
But far less dangerous to our nation and the world than GWB or this Biden administration
This Biden administration has done more harm to the USA, The World, and to the cause of PEACE than ANY other president in the history of the United States. Including Nixon and/or GWB
You know, what the substack comments section really needs is an *ignore* function.
You won't find a bigger opponent of censorship than me, but letting individual users decide they don't want to hear from somebody like Dwhy is completely different deal. If we all ignore this obvious bot/troll, then eventually his minders would tire of paying him when he generated zero interaction.
L0L...as if the president were in charge of the country. Presidents have the bully pulpit. That's about it. Trump kowtowed just like those before him and those that will come after.
I disagree. Tucker treated Dr. Ron Paul with respect well before he was the biggest news show on TV. He’s a bit more conservative than me, but he’s the best on TV without question.
I’d turn to Zerohedge, Taibbi, Greenwald, or Brand before watching the tele, however.
Yes, seriously, who do I trust more than Brand? I don’t agree with his ideal vision of society, but he’s clearly in the pursuit of truth. His reporting also highlights some of the NGOs that fly below my radar.
He also understands the goal of a free society should be the dissipation/ decentralization of power as opposed to concentrating it in the hands of the Washington, London, and Brussels elite.
Sure, it's possible. But it's becoming less and less relevant. As was promoted not long ago by Left-leaning reformers, "Policies not personalities".
We are now avoiding getting caught up in hero-worship -- we know everyone in power lies. So, we support them as long as what they say rings true, but drop them like hot potatoes once it clearly doesn't. Take loveable ol' Bernie, for example. And did I mention Donald Trump?
As they did with the Southern Poverty Law Center, academia was also quick to cite Hamilton 68 as a reliable reference for its biased reasoning.
Respectable organizations were tarnished by SPLC's list of "hate groups". All patches from the same quilt.
Mr. Taibbi is an essential new journalist in this space. We need ethical journalists to work like surgeons to quickly and factually excise these cancerous think tank initiatives with dark agendas. The new journalists are like Batmen working in Gotham to save the city. We need you, Mr. Taibbi!
Taibbi and company arent 'new', by any standards. They are the OLD model, aka ACTUAL journalists,aka normal. Whats new is the weaponization of tech to fraudulently manipulate info in order to frame certain narratives, and at exponential scale. And Taylor Lorenz. IOW, propaganda.
To even conceive of actual journalistic standards as something 'new' is evidence of how we as a Society have been purposely manipulated.
Couldn't agree more. Here in New York we had citizen journalists like Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin. These guys dedicated their careers to fighting The Man. They came from the streets and they never left. And they represented a heritage that went back a century.
What makes the Substack Crew different is that they come with pedigree: private schools, Ivy League, etc. But unlike their Establishment press peers, they've left the elite cucoon and built a bridge back to their working class predecessors by questioning authority and holding the feet of those in power to the fire. Hamill and Breslin would be with them.
What bothers me about this is the suggestion that whether Substack or Establishment, a certain pedigree is a prerequisite. Why assume that the "Substack Crew" have these pedigrees but nevertheless choose to leave them behind to reconnect with the working class? I subscribe to several Substack writers and don't care whether they come from elite* backgrounds, just the quality of their writing. But then again, I've never understood the allure of pedigrees anyway, not even when it comes to my beloved cat.
*I guess I should mention that my antipathy to this word makes my muscles seize up whenever I see it, which is unfortunate because it's so ubiquitous. I can't wait for it to fulfill its destiny wandering the netherworlds.
Look around in here a little further, and find the kind of progressive claptrap that will make you throw up in your mouth a little, pretending to be " above the fray", utilizing incredibly long words to beat up the idea of conservatism.
This article and the one preceding it are of great value and they hope it become widely known.
The most evil institution in the US is not the military, which is being used to kill millions of innocent people, but the mainstream media which, with its pervasive lying, has been the facilitator for this continuing mass murder and exploitation by covering it up, justifying what was done, punishing truthtellers (like Assange), smearing real journalists trying to tell the truth, intimidating others who might report the news into self-censoring, while also promoting the idea we (really a few families) have the right to order around everyone else in the world. A vast quantity of the innocent blood shed is on the hands of the faux press and its servants and minions.
You can be certain that NONE of this will see the light of day on CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, MSNBC, CNN, NYT, WAPO
It’s not laziness or unintentional slippage of journalistic standards
These outlets are INTENTIONALLY spreading this bullshit to propagate a false narrative as essentially employees of the intelligence community and the “deep state”/permanent Washington UNI-party
I subbed to WSJ so I could post about the Twitter Files in comments. They don't moderate them out as do the others. You just can't post links. Every once in a while someone likes what I say. A tiny effort to go under their barriers of ignoring this.
Getting through to WSJ readers is a neat trick. I just found out one of the dopes that ended up with Maja Rushdie's spot ( clay or buck) are hard core wsj fans, every day, cover to cover. Sorry, but that has to have an effect on you, reading full blown state approved propaganda on a daily basis. Every article in there in the last forty years, maybe fifty, is " nuanced". That's a word in place of propaganda. I stopped reading it thirty years ago.
It’s neck and neck but our expectations of the military are low. The mainstream media was once there as an effective check and balance. They’ve become the enemy of the citizen. Faux checks, no balance.
Alan: I would suggest that it is "social media" which is the more pernicious form of social engineering today than is the MSM. Look at how the numbers of viewers of the left-media (most of it) have dropped off a cliff in recent years, while Fox numbers have remained strong. And it is the Department of Defense who is behind the mass poisoning of Americans (and the world) with their biodefense countermeasures quaintly called "vaccines." Countermeasures are not required to follow FDA protocols for licensure, thus the completely sham Warp Speed "clinical trials." There have not been, and never will be any actual clinical trials for these bioweapons, nor any real after-marketing surveillance.
no sir, their childish response, does not sound solid.
Add hamilton 68 as a source, the major news could hide behind, when publishing lies and propaganda:
#PerceptionIsACommodity - We are aggressively manipulated to "think" and "feel" about everything with repeated deceitful narratives and images which specifically TARGET emotional response. US Corporate-State Media (MSNBC, FOX, CNN, ABC, PBS, NPR, WaPo, NYT, etc) manufactures "support" or "rage" for whatever the oligarchy chooses. OUR thoughts and feelings on any given topic are often, largely NOT our own
Just re-reading Dune. It's interesting that Frank Herbert made a point of excluding both robots and computers from his science fiction. That was a very popular book in its time, along with Lord of the Rings. A lot of people don't realize what a hit Lord of the Rings was back then, too. It was anti-Tech, too, since Tolkien saw way too much of what Tech could do during WWI.
Leonidas: I’ve been wondering the very same thing. In some ways it seems it may be a necessity as technology (GPT chat for example) has potential to completely ruin our world.
I find myself hoping at times for an emp making all these horrid contraptions worthless for a period of time, and long distance communication only possible by hams the norm for a year or two. I know it will be ugly for many. I guess I'm selfish that way.
Careful what you wish for... I get the feeling but an EMP strong enough to knock out communications across the continent would also knock out all kinds of infrastructure support and we'd have massive die off in this cities at least.
It's only a cesspool because *we* haven't figured out what to do with it yet. TPTB certainly have, as they are always chomping at the bit to use any means to expand power.
Just bonkers. My mind goes to two places. First: What is the extent of disinformation we are receiving now from dishonest media? I’m guessing most of us on this platform are not drinking from the mainstream hose any longer. But there are many sheep out there digesting lies and not questioning the “news”. Second: What happens now? Is anyone within the Hamilton68 core going to be held accountable for such blatant disregard for the truth?
When was the last time you saw a public figure say they "take responsibility for this [issue/event]" and have that be followed by them taking some kind of ACTION (such as resignation)? It's as if saying those magic words is all that is required. For public figures, the concept of one's honor is just about as extinct as the concept of accountability. The two go hand-in-hand. And their extinction feeds our skepticism and distrust of government.
So true. I guess I’m envisioning more and more awareness -- public ostracism of sorts. But even the “court of public opinion” has a skewed focus without much of a center. Ugh.
This, plus they are confident it will be sidestepped and pretended that this is a "nothingburger". The malaise is so deep with this yet another example of the hubris in the intelligence community and the bulk of media.
They’re caught by virtue of a billionaire buying a failing business and outing the previous regime. I’m not sure how much of this we ever would have known without Elon musk. It’s FDR on steroids and all the media can do is try to smear him. It should be screamed from the mountain top but instead is trickled out by tweet thread or behind a paywall. Tell me again why they would think we’re stupid
Substack is doing a terrible job withe-mail alerts now. I didn't get an alert for this or several others. But I did see on Twitter that this had been posted so I came to look.
Imagine claiming you spent 3 years developing algorithms purporting to identify bot accounts so secret that you can’t tell anyone the account names and then simultaneously asserting you never bothered to verify the only 600 accounts produced by your algorithms. That is some serious Class A hubris.
No, that might trigger some of the Congresspeople. The depiction of a slightly aware constituent might prove to be "hurtful" and create an "unsafe space" for our elected representatives. No, the statue should convey the idea of a complete lack of awareness and disinterest, of deep slumber.
A bag of chips lying next to him, and a TV remote in his hand, would complete the image.
We could solve a lot of these problems if we had a law that made it mandatory to publicly display these "algorithms," like it is mandatory to list ingredients on food.
We're becoming ruled by trade secrets. FICO is the oldest and most well-known. Anybody who has ever tried to figure out that nonsense system comes away confused. "I paid off all my debt and my score went down?"
Just wait until the WEF wet dream of digital ID and social credit scores is forced on the world. People like those at Hamilton 68 will label you a troll then you'll be evicted, fired and all of your Central Bank Digital Currency will be flagged as unspendable until you report for re-education.
Actually if you studied real history you would understand you are speaking nonsense. Milton wrote Areopagitica. Milton was a liberal puritan. He was what we now call secular humanist. In 1776 everybody who read loved Milton except for Priests and pedants.
I live in Quebec Bill 21 says the only freedom of religion is freedom from religion.
Our charter of right and freedoms protects living things not institutions.
Julian Assange and Greta Thunberg are saints and Lockheed Martin is the enemy.
America is a religion.
In Quebec government is about health education and welfare.
Here is the quintessential Taibbi snowflake-commenter at work. In a world of right-wing grifters run amok, endoftheroad here focuses his wrath on a 19-year old environmental activist, dismissing her as a "grifter."
People like End of the Road have reached the end of the road they don't understand English. The Ministry of Truth has made language meaningless.
One may not like Greta's message but she not only talks the talk but walks the walk.
She is no grifter.
She is sincere in her beliefs and here in Quebec most us believe her.
Biden is a grifter. I believed him until Alaska and oil leases. In Quebec the burning of fossil fuels ends in 2030 and I can't think of greater betrayal of my trust than opening up Alaska to destroy our biosphere.
I always believed the Reverend Jerimiah Wright "God damn America." or was that God damned America.
The secret to good trolling is that what you say has to have some very thin connection to the conversation at hand. Yours has none. And for being a troll, you seem curiously capable of producing Bovine excrement, as you put it.
You'd have to also have access to the data and be able to repeat results, just like science used to work long ago. But corporations will never release their code AND data. That's their whole business (grift) model.
I am quite familiar with what algorithms are. They are programs with "if . . . thens." Even if I cannot make sense of them, if they are public information, then others can make sense of them so we all know what is being amplified, what is being deamplified, and what criteria they are programming in.
And I don't trust the government to make anything makes sense. Their job is to force transparency so we are making decisions with all the information.
You however seem quite comfortable with the status quo as you're making a pathetic excuse for why we can't know.
Yes, you have correctly described an algorithm. But what we generally refer to as "the Algorithm" is something much more specific -- usually neural nets, or a complex web of decision-making tools.
The general idea of forcing companies to go 100% transparent with their algorithms is laughably impractical (and also extremely authoritarian and draconian). So your dictionary description of an algorithm obviously doesn't apply here.
The more specific idea of forcing companies to register decision-making tools when they reach x amount of complexity is even more insane. Imagine a law that says, "algorithms smarter than these benchmark values are government property by default"... that's what you're basically talking about.
Again, all this sounds like an excuse to not enforce transparency. I find it amazing how we worry about things that are "draconian and authoritarian" (which they're not--we're not telling them what they can and cannot put in the algorithms, just that they have to make them public, which is the *opposite* of draconian and authoritarian) when it comes to *companies* but people, meh, they can be in the dark.
Companies that have as great a market share as say Twitter and Amazon and Google need to be made to do the "impossible" for the sake of keeping our citizenry informed and having a level playing field. I don't care how"draconian" their apologists think that is.
The new way of dodging responsibility is to blame it on algorithms.
It would have taken, at most, a week to verify which owners of these accounts were authentic individuals. That they didn't even try speaks volumes of their laziness, ineptitude, or malfeasance.
They wouldn't have had to do the work themselves, just needed to ask Yoel Roth.
So that eliminates laziness as a cause.
Which came first the sloth or the Ministry of Truth?
Fortunately, there's also the convenient Ministry of Backpedaling...
He who controls the present controls the past."
The Act of Toleration 1689
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/act-of-toleration-1689/
I also noticed on Friday that key piece Matt mentioned where "The Hamilton 68 team did not individually review or verify all accounts", after "three years of observation". This is laughable on its own, but add to that this little nugget that you may have also overlooked... In paragraph 3 of the fact sheet, they say "Members of the media, pundits, and even some lawmakers often failed to include appropriate context when using the dashboard’s data, despite ASD experts’ extensive efforts to correct misconceptions at the time." Where they link to the following daily caller article (https://dailycaller.com/2018/04/09/hamilton-68-russian-bots-media-coverage/). At the very end of the the DC article, the author writes the following about Hamilton 68's communication’s director, Bret Schafer:
"Schafer couldn’t rule out that pro-Russia Americans could be among the accounts tracked on the Hamilton 68 dashboard. Researchers “weed out” any known American accounts from the list of monitored accounts, he told TheDCNF, and he said the list is believed to be 95-98 percent accurate."
So according to Schafer, they were at least 95% sure the list had weeded out any known Americans, which is in stark contrast to the above claim that they did not individually review all accounts.
Oh Mighty Wizard,
Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa Mea Maxima Culpa.
I was Busy watching the Marxist Brothers in Duck Soup. The script was plagiarized in Washington.
I was rolling on floor laughing with tears in my eyes.
The Chicolini defense is iron clad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEabC9WzHck&t=64s
There is no Sanity Clause. in the House Senate or Supreme Court and The Presidency is
A night at the Opera with Antonin Scalia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_Sy6oiJbEk&t=122s
Assuming the idea was to authenticate, then you're probably correct. Their intention was more obvious - confusion and discord.
Yes, the dog that never barked.
...and it matters not one whit. I'm so grateful to Matt for doing all this work but it gets zero traction, actually zero coverage, in the mainstream media. Much as I despise that group of government cheerleaders, they still control the "narrative." My brother, for example, won't believe any of this until it's on the front page of the NYT. So, never. Despair/rage inducing.
Well, its all over the current Congressional Hearings. Seems a bit odd its not front and center of EVERY media outlet on the planet, dontcha think? I guess its just a nothingburger, like Van Jones said in 2016.
My friend, the world traveller, and Masters anthropologist is exactly the same.
"Where did you hear that?"
"Matt Taibbi"
"WHO???"
Ask ur bro to google Jeff Gerth. If he then STILL doesnt/wont get it, he's beyond hope.
Most of them are.
People believe what they want and need to believe. Facts don't matter. Tribe matters.
It served a purpose.
Yup, the war on Russia and China has already started.
Exactly. Which is EXACTLY why this crap MUST be stamped out, with prejudice, and made clear that in NO WAY is it acceptable. Nor will it EVER be.
I believe it is perfectly legal to tell lies under most circumstances. One should be aware of this whenever listening to politicians, corporate executives, and mainstream media.
A democracy where people are constantly misleading others because it benefits them is not sustainable. Asking people to "critically" filter every single source is not realistic. You go to your doctor who lies to you about the medication and the treatments because it suits their interest. Then you go to the pharmacy where the pharmacist lies to you. Then you talk to your attorney, who is also giving you a selective version of reality. Finally, you go home and turn on the tv and whatever a politican says is a carefully researched and crafted lie meant to appease certain interest groups with no relationship to how they plan to govern, and the newscasters are intentionally manipulating and lying as well. It's unworkable, and being skeptical is not the solution.
there are ancient sources that talk about the widespread use of lying in public Roman discourse and the damage it caused to the late Republic
This is a good point.
Where I think it gets murky is when you lie in a conspiracy to deprive other people of their first amendment rights.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984
"We have always been at War... (etc, etc)." Truly terrifying.
Thank you Bill
I keep thinking of Adams' babelfish. I have no idea what autistic means but we speak two different languages.
To me Orwellian means very specific language simple and direct.
I see TWO fingers not how many fingers am I supposed to see.
All this empty verbiage on Russia, Ukraine, White Supremacy, Zionism, anti-Semitism racism, Musk's eugenics is moot Orwell in his Essay on Nationalism covered America from 1689 till the present.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/
I've met one fellow High School student I knew since I left High School in my 75 years. He told me he thought I was a deaf mute. I remember very little about school when I arrived I was comatose.
I do remember arguing with the teacher and being thrown out of class over the interpretation of 1984. I remember all I wanted to do in school was be invisible and molest young women . I was seven when I first fell in love with the teacher.
We studied Orwell and Huxley back-to-back.
I was brought up to be a Democratic Socialist like Orwell and the Huxleys believed in Eugenics.
I thought I was stupid because my interpretations were not mainstream.
Brave New World is Utopian and 1984 is where we live.
That was 1963 and nothing has changed my opinion in sixty years.
AI's will soon be able to verbally translate languages on the fly.
Now that will CHANGE THE WORLD
I speak computer but I am Darwinian.
Empathy: the fruit of the tree of knowledge is beyond AI
I am talking Astrophysics' exponents.
Integrating computers with biologicals organs is no longer artificial it is Darwinian.
Real intelligence is not by design but by accident.
I know the science. That why I prefer a Stephen Fry to an Elon Musk.
Fry is for real.
Musk is for the birds.
I don't know Elon but I know one of his scientists and I trust good scientists because they know science.
Musk is how shall I say it . Musk is an A1 engineer and fiction writer. Engineers write excellent fiction. Aldous Huxley was a Huxley. The Huxleys understood engineering but couldn't do science they understood design and science is not about design it is about "Standing on the shoulders of giants. " Newton
Eugenics is not science it is believing evolution is progress when evolution is only change over time.
Science doesn't write fiction.
Stephen Fry is a writer of great comedy and good comedy is never fiction.
Alphas with Alphas and with Betas in bed but the Epsilons stand alone.
I went to a Protestant school and ghettos were its pride and joy.
In America they are called neighbourhoods or suburbs.
I'm old so I remember the old phrase "Garbage in garbage out" when talking about faulty computer aided research. "Algorithms"is just an abbreviation for that phrase.
Yes, but it’s not faulty. It’s fraudulent.
I work very at being open minded and not jump to conclusions but this one is crystal clear.
Bingo.
"The majority of machine learning algorithms today are correlation linking, nothing more. Attributing causation to such analysis is doomed to fail. I would suggest it is solely the human decisions to link such outputs with perceived causal factors that creates the conflict at all. In other words, the outputs are seemingly biased because we are applying our human biases in the interpretation.
The real trouble isn't getting mathematically correct answers. It's what to do with them."
I see quote marks around your entire comment here, but nothing that hints at who to attribute that comment to. I would love to read more of what that person has to say.
I dont recall where I read it unfortunately. It was a response to Timnit Gheru (sp?) at Google who claimed that deep learning was racist, sexist...the usual. She's an 'expert', btw.
A leader in her field. A MIT darling.
Oh well, thanks! It's a very interesting quote no matter what.
Agreed. And now i gotta find where I read it! Regardless, it notes the issues re: machine learning and its disconnect with causality, time, space, etc. IOW, statistical data means almost nothing w/o pertinent contextual frameworks.
Vaporware is more like it. Wasn't it Zuckerberg himself who pushed releasing stuff in a hurry, and then see what breaks? We're turning into a whole society run that way. It will be interesting to see how well this electric vehicle thing works.
I think this method also devices the vaccine. In all cases, now, there is no reassessment. That's because the intention was never to get the thing right
Microsoft perfected that technique in the previous millennium. It was called, "windows" - brought a whole new meaning to the verb, "defenestrate" - and the author of that miracle is now running global health care.
More a Microsoft thing. Release on schedule no matter how buggy. That way the users take the hit.
I can already answer that. It doesn't. The problem with them is there hasn't been any " electric vehicle efficiency files" exposed yet, that will get any readership anywhere, ever. Engineering papers tend to be too dry, even when exposing the second biggest hoax on the world.
Or, electric vehicles are ptretty much as advertised.
We’re a solid 10+ years in. If the marketing says an EV will go a distance on a charge under normal conditions you can bet it will. Mine does.
If you mean will that the claims that EV’s will cool the planet, clean the environment, feed the sick and un-f*ck all the unwanted pregnancies then of course they won’t. I don’t care. They go thousands of miles on the dollar equvalent of one tank of gas. I care not at all about the environmental impact of that, if any. I care about not buying $5 gas.
Hate to break it to you, Chuck, but there is no guarantee that the price of electricity will always effectively be less than $5 gallon...or that there will he enough electricity to charge tens of millions of electric vehicles. In CA, they have a hard enough time keeping the power on right now.
Wait, what is this about electric vehicle efficiency? Is the implication that electric vehicles are not as efficient as advertised?
Not sure why you would claim such a thing considering that electric vehicle efficiency is one of the easiest things to measure. It's so easy that any individual can do it with only a few dollars of equipment. Anybody publishing false numbers would be discovered immediately.
Spend 20 years of your life in a cogen power plant and you learn things. One of those is that between the media, and corporate America, the odds of you being lied to on an hourly basis go up exponentially with the amount of media consumed. I could tell a long sordid tale of clean coal technology from 25 years ago that will piss you right off.
"Clean Coal!" I remember clean coal. Resting, now, in peace with the hula-hoops and Edsels.
I don't understand. It's trivial to measure how much electricity you're using to charge an electric car. It's trivial to measure how far you can drive an electric car. Do some division and you get efficiency. The media isn't involved in the process at all. So how could they possibly lie to you. This is like claiming that the media lies to you about how long your pants are, and you have a tape measure...
To err is human. If you really want to foul things up, use a computer.
This venture was human, all too human.
Algorithm is another way to say Ambrose Bierce's Abracadabra.
As of yet the computers haven't yet eaten of the fruit of tree of knowledge of good and evil. I have spoken to computers for 50 years and 2000 + anything is not science fiction it is total fantasy. Just like homer's Odessy.
Just for the sake of History. Jefferson's Bible was published After Darwin wrote The Voyage of Beagle.
Exactly
If you don’t know the source of claimed “facts”, don’t buy them. Why I browse Twitter and corporate media but triple check claims.
It is hard to check when Peleton won't let you get off the treadmill.
I have been on Ozempic for two years. I lost lots of weight but Between the diarrheas', nausea, constipation, gas pain I did it all for love. I still sleep with my best friend and partner and like waking up in the morning. It is what the cardiologist ordered.
I can't twitter but I know my food is mostly local and my farming neighbours own Quebec's food industry. Our farmers are rich and our bankers get paid wages.
I love cooking and I used to love eating but I enjoy my life even with the depravations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOCCvN8YDuc
Yep. Always a handy phrase to have at the ready.
Algorithms they wrote...
There were none, in my humble estimation. If there were they could easily exonerate themselves by releasing the algorithmic source code.
After all, they claim they don't use it anymore. Somebody on that list should sue for conspiracy, defamation and intentional interference with business advantage. I don't trust the GOP Congress to get to the bottom of this.
YES!
I think the new way of dodging responsibility is to refuse to acknowledge or report on it.
For the Liberal Mainstream Media the plan apparently is “If a Tree Falls in the Forest and we don’t report on it, who’s to say it ever happened?”
And if Matt or Matt’s subscribers say “Oh Yes, it did happen “ then we’re subject to withering criticism and claims of BIAS ! Or being a “Hating Hater who Hates !!”
Was thinking of the tree in an empty forest last night after reading Matt’s piece amid the deafening media silence.
A mention to a friend many months ago of the then-leaking story that the government was flying illegal aliens to small US cities in the middle of the night was met with an expression of disdainful incredulity: “If that’s true why isn’t anyone I know talking about it!’
To friend: "Ah, indeed. That IS the question. Why is anybody you know not talking about it?" Because the powers that be want to steal Russia's stuff. They don't want to trade with them. They want to steal it. Then, just like the Big Bad Wolf, they say, "If you get rid of Putin, then we will make peace with you and trade with you. Trust us. " "Yeh, right," says the Russian people. "We fell for that in the 1990s. Never again."
Embrace their hatred. The only way to counter professional liars is to pursue each statement to it's origin and quote them back to themselves. It's a lot of work initially, but then it gets easier when it becomes obvious they don't have the stomach to stand up in a direct fight as long as we do.
A direct result of valuing social/emotional response at the expense of logic and reason.
Agreed. I'd add that valuing social/emotional response is a direct effect of a concerted effort to undermine logic and reason. When it goes on for decades in one direction, it's certainly no random "oopsie!" mistake.
If we don’t report on it, it didn’t happen
All it takes is an accusation of being straight and white. Eliminates any questions regarding accuracy.
I’m here to attest that this line of thinking is transphobic, disproportionately hurts people of color, and displays all the classic hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
Thankfully the human brain is better than that.
These Hamilton 68 people are fucking morons.
They are not moronic. They are dishonest and EVIL
A very important distinction to make.
More like clever like criminals can be.
connected criminals
The omniscient black box.
I had been thinking of changing my screen name to "Al Gorithm" (assuming it wasn't already taken) but I guess I'd better not now. I couldn't bear being blamed for everything.
I’M thinking Al-Gore-íthm.
OH, isn't he the one who invented it all?
😂
That's a good point and they've been doing it for years. I remember 15 or more years ago when mainstream news first wondered about Big Tech's claims that their algorithms are neutral. "The algorithms are designed by people so they can express bias." Of course, I agreed, but it's worse, I remember saying. Even if bias is eliminated from the algorithm itself, it can learn bias from the fire-hose input of behavioral data. The algorithm itself is open to inspection but you'd have to measure learned bias with statistical experiments on the running system. Plausible deniability. A fantastic smokescreen!
Absolutely. And just like Twitter itself the "programmers" always had a thumb on the scale. It was really gangs of wokesters banning or throttling (shadow banning) anything they didn't like. Of course, they also banned all the tweets the secret police ordered them to ban.
Well, maybe. I don't know the programmers involved but it is certainly common that technical specialists keep their heads down rather than blow a whistle when their organization is doing crimes.
At first blush, the censorship looks like 99.9% decisions by individuals to ban and throttle tweets they didn't like. The algorithm story is hard to swallow. If there ever was an algorithm, then disclose the code.
They told us who they are. Don't second guess their confessions. They had their thumb heavy on the scale. If not, then they should show their notes.
I know. But there's a limit to how much I am ready to blame individual computer programmers without a case being made against them.
The algorithmic visibility control never made any sense and it was regrettable that Taibbi discussed it so much. Almost everything on the internet has a snitch (report) button. It takes you to a form. Form submissions go into a queue*. Maybe they have some automation for grouping form submissions to make processing them less laborious. They are reviewed against policy that's forever subject to change and a decision to modulate visibility is made. (And there's a review/appeal process but that's not used as much.)
It doesn't matter how much of this is handled by humans at computer terminals and how much is automated. What matters is the the policy, the power it represents, and who gets to define it.
*The FBI Belly Button's connection to the queue seems not very automated and often to have had high level human review on both sides of the public-private partnership.
I suspect computers and algorithms were lesser drivers of censorship. More likely, individual twitter employees and secret agents in the security state and Congress simply picked tweets that made them butthurt along with an unhealthy dose of ambition to control others and feel important and powerful. The official surveillance operatives were aided by self-appointed wokesters who wanted to see something, say something. I don't know any of this for sure.
But we may learn more--Captain Renault didn't invent the concept of "usual suspects."
Man thats nuts! And to reiterate:
"The majority of machine learning algorithms today are correlation linking, nothing more. Attributing causation to such analysis is doomed to fail. I would suggest it is solely the human decisions to link such outputs with perceived causal factors that creates the conflict at all. In other words, the outputs are seemingly biased because we are applying our human biases in the interpretation.
The real trouble isn't getting mathematically correct answers. It's what to do with them."
The issue we seem unable/unwilling to deal with is that, despite the wizardry of tech advancement, AI is untethered to reality. Which can, and does, lead to a false reality, which in turn confuses the two. And here we are....
I think you might enjoy or be aghast at (according to personality) this article: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/01/ai-bs.html Or maybe you'll nod knowingly and mutter, "Yup." Idk
Any by pure coincidence today I published a short blog that included a big block quote from Alan Turing's 1950 article on AI. https://thefsb.substack.com/p/alan-turings-sub-critical-and-super
ever since these files has been released I have gone thru, at first, shock.
then anger.
and now, with the latest releases, I just have my feelings hurt.
this just depressing now...
I asked a person earlier today what was their take on this Hamilton68 story...
He responded that he had no idea what i was referring to.
The algorithm made me do it...
Geraldine is rolling over in her grave.
Now. Now. Don't be flip.
Here come da judge!
I see what you did there.
AI made me do it!
If they ever get self-driving cars going (I hope not!), you bet this will be the escape route for the companies running the hardware and software. We already wage war like this to a certain extent, with drones and robots. Nobody has to do the dirty work.
Dave, I'm concerned that those self driving cars will accidentally transport both of us, and Matt, to the re- education camps
The Ivan Denisovich model.
Yes. They blame the magic pixie dust that obviously didn't exist.
The "interns" and "assistants" that they used to blame them on must be so happy!
"Phew"
Nope, looks like cherrypicked quotations from the Wayback Machine to me. Above, Matt has quoted the section on two parts of the dashboard: one from sources connected two Russia and a second connected to "bots and trolls". However, immediately below in the section labeled "How Does Russian Influence Online Work?", they make it clear that they are researching and reporting on THREE types of sites:
1) "Attributed accounts that clearly state they are pro-Russian or affiliated with the Russian government."
2) "Accounts (including both bots and humans) that are run by troll factories in Russia and elsewhere.'
3) "Accounts run by people around the world who amplify pro-Russian themes either knowingly or unknowingly, after being influenced by the efforts described above."
It is the latter that is concerning to me. For example, near the end of the Syrian Civil War, I was shocked when Tulsi Gabbard and other I had previously respected got worked up over whether the last one or two poison gas attacks in Syria were carried out by the Syrian government of the rebels. They were all worked up over some details in the OPCW reports and other information attributing the attacks to the government. Some of their complaints appeared to have some merit, but the big picture suggested that these complaints weren't worth bothering investigating: 1) The Syrian government was certainly responsible to all of the poison gas atrocities early in the war (more than a dozen) and were the only ones with the capability to handle Sarin. 2) The Syrian government always blocked access to the site of the gassing. If the government knew it hadn't been responsible for a poison gas attack and had an opportunity to prove the rebels were also behaving outrageously, the government would have immediately secured the area, and brought in the OPCW inspectors and the press. And if security were a real problem, Syria would have been happy to risk the lives of a few neutrals if they were going to report the rebels were now using poison gas. Since they hadn't done so, I was about 95% sure the government was responsible. The fact that suspicious things had happened at these unsecured sites where poison gas had been used and that the OPCW may have done a poor job or obtained ambiguous evidence didn't influence my judgment either way and I remained only 95% confident the government had done it. However, I was shocked when so many people took what appeared to me to be taking Russia's side by persisting in raising questions about the evidence when the big picture was so clear (to me at least).
BTW: Twitter didn't accept Hamilton 68 a face value and ban all of these users who often appeared to be following a Russian line. They did their own investigation and decided most of the accounts were ordinary users who were being influenced by Russian propaganda. The only reason Matt knows this is because Twitter behaved responsibly and checked out the allegations.
Too true
A misinformation factory. Appears to be one of the ways the deep state/woke democrats dispense their groupthink propaganda to CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WAPO
Weird that suddenly outlets like FOX/Tucker Carlson seem to be the only significant media outlet that is immune to this pernicious bullshit
The difference with Fox these days is they allow for opposing points of view. I’m sure it’s memory-holed now, but they played the same games back in the War on Terror days. They’ve realized that being a conservative mainstream foil to the remainder of all the rest of mainstream (liberal) media is driving impressive ratings. Agreed on the weirdness that you note. The world has been flipped on its head.
Fox host, Brian Kilmeade, had Matt on last night on his show "One Nation". He gave quite a bit of time to Matt and did a pretty good job of asking questions. I realized watching it that this is still a somewhat complex issue to explain to readers and viewers because of convoluted explanations by Hamilton68 and other human bots. So the simpler the language the better aka "It's Bullshit" or as a former president said, "It's fake news." All these people are basically running money-making scams and getting away with it. That's what irks me. They will just move on to the next hustle.
Kilmeade is on the WGAU (10am-noon) in central Georgia and once played a clip of Matt on the Twitter Files.
It's a game of 'whack a mole', sure. But the stakes couldn't be more important, and destroying another's credibility in cases like this, and Jayson Blair's is something that can stick for quite awhile.
Careful with Brian neocon establishment republicant killmeade. Used to follow him, until the last three years. Now I listen even closer, and hear Billy Kristol.
Cowgirlcontrarian: Yup, it's all just a hustle, and a truly clumsy one at that.
However, they’re all getting rich with these hustles.
basically, Fox News created the media business model that that is now dominant amongst all MSM.
eschew objective reporting, target a demographic and cater the news to them.
my MSNBC addicted friends Love to make fun of the Fox crowd without realizing they are the flip side of the same coin.
the projection is off the charts...
I don’t have time to watch either. I will say that I believe that Foxes “straight” news is less partisan than the others.
Fox straight news is a bit more non-partisan in that they cover news stories that are not political. Like natural disasters and human interest stories. My take on Fox is that the daytime "news" crowd is definitely on the side of the war mongers in DC and so are in line with MSNBC and CNN. They have on their General Kean who is a rabid Russiaphobe. Later in the day such as "The Five" (on at 5PM ET) are more nuanced and have a more Libertarian leaning which is more anti-war or anti foreign involvement. Tucker has on Colonel MacGregor who has tried to objectively report on Ukraine and sees Russia winning. Note that he is a field officer; a colonel. Whereas the MSM including daytime Fox has on "Generals". "Gutfeld", the talk comedy show at 11PM has comedians and definitely a libertarian bent. They actually disagree with each other in a playful way. Big fan of Tyrus on that show. It is, by the way, the #1 show in it's time slot. It is not woke. And, of course, I love it because Walter Kirn is a semi-regular.
Really? They are all actors in a giant stage production. It's kabuki theatre. Don't believe the hype.
Less partisan? L0L It's all kabuki theatre.
Sorry, no. What the MSM had in former days was not objective reporting, it was the *pretense* of objective reporting.
To which I say, good riddance!
Because left/right is an illusion. All serve the god of mammon. This generation gets "liberals" that favor the FBI and state power. A few generations back the FBI and state power were enemies of the "liberals". It's all kabuki theatre. Don't believe the hype.
It was fun for them basking in the prestige while at the same time remaining just below the radar of the disinformed public. After a couple failed early attempts successfully quashed by the same media that used their services, Matt has outed them. The media says “Hey, we trusted them...not our fault.” and Ham68 says, “Hey, we trust our methods. Of course there may be some things that require further explanation...not really our fault.” Even though they invented the egregiously faulty process. Deny, deny, deny is the algorithmic response to the failed algorithms. It’s a guilty pleasure to see the frantic, nonsensical ass covering our information overlords engage in presuming we are all too dumb to connect the dots ourselves. Long live The Racket.
If not state propaganda, a mere step away. Although I’m inclined to see the denial as confirmation, along the lines of “never believe anything in politics until it’s been officially denied” - Otto von Bismarck
Actually, it's Biblical: "Never believe anything until it's been officially denied three times." (Matthew 26:69–74, Mark 14:66–72, Luke 22:55–62, and John 18:15–18, 25–27) Although I'm sure Otto, being a savvy politico, would agree
"No evidence but I gotta believe" - Grape Soda
I just noticed that Hamilton 68's parent organization, the Alliance for Securing Sophistry (ASS), more generally known as A.S.D. (the parody writes itself, really*), is advised by Michael Chertoff, Bill Kristol, Michael Morell, John Podesta, among others. That is, CIA, NSA, "bi-partisan" "think tanks", and the like. What else do we need to know?
----
*EDIT: I mean nothing against ASD people, of course. But as there are people who are not conscious of their human disconnects, and there are also people who are *fully* conscious and cultivate their own brand of disconnects (manipulation; objectification) for selfish gain. In the extreme, the latter are sociopaths.
A real who's who of shitbirds.
I should be a bit more specific about FOX. While most of the FOX presenters are airing this stuff from Matt Taibbi simply to tarnish their traditional opponents, ONE of them stands out as legitimate in my mind-- Tucker Carlson
Frankly I can’t believe he is still allowed to have any access to media given his consistently anti-corporate populist views
I wonder how long it will be before he too loses his platform and gets “cancelled”
Tucker Carlson is an unwashed anus. The man is a chameleon with no principles whatsoever.
You honestly view him as reliable? I hope you get the help you need.
You're here to shill for his TV show like all the other Tucker ad posters? Get fucked, nerd.
That tells us a lot about Tucker Carlson, Dwhy. Thanks for playing!
It's interesting to me that you didn't respond similarly to the post I responded to, which was similarly devoid of a coherent point, but just happened to be right-leaning in nature.
But I guess you were never pretending to be something other than a partisan hack.
Seriously? OK, sure.
"...the post I responded to, which was similarly devoid of a coherent point..."
1. Thank you for admitting your post was "devoid of a coherent point". I do appreciate the sincere humility, given how rare this can be these days. So, I'm not just picking on you! In fact, you're maybe a little too hard on youself... You've made oh-so-clear what you think of Tucker Carlson -- that is, a point made, and very coherently!
2. Now, as to the OP being equally "devoid of a coherent point":
Hmmm... He's differentiating between Tucker and the rest of FOX; the former admirable, the latter not so much. Why, there's a point! Coherent too! Do you disagree? That is, with its coherence, not its lack of presented evidence, which IMO is a completely separate matter. Maybe we could even, you know, discuss it a little?
So is the above really partisan hackery? Remember, you're talking to someone who's to the Left of Marx.
Carlson will lose his platform if he ever skirts the Murdoch bottom line. If his ersatz "anti-corporate populist views" is making money for Rupert, then that's good enough for Rupert.
He's a shill just like the rest. If he wasn't he wouldn't be on corporate broadcasts. Nobody gets a show on corporate news without being a spineless toady to corporate power. It's all kabuki theatre. The sooner we acknowledge this uncomfortable truth the sooner we can focus on real issues.
It's likely Carlson is being let out to run for now because he is either
(a) being set up as a new candidate for prime scapegoat (a la Trump) and will, at some point once they have sufficient goods on him or he makes a serious mistake, go down very hard a la Alex Jones; or
(b) controlled opposition. But on this latter possibility I don't see any clear signals, other than the usual Overton windows on MSM talent.
I seriously doubt the deep state has lost control at this point; they are nothing if not masterful over the last several decades.
I suspect that, if Team R had the whip hand, we'd see the roles reversed.
This is not because of any inherent dastardliness in either Team R or Team D, but because of the nature of power.
This is my biggest criticism of Matt. He comes from liberal media, so obviously their shitty behavior is going to hit him closer to home.
Our two-party system is simply outdated tech. If we want to compete in contemporary space, we need reform now that makes a two-party system unthinkable. Instead Matt seems committed to making one party pay, and his readers are pretty much here to watch the show anymore.
Was it your intention to claim "the deep state" are "woke democrats" or were you just grouping them together as on this particular occasion? Democrats/Republicans are part of the same entity with slightly different political purposes. The deep state, by definition, is not partisan. Both "parties" are extensions of the deep state. They are Kabuki theatre to distract the masses.
Fox News has been rated as least biased by the best academic studies, from UCLA, the University of Missouri, and Harvard's Shorenstein Institute on the Media. The latter did a study of the coverage of the 2020 Presidential election from June to November by two major networks. They found CBS's coverage was 89% favorable and 11% unfavorable for Biden, and 5% favorable and 95% unfavorable for Trump. Fox News was found to be 42% favorable and 58% unfavorable for Biden and 43% favorable and 57% unfavorable for Trump.
"the best academic studies"
... For some reason that language is reminding me of some politician in particular... someone full of shit...
Idk, it's probably legit.
So...shit topped with whipped cream and sprinkles is better than plain old shit? Shit by any other name smells just as shitty.
The difference between Fox and the rest of the “media” is the the rest of them RUN with **anything** they’re given with no fact-checking whatsoever (as illustrated for the gazillion and tenth time in this article) so long as it repeats Democrat Party talking points. It’s “Bombshell Breaking News!!”. Whereas look how Trump and others routinely get po’d with Fox because Fox demands their journalists do, ya know, their job and find if it’s true first.
Sure, pal. Fox is a beacon of light in the corporate media landscape. If it's on TV it's bullshit.
IT’S INTENTIONAL!!!
It’s NOT laziness
It’s their corporate overlords whom they serve who are using the Corporate Media to destroy the United States culturally AND politically
They want force the United States to surrender our sovereignty to global organizations WTO. WEF. ETC!
I mean, Trump claims things so much more aggressively false than this dashboard, any journalist who attempted to print them all verbatim would spontaneously combust from the head down.
Every accusation leveled against Trump by the MSM/INTEL COMMUNITY turned out to be not only incorrect but intentional fabrications repeated 24/7 by the pimps of war
If Trump were President we would not be embroiled in a war with Russia
Was/is Trump a self absorbed, scoundrel? Yes!
But far less dangerous to our nation and the world than GWB or this Biden administration
This Biden administration has done more harm to the USA, The World, and to the cause of PEACE than ANY other president in the history of the United States. Including Nixon and/or GWB
You know, what the substack comments section really needs is an *ignore* function.
You won't find a bigger opponent of censorship than me, but letting individual users decide they don't want to hear from somebody like Dwhy is completely different deal. If we all ignore this obvious bot/troll, then eventually his minders would tire of paying him when he generated zero interaction.
I usually read the comments, then look who wrote it. Typically it’s the same 3-4 dumbasses in the comments section spewing nonsense…
I appreciate that my mind doesn’t work like theirs.
Then you understand why I support Twitter aggressively banning aggressively stupid people like you.
Biden right up there with Woodrow Wilson.
L0L...as if the president were in charge of the country. Presidents have the bully pulpit. That's about it. Trump kowtowed just like those before him and those that will come after.
POTUS appoints judges, including the supreme court, and also controls the military. What are you on about?
Does he really though?
Yeah, it seems weird because it's not true. Don't mistake a shift in target audience for integrity.
Tucker is a chameleon who will say anything in order to stay relevant. You're just part of his latest batch of dupes.
Says the guy still waiting for the Trump-Russia “damning proof!!”.
I disagree. Tucker treated Dr. Ron Paul with respect well before he was the biggest news show on TV. He’s a bit more conservative than me, but he’s the best on TV without question.
I’d turn to Zerohedge, Taibbi, Greenwald, or Brand before watching the tele, however.
Russell Brand, seriously? The love child of schizophrenia and crystal meth?
Yes, seriously, who do I trust more than Brand? I don’t agree with his ideal vision of society, but he’s clearly in the pursuit of truth. His reporting also highlights some of the NGOs that fly below my radar.
He also understands the goal of a free society should be the dissipation/ decentralization of power as opposed to concentrating it in the hands of the Washington, London, and Brussels elite.
Sure, it's possible. But it's becoming less and less relevant. As was promoted not long ago by Left-leaning reformers, "Policies not personalities".
We are now avoiding getting caught up in hero-worship -- we know everyone in power lies. So, we support them as long as what they say rings true, but drop them like hot potatoes once it clearly doesn't. Take loveable ol' Bernie, for example. And did I mention Donald Trump?
Sadly though I feel it might just be the fact that it is democratic
"seem to"
Get out more, you'll feel better.
As they did with the Southern Poverty Law Center, academia was also quick to cite Hamilton 68 as a reliable reference for its biased reasoning.
Respectable organizations were tarnished by SPLC's list of "hate groups". All patches from the same quilt.
Mr. Taibbi is an essential new journalist in this space. We need ethical journalists to work like surgeons to quickly and factually excise these cancerous think tank initiatives with dark agendas. The new journalists are like Batmen working in Gotham to save the city. We need you, Mr. Taibbi!
Taibbi and company arent 'new', by any standards. They are the OLD model, aka ACTUAL journalists,aka normal. Whats new is the weaponization of tech to fraudulently manipulate info in order to frame certain narratives, and at exponential scale. And Taylor Lorenz. IOW, propaganda.
To even conceive of actual journalistic standards as something 'new' is evidence of how we as a Society have been purposely manipulated.
Couldn't agree more. Here in New York we had citizen journalists like Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin. These guys dedicated their careers to fighting The Man. They came from the streets and they never left. And they represented a heritage that went back a century.
What makes the Substack Crew different is that they come with pedigree: private schools, Ivy League, etc. But unlike their Establishment press peers, they've left the elite cucoon and built a bridge back to their working class predecessors by questioning authority and holding the feet of those in power to the fire. Hamill and Breslin would be with them.
What bothers me about this is the suggestion that whether Substack or Establishment, a certain pedigree is a prerequisite. Why assume that the "Substack Crew" have these pedigrees but nevertheless choose to leave them behind to reconnect with the working class? I subscribe to several Substack writers and don't care whether they come from elite* backgrounds, just the quality of their writing. But then again, I've never understood the allure of pedigrees anyway, not even when it comes to my beloved cat.
*I guess I should mention that my antipathy to this word makes my muscles seize up whenever I see it, which is unfortunate because it's so ubiquitous. I can't wait for it to fulfill its destiny wandering the netherworlds.
Look around in here a little further, and find the kind of progressive claptrap that will make you throw up in your mouth a little, pretending to be " above the fray", utilizing incredibly long words to beat up the idea of conservatism.
But instead of beating up poor people, it’s idiots.
I’m down.
And like Batman they are considered villains by many.
This article and the one preceding it are of great value and they hope it become widely known.
The most evil institution in the US is not the military, which is being used to kill millions of innocent people, but the mainstream media which, with its pervasive lying, has been the facilitator for this continuing mass murder and exploitation by covering it up, justifying what was done, punishing truthtellers (like Assange), smearing real journalists trying to tell the truth, intimidating others who might report the news into self-censoring, while also promoting the idea we (really a few families) have the right to order around everyone else in the world. A vast quantity of the innocent blood shed is on the hands of the faux press and its servants and minions.
You can be certain that NONE of this will see the light of day on CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, MSNBC, CNN, NYT, WAPO
It’s not laziness or unintentional slippage of journalistic standards
These outlets are INTENTIONALLY spreading this bullshit to propagate a false narrative as essentially employees of the intelligence community and the “deep state”/permanent Washington UNI-party
It’s terrifying
I subbed to WSJ so I could post about the Twitter Files in comments. They don't moderate them out as do the others. You just can't post links. Every once in a while someone likes what I say. A tiny effort to go under their barriers of ignoring this.
Getting through to WSJ readers is a neat trick. I just found out one of the dopes that ended up with Maja Rushdie's spot ( clay or buck) are hard core wsj fans, every day, cover to cover. Sorry, but that has to have an effect on you, reading full blown state approved propaganda on a daily basis. Every article in there in the last forty years, maybe fifty, is " nuanced". That's a word in place of propaganda. I stopped reading it thirty years ago.
In addition to sending them money...
It’s neck and neck but our expectations of the military are low. The mainstream media was once there as an effective check and balance. They’ve become the enemy of the citizen. Faux checks, no balance.
Alan: I would suggest that it is "social media" which is the more pernicious form of social engineering today than is the MSM. Look at how the numbers of viewers of the left-media (most of it) have dropped off a cliff in recent years, while Fox numbers have remained strong. And it is the Department of Defense who is behind the mass poisoning of Americans (and the world) with their biodefense countermeasures quaintly called "vaccines." Countermeasures are not required to follow FDA protocols for licensure, thus the completely sham Warp Speed "clinical trials." There have not been, and never will be any actual clinical trials for these bioweapons, nor any real after-marketing surveillance.
Just incorrect. And the US in defiance of international conventions they’d signed, refused to count enemy casualties.
lulz.
no sir, their childish response, does not sound solid.
Add hamilton 68 as a source, the major news could hide behind, when publishing lies and propaganda:
#PerceptionIsACommodity - We are aggressively manipulated to "think" and "feel" about everything with repeated deceitful narratives and images which specifically TARGET emotional response. US Corporate-State Media (MSNBC, FOX, CNN, ABC, PBS, NPR, WaPo, NYT, etc) manufactures "support" or "rage" for whatever the oligarchy chooses. OUR thoughts and feelings on any given topic are often, largely NOT our own
The sooner we just concede that the internet - however it was initially conceived - is now just a cesspool, the better off we will all be.
i’ve been wondering if we might see a kind of neo-primitive movement that seeks to find a place to live outside of the digital world
Just re-reading Dune. It's interesting that Frank Herbert made a point of excluding both robots and computers from his science fiction. That was a very popular book in its time, along with Lord of the Rings. A lot of people don't realize what a hit Lord of the Rings was back then, too. It was anti-Tech, too, since Tolkien saw way too much of what Tech could do during WWI.
Leonidas: I’ve been wondering the very same thing. In some ways it seems it may be a necessity as technology (GPT chat for example) has potential to completely ruin our world.
I find myself hoping at times for an emp making all these horrid contraptions worthless for a period of time, and long distance communication only possible by hams the norm for a year or two. I know it will be ugly for many. I guess I'm selfish that way.
I’m trying to replay Elden Ring in my down time, hold off on the EMPs please. By all means nuke DC, Brussels, and London.
Careful what you wish for... I get the feeling but an EMP strong enough to knock out communications across the continent would also knock out all kinds of infrastructure support and we'd have massive die off in this cities at least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Zerzan
good stuff, thanks!
There are rocks we can use to run across the cess pool and Racket is one of them.
Don't slip, Kathleen.
It's only a cesspool because *we* haven't figured out what to do with it yet. TPTB certainly have, as they are always chomping at the bit to use any means to expand power.
HaHa! These douchebags don't seem to grasp how the internet works. "Quick ...issue a statement as fraudulent as our entire existence!"
Clean up. Isle 68. You missed a spot!
Great work, Matt.
Stephen Hart.
Nope. They know EXACTLY how it works. EXACTLY.
If they stopped gaslighting, they'd have nothing to say at all.
Just bonkers. My mind goes to two places. First: What is the extent of disinformation we are receiving now from dishonest media? I’m guessing most of us on this platform are not drinking from the mainstream hose any longer. But there are many sheep out there digesting lies and not questioning the “news”. Second: What happens now? Is anyone within the Hamilton68 core going to be held accountable for such blatant disregard for the truth?
When was the last time you saw a public figure say they "take responsibility for this [issue/event]" and have that be followed by them taking some kind of ACTION (such as resignation)? It's as if saying those magic words is all that is required. For public figures, the concept of one's honor is just about as extinct as the concept of accountability. The two go hand-in-hand. And their extinction feeds our skepticism and distrust of government.
Honor from public figures?
It almost makes me think getting rid of dueling was a mistake.
"I'm sorry you were offended."
Accountability is so 20th century. Don't hold your breath.
So true. I guess I’m envisioning more and more awareness -- public ostracism of sorts. But even the “court of public opinion” has a skewed focus without much of a center. Ugh.
No one is ever held accountable beyond petty criminals. No one is going to jail. No one wins in court but the lawyers.
What happens now is a slow inexorable grind into totalitarianism.
When my first girlfriend broke up with me, I asked her why? She said, "the algorithms told her to". She was a very cutting edge girl.
Mine told me our algorithms did not converge. Very true...
Mine left because I supported Hitler, um I mean Trump whom I didn't vote for the first time to begin with.
Bullet dodged
I was told it's because I played bass. Immediately switched to guitar.
I heard about you bass players, special breed
This is outrageous. And even when caught, they think we’re too stupid to believe our own eyes.
This, plus they are confident it will be sidestepped and pretended that this is a "nothingburger". The malaise is so deep with this yet another example of the hubris in the intelligence community and the bulk of media.
Kevin Drum who wrote a lot of the MJ articles has a whole Greek chorus of cherry pickers.
I posted a link to the latest Twitter Files and got no likes. Help me out Racket Squad.
https://twitter.com/kdrum/status/1619390119907319808
Oh, ugh. Wish I hadn't gone there.
They’re caught by virtue of a billionaire buying a failing business and outing the previous regime. I’m not sure how much of this we ever would have known without Elon musk. It’s FDR on steroids and all the media can do is try to smear him. It should be screamed from the mountain top but instead is trickled out by tweet thread or behind a paywall. Tell me again why they would think we’re stupid
It must be tiring to be the country’s investigative reporter, as well as it’s only functioning editor. Get some rest.
Thank you! Your patience and focus is so critical.
Did I miss an installment with you and Walter Kirn? I have come to love your conversations!!!
I got it ( podcast). You DO want to hear it. This one was not just great but puts a LOT in great perspective.
Found it!! Thank you
Substack is doing a terrible job withe-mail alerts now. I didn't get an alert for this or several others. But I did see on Twitter that this had been posted so I came to look.
Imagine claiming you spent 3 years developing algorithms purporting to identify bot accounts so secret that you can’t tell anyone the account names and then simultaneously asserting you never bothered to verify the only 600 accounts produced by your algorithms. That is some serious Class A hubris.
Hubris is bred in precincts where there is no accountability.
Exactly. Seems they are counting on the sleeping citizen
Hey, maybe someone should make a statute of "The Sleeping Citizen." It could be placed in the Capitol. Maybe next to that bust of Zelensky.
Well, if it’s going there, perhaps having one eye open would be more inspirational.
No, that might trigger some of the Congresspeople. The depiction of a slightly aware constituent might prove to be "hurtful" and create an "unsafe space" for our elected representatives. No, the statue should convey the idea of a complete lack of awareness and disinterest, of deep slumber.
A bag of chips lying next to him, and a TV remote in his hand, would complete the image.
We could solve a lot of these problems if we had a law that made it mandatory to publicly display these "algorithms," like it is mandatory to list ingredients on food.
We're becoming ruled by trade secrets. FICO is the oldest and most well-known. Anybody who has ever tried to figure out that nonsense system comes away confused. "I paid off all my debt and my score went down?"
Just wait until the WEF wet dream of digital ID and social credit scores is forced on the world. People like those at Hamilton 68 will label you a troll then you'll be evicted, fired and all of your Central Bank Digital Currency will be flagged as unspendable until you report for re-education.
That's a profoundly dystopian vision you have there . . . and sadly all too imaginable.
I find your name apropos.
Coming soon. Yet most people in this country do not even know what WEF is about.
"We're becoming ruled by trade secrets." That's always the excuse, isn't it?
"People like those at Hamilton 68 will label you a troll" And that's exactly my fear.
Can't happen to you soon enough.
Actually if you studied real history you would understand you are speaking nonsense. Milton wrote Areopagitica. Milton was a liberal puritan. He was what we now call secular humanist. In 1776 everybody who read loved Milton except for Priests and pedants.
I live in Quebec Bill 21 says the only freedom of religion is freedom from religion.
Our charter of right and freedoms protects living things not institutions.
Julian Assange and Greta Thunberg are saints and Lockheed Martin is the enemy.
America is a religion.
In Quebec government is about health education and welfare.
Religion is about many fantasylands.
We teach Darwin not Noah in our schools.
What are you babbling about, and who are your responding to?
Also, Greta Thunberg is a grifter, as are almost all high profile eco-warriors.
And Canada is assaulting human rights daily. If your don't see that, nobody can help you.
Here is the quintessential Taibbi snowflake-commenter at work. In a world of right-wing grifters run amok, endoftheroad here focuses his wrath on a 19-year old environmental activist, dismissing her as a "grifter."
You're a POS, endoftheroad. A real POS.
You think that 19 year olds can't be grifters? Ah, the naïveté.
The train hypocrisy: https://nypost.com/2019/12/15/german-railway-claims-greta-thunberg-lied-about-taking-first-class/
The yacht hypocrisy: https://www.yachtingworld.com/sailing-across-atlantic/greta-thunberg-atlantic-crossing-la-vagabonde-125068 So would Greta have had this "adventure" if she wasn't Greta. I don't care if the thing's carbon neutral. It's not something you or I could do. We'd have to fly or take a ship.
Yes, she's a grifter, maybe not completely consciously, but she is.
There oughta be some sort of prize for being the first person on these threads to link to "Yachting World."
Obviously nothing you know anything about.
I am responding as best I can with the facts that are available and providing pretty good links
.I am an old troll living under a bridge. Pierce is my publicity agent but he is on Sabbatical. He is back in High School where he belongs..
Thank you Feldspar.
People like End of the Road have reached the end of the road they don't understand English. The Ministry of Truth has made language meaningless.
One may not like Greta's message but she not only talks the talk but walks the walk.
She is no grifter.
She is sincere in her beliefs and here in Quebec most us believe her.
Biden is a grifter. I believed him until Alaska and oil leases. In Quebec the burning of fossil fuels ends in 2030 and I can't think of greater betrayal of my trust than opening up Alaska to destroy our biosphere.
I always believed the Reverend Jerimiah Wright "God damn America." or was that God damned America.
Grifter:
A person who engages in petty or small scale swindling.
I guess when you spend your life representing Delaware where there are more corporations than people you must understand the grift.
grift:
to obtain money illicitly.
His profile says he's a troll. He's not very good at it.
Thanks Lillia.
I am a very old troll and have eaten my fill of Bully Goats.
I was never very good at being a troll. I never liked stepping in Bovine excrement.
The secret to good trolling is that what you say has to have some very thin connection to the conversation at hand. Yours has none. And for being a troll, you seem curiously capable of producing Bovine excrement, as you put it.
Your loss. You churn out the progretards you do.
I am a retard. I couldn't do school despite an IQ they considered genius.
Autisme Montreal says autistic is what we are. We are who we are.
I am me. I have no reason to lie.
I have lost nothing I am living my dreams. I am writing after 50+ years of abject failure.
Your comments affirm my understandings.
I must thank you.
Dr Samuel Johnson hated Milton but gave him to the world.
Dr Johnson hated Benjamin Franklin even more.
Dr Johnson hated the wisest of the wise because he knew he didn't belong.
Dr Johnson was a conservative conservative philosopher.
As time goes on maybe chimpanzees are an Improvement over the town drunks.
Legends of the Bible Louis Ginzburg Jewish Publication 1905.
Agree, but how will we know if the displayed algorithms were the real ones?
You'd have to also have access to the data and be able to repeat results, just like science used to work long ago. But corporations will never release their code AND data. That's their whole business (grift) model.
Something tells me you don't have a clue what "algorithms" are, else you would understand what a laughably impracticable idea that is.
"Make the government make it make sense!"
I am quite familiar with what algorithms are. They are programs with "if . . . thens." Even if I cannot make sense of them, if they are public information, then others can make sense of them so we all know what is being amplified, what is being deamplified, and what criteria they are programming in.
And I don't trust the government to make anything makes sense. Their job is to force transparency so we are making decisions with all the information.
You however seem quite comfortable with the status quo as you're making a pathetic excuse for why we can't know.
Yes, you have correctly described an algorithm. But what we generally refer to as "the Algorithm" is something much more specific -- usually neural nets, or a complex web of decision-making tools.
The general idea of forcing companies to go 100% transparent with their algorithms is laughably impractical (and also extremely authoritarian and draconian). So your dictionary description of an algorithm obviously doesn't apply here.
The more specific idea of forcing companies to register decision-making tools when they reach x amount of complexity is even more insane. Imagine a law that says, "algorithms smarter than these benchmark values are government property by default"... that's what you're basically talking about.
Again, all this sounds like an excuse to not enforce transparency. I find it amazing how we worry about things that are "draconian and authoritarian" (which they're not--we're not telling them what they can and cannot put in the algorithms, just that they have to make them public, which is the *opposite* of draconian and authoritarian) when it comes to *companies* but people, meh, they can be in the dark.
Companies that have as great a market share as say Twitter and Amazon and Google need to be made to do the "impossible" for the sake of keeping our citizenry informed and having a level playing field. I don't care how"draconian" their apologists think that is.
Why are you responding to Lillia. She is repeating the nonsense she was taught. Science is standing on shoulders of giants; Newton
Lilla is not a scientist. She is a religious acolyte.
Talk to her about the Sun standing still and Noah. She understands magic and hocus pocus.
Me, a religious acolyte?
Ah, honey. You got the wrong end of the stick.
My definition of religion is the belief in fictions.
American history is a fiction sweetie.
I got the right end of the stick.
I live in Quebec where gender, race and religions are all fictions.
E pluribus Unum
Stop talking, you look like a clown. I'm an IT exec who started out as a software developer.
So, guilty as charged.
It exec is another descriptor for " failed it loser, let's make him a boss"
That figures... an exec who thinks "stop talking" is a valid argumentation tactic.
Crawl back into your hole jackass.
That figures, an internet rando who thinks his uninformed opinion trumps experience.
Wow, did your feelings get hurt?
Who am I kidding, I'll eat my hat if you're gainfully employed.
Ridiculous and exactly what I've come to expect over the past few years. Your work offers a glimmer of hope. Truth to Power. Keep going ! 🙏