The creepiness that is Facebook

[8bitagent]

I wound up joining Ello too with the peeps I technologically interface with. Don't know if I'll use it. I kinda looked at it. Those last two comments here make me hate it. I'm "FOIB" if you wanna search for me.

Otherwise, who cares?

I was trying to think of the next "big thing" and what it will be. We've already been through what, like 5 or 6 different "social" media iterations since the late 90's -- not including "WELL".

I gave in last nite and joined Ello...which I soon realized is on the level of a jr high schooler doing a weekend coding product. Not saying there's no potential...and so far I like how it's mostly intelligent artsy weirdos(all the right wing knuckledragger ghetto people from myspace eventually made it to facebook)
But none of my 45 friends seem to truly be posting or using it...AS MUCH as we all yearn for something NEW to break from our facebook slavery. More and more I miss the Bush era days of Livejournal

[Elvis]

Facebook users ‘running low’ on inspirational quotes

Thousands of Facebook users have found themselves running ‘seriously low’ on fresh inspirational quotes to share with their friends of late, the social network giant has announced today. Quotations from the likes of Socrates, Edgar Allan Poe and Winston Churchill have reportedly had their profundity ‘watered down’ by ‘excessive sharing’, forcing Facebook users to turn to the musings of more contemporary wordsmiths, like Harry Styles or Dappy from N-Dubz.

‘I just wish Plato would have said more stuff’, frustrated Facebook user Paul Donaldson, who has not blindly shared an ancient philosophical observation for nearly two days. ‘I suppose he wasn’t to know that millions of people would one day be sharing his words on computers – he was just a cartoon dog after all’.

Facebook’s head researcher for the UK, Chris Stone, said: ‘Unshared quotes are becoming dangerously scarce. Our research indicates that there is now only one Shakespeare quote remaining that is yet to lose its original meaning on Facebook, but that’s just: “A fusty nut with no kernel’. It’s clearly far too obscure for 2013 Britain, but I suspect somebody will eventually slap it on a pixelated flowery placard and share the shit out of it’.

Added Stone: ‘When a timeless quote from the likes of Lord Byron or Wordsworth is shared by Gemma from Telford to express her love at the moment a stranger in Wetherspoon’s bought her a tequila slammer before nonchalantly leaving, it somehow becomes less enlightened and insightful.’

However, not all is lost, according to Professor James Watkins of Sheffield University, who argues that finding fresh quotes to circulate and impress friends with is not that difficult, given that people today are much less impressed by the deeper meaning of the quote itself than the format in which it’s presented’.

‘Take this Joey Essex quote, as an example,’ Watkins said. ‘”If you get a waxwork done, that’s how you know you made it”. Of course it’s void of anything even remotely profound and is essentially a load of bollocks, but throw an inverted comma on each end, make it bold and italic, and it somehow gains a deeper meaning and purpose’

http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2013/11/01/f ... al-quotes/

[Pele'sDaughter]

http://countercurrentnews.com/2014/10/f ... umbus-day/

Facebook Deleted Accounts of Native Americans On Columbus Day For Having ‘Fake Names’

Perhaps it was nothing more than a disturbing coincidence, but this Columbus Day, Facebook decided to delete the accounts of Native Americans from the Midwest Village of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Yellow Springs became nationally known after Dave Chappelle’s Block Party toured popular spots in the comedians hometown.

Yellow Springs has something of a reputation for social justice activism, going back to Horace Mann, and – now that you mention it – the Antioch College and University, where Coretta Scott King, the wife of Martin Luther King, Jr. graduated (though her time in Yellow Springs was hardly devoid of encounters with racism) often serves as a magnet for activists.

Many of the students at Antioch have been visible at the John Crawford protests in nearby Beavercreek.

One of those associated with Antioch is Shane Creepingbear. He’s the Assistant Director of Admission and Multicultural Recruitment and Enrollment Coordinator at Antioch College.

While he is easy enough to find on the Antioch website, Facebook did no investigation before deleting his account. Facebook, apparently thought his name was “made up,” as they decided Columbus Day would be a great time to deactivate the Facebook accounts of Shane and his wife Jacqui Creepingbear.

Both had their accounts reactivated, but Jacqui explains that this has happened before. Facebook has repeatedly shut down her husband’s account. But after the last time, when the social media giant was provided with a valid drivers license, proving that the name was real, they thought the issue was over and done with.

Apparently, Shane explains, if Facebook receives a notification that your name is fake, if they do a simple visual glance at it and believe that it is, they will delete your account with no investigation. Apparently that also means they will not even look through files that you submitted in the past to prove you are who you say you are.

The timing of the account deactivation is particularly disturbing. Yes, it could all be a coincidence, or it could have been a targeted date by a racist who had a grudge against Shane and Jacqui, and wished to use the laziness of Facebook account verifiers as their weapon.

Facebook has – not surprisingly – not responded to our request for a statement about this.

[Luther Blissett]

Oddly enough I'm talking about future interfaces and the shelf life of "social media" "sites" with a group of my friends as we speak. It'll one day seem fairly quaint that there was once a special designation for a special well of socialization. However, I don't think Facebook will ever truly die until we leave the screen. And hardware manufacturers have not yet fully milked the screen of all of its financial potential.

[82_28]

This means you WILL NEVER BE SAFE without FB. I guess I'm just gonna remain unsafe. Throw caution to the wind. Live life willy-nilly. Be a slacker. Not keep up on my "wall". Fuck the scourge of FB.

http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/10/int ... ety-check/

Knowing what little I know of data transfer from radio to backbone back to radio means the networks will be crushed with data access -- read GO DOWN. All at once. FB has nothing to do with the requests to send or receive data. That shit is contingent upon how robust the "back haul" (no idea -- it's just the term used in telecommunications). I was at a Seahawks game last year and couldn't call, text, access data at all because of 65,000 people all had their own smartphones trying to do the same thing I was trying to do. Now imagine, let's take Seattle, a metro area of 4 million and a calamity occurs. Down for the count. 911 would go down too. There's only so much bandwidth and capacity.

[elfismiles]

'Anti-Facebook' social network gets fresh funding
AFP

The Ello website is seen on a computer screen on September 27, 2014 in Washington D.C

San Francisco (AFP) - Flush with a reported $5.5 million in fresh funding, upstart social network Ello on Thursday legally changed its corporate standing to back a promise to remain ad-free.

Ello converted to a public benefit corporation, which it described as "a new kind of for-profit company in the USA that exists to produce a benefit for society as a whole — not just to make money for its investors."

The announcement posted at Ello's website came as word spread that venture capitalists pumped $5.5 million into the company in a fresh funding round.

That money will be used in part to beef up capacity so the social network can be opened to more users.

Ello, described as the "anti-Facebook" for its stand on privacy and advertising, has become a hot ticket on the Internet.

Created last year as a "private" social network, Ello (www.ello.co) recently opened its doors on an invitation-only basis.

Ello appears to have caught on with its simple message which seems to take aim at frustrations of Facebook users.

Facebook has been criticized by some users over its privacy policies and ads that use personal information.

"Ello doesn't sell ads. Nor do we sell data about you to third parties," the company says.

Its "manifesto" states: "We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce, and manipulate -- but a place to connect, create, and celebrate life. You are not a product."

Ello's policy states that the practice of collecting and selling personal data and mapping your social connections for profit "is both creepy and unethical."

"Under the guise of offering a 'free' service, users pay a high price in intrusive advertising and lack of privacy."

Based in Vermont, Ello was launched by a group of artists and programmers led by Paul Budnitz, whose previous experience includes designing bicycles and toys.

Budnitz says on his page that Ello was designed to be "simple, beautiful and ad-free."

It remains unclear if Ello can develop a profitable business plan without advertisements.

Ello states it plans to remain "completely free to use," but that it could start offering some premium features for a fee.

http://news.yahoo.com/anti-facebook-soc ... 00117.html

[elfismiles]

Anybody round ere got experience or thoughts on TSU.CO?

tsū is a free network that gives the social revenues back to you. We instead focus on payments. It's the right thing to do.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL1fDIJVl_U

The Problem

2 billion of you create social content and get nothing for it.
It's your content, your audience and you should own it.


The Solution

tsū gives you the ability to onboard your audience by removing ourselves from the sign-up process.
Everyone has their own member short code, which is the door to their network.


How It Works

Get invited or join through another member's short code.
Get your own member short code by signing up.

https://www.tsu.co

New Social Network Tsu — Which Pays Users Who Post — Raises $7 Million
October 21, 2014, 5:30 AM PDT
By Kurt Wagner
http://recode.net/2014/10/21/new-social ... 7-million/

Social Network tsū May Have Security Issues (Update - tsū Responds)
Techaeris-Oct 27, 2014
So you guys probably have heard something about Tsu.co by now, the social network that has recently received 7 million in funding, which ...
http://techaeris.com/2014/10/27/social- ... ty-issues/

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https://www.tsu.co/terms

[elfismiles]

RT

Facebook manipulated users' emotions as part of psychological experiment – study

Published time: June 28, 2014

Facebook conducted a psychological experiment on its users by manipulating their emotions without their knowledge, a new study reveals.

Researchers toyed with the feelings of 689,003 randomly selected English-speaking Facebook users by changing the contents of their news feed, according to a paper published in the June edition of the journal 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists' (PNAS).

During a week-long period in January 2012, researchers staged two parallel experiments, reducing the number of positive or negative updates in each user's news feed.

Facebook boosted US election turnout via psychology experiment, company reveals
Published time: November 04, 2014 05:54
Edited time: November 04, 2014 07:36

Facebook manipulated the news feeds of almost 2 million American users during the 2012 presidential election without telling them. The manipulation led to a 3 percent increase in voter turnout, according to the company’s own data scientist.

In a stunning revelation, the three months prior to Election Day in 2012 saw Facebook “tweak” the feeds of 1.9 million Americans by sharing their friends’ hard news posts rather than the usual personal posts. The effect was felt most by occasional Facebook users who reported in a survey they paid more attention to the government because of their friends’ hard news feeds. Facebook didn’t tell users about this psychology experiment, but it boosted voter turnout by 3 percent.

The experiment was first shared with the public in two talks given by Facebook’s data scientist, Lada Adamic, in the fall of 2012, and more details were disclosed recently by Mother Jones. In those talks, Adamic said a colleague at Facebook, Solomon Messing, “tweaked” the feeds. Afterwards, Messing surveyed the group and found that voter turnout and political engagement grew from a self-reported 64 percent to more than 67 percent.

Michael Buckley, vice president for global business communication at Facebook, said the Messing study was an “in product” test designed to see how users would react with news feeds that were more prominent.

“This was literally some of the earliest learning we had on news,” Buckley told Mother Jones. “Now, we’ve literally changed News Feed, to reduce spam and increase quality of content.”

READ MORE: Facebook will ‘share’ Americans’ political views with Buzzfeed, ABC News

Buckley said the public will not receive full answers about that experiment until some point in 2015, when the academic papers are expected to be published.

It is not the first time that Facebook has been exposed for conducting psychological experiments on its users without their knowledge. In June, it was revealed that Facebook tried to manipulate users’ emotions when toying with the feelings of 689,003 randomly-selected, English-speaking Facebook users by changing the contents of their news feed. During a week-long period in January 2012, researchers staged two parallel experiments, reducing the number of positive or negative updates in each user's news feed.

READ MORE: Facebook manipulated users' emotions as part of psychological experiment – study

“These results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks, and providing support for previously contested claims that emotions spread via contagion through a network,” according to a paper published in the June edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists (PNAS).

The Facebook users were not notified of the experiment. However, according to Facebook's terms of service (to which every person agrees when they register on the social network), user data may be used “for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.” The researchers argue that their experiment was consistent with Facebook’s data use policy.

READ MORE: Journal that published Facebook psych study sorry…social network no

These experiments are raising eyebrows over the manipulation of voters, as well as the possibility that big data can eventually be used to “engineer the public” without the public’s knowledge, according to sociologist Zeynep Tufekci.

“At minimum, this environment favors incumbents who already have troves of data, and favors entrenched and moneyed candidates within parties, as well as the data–rich among existing parties. The trends are clear. The selling of politicians — as if they were ‘products’ — will become more expansive and improved, if more expensive,” said Tufekci in a report on the peer-reviewed journal First Monday.

“In this light, it is not a complete coincidence that the ‘chief data scientist’ for the Obama 2012 campaign was previously employed by a supermarket to ‘maximize the efficiency of sales promotions.’ And while the data advantage is held, for the moment, by the Democratic party in the United States, it will likely available to the highest bidder in future campaigns.”


http://rt.com/usa/202019-facebook-user- ... -election/

[Elvis]

cptmarginal wrote this in another thread...

I can see some of these Highlands Forum types taking stuff like this as a victory:

Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet

...without even taking into account what those people are specifically using social media for. I'm betting it's mostly not to talk about awful American reality shows or superhero movies, nor is it about organizing protests. Cultural assault, my ass

...and I thought the article at the link was worth posting here. Many links in original:

http://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-using-the-internet/

Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet

Written by
Leo Mirani
@lmirani

It was in Indonesia three years ago that Helani Galpaya first noticed the anomaly.



Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told her that they didn’t use the internet. But in focus groups, they would talk enthusiastically about how much time they spent on Facebook. Galpaya, a researcher (and now CEO) with LIRNEasia, a think tank, called Rohan Samarajiva, her boss at the time, to tell him what she had discovered. “It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook,” he concluded.

In Africa, Christoph Stork stumbled upon something similar. Looking at results from a survey on communications use for Research ICT Africa, Stork found what looked like an error. The number of people who had responded saying they used Facebook was much higher than those who said they used the internet. The discrepancy accounted for some 3% to 4% of mobile phone users, he says.

Since at least 2013, Facebook has been making noises about connecting the entire world to the internet. But even Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s operations head, admits that there are Facebook users who don’t know they’re on the internet. So is Facebook succeeding in its goal if the people it is connecting have no idea they are using the internet? And what does it mean if masses of first-time adopters come online not via the open web, but the closed, proprietary network where they must play by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s rules?

This is more than a matter of semantics. The expectations and behaviors of the next billion people to come online will have profound effects on how the internet evolves. If the majority of the world’s online population spends time on Facebook, then policymakers, businesses, startups, developers, nonprofits, publishers, and anyone else interested in communicating with them will also, if they are to be effective, go to Facebook. That means they, too, must then play by the rules of one company. And that has implications for us all.[/b]


The data

Measuring Facebook penetration versus internet penetration is tricky business. Internet penetration numbers come from national regulators and from estimates by the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body. These are generally months if not years old. Facebook numbers come from Facebook’s advertising platform. These can be tricky, too. Some people have more than one account. Some accounts are rarely used. And some people access Facebook through phones with only the most basic of online features, in which case it is hard to argue that they really are using the internet in any meaningful way.

In an attempt to replicate Stork and Galpaya’s observations, Quartz commissioned surveys in Indonesia and Nigeria from Geopoll, a company that contacts respondents across the world using mobile phones. We asked people whether they had used the internet in the prior 30 days. We also asked them if they had used Facebook. Both surveys had 500 respondents each.



It would be silly to extrapolate this to the entire population of Nigeria or Indonesia. But the survey does provide replicable evidence of the behaviors described by Stork and Galpaya. Considering the substantial percentages—about 10% of Facebook users in our surveys—the data suggest at the very least that a few million of Facebook’s 1.4 billion users suffer from the same misconceptions. (Quartz commissioned limited surveys in just two countries; we encourage researchers and other journalists to conduct more large-scale studies.)

The effects of the misconception also are visible in the survey results. We asked respondents whether they follow links out of Facebook. In both countries, more than half of those who don’t know they’re using the internet say they “never” follow links out of Facebook, compared with a quarter or less of respondents who say they use both Facebook and the internet. If people stay on one service, it follows that content, advertisers, and associated services also will flow to that service, possibly to the exclusion of other venues.




How Facebook became the internet

At Davos this year, Sandberg told the well-heeled crowd (paywall) that in the developing world, “people will walk into phone stores and say ‘I want Facebook.’ People actually confuse Facebook and the internet in some places.” Or as Iris Orriss, Facebook’s head of localization and internationalization, has put it, “Awareness of the Internet in developing countries is very limited. In fact, for many users, Facebook is the internet, as it’s often the only accessible application.” (Emphasis in the original.)




Facebook is “often the only accessible application,” as Orriss puts it, but that’s because Facebook—which did not respond to requests to comment on this story—has worked to ensure that it is the easiest and cheapest to access. The company backs internet.org, an initiative to “bring the Internet to the two thirds of the world’s population that doesn’t have it.” Yet internet.org’s showpiece, an app now available in nearly half a dozen countries, provides free access only to Facebook, Facebook messenger, and a handful of other services (the precise lineup varies by country).

Most of these other services are well-meaning and related to development: Women’s rights. Jobs. Maternal-health information. An Ebola FAQ. The only concessions to the wider web are Wikipedia and Google search. But clicking through on a Google search result requires a data plan—and that must be paid for by the user. (Despite the name, internet.org is not a non-profit concern, but very much a part of Facebook Inc.)

Telecom operators across the developing world also contribute to the confusion—though this is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mobile web users spend a lot of time on Facebook and WhatsApp (also owned by Facebook). Mobile networks see this and offer these customers social-only plans.

In India, you can get a Facebook-only data plan for $2.50 a year (the cheapest full data plans cost about $10 a year.) In the Philippines, Facebook-only plans cost a fifth as much as data plans. In Ghana, telecom operator Tigo once sold a Facebook phone. It looked like a Blackberry with a big blue “F” as the central button. Even in America, Sprint offers a data plan (paywall) solely for access to Facebook and Twitter.




Finally, there is Facebook Zero, which predates internet.org and allows users of basic phones to access Facebook at no cost. Mobile operators have grumbled about this particular arrangement. Let them. One day Facebook will beam its services from the skies with its fleet of indefatigable, solar-powered drones.
Why it matters

Facebook bosses generally dismiss suggestions that the whole internet.org project might be self-interested. Writing in Time, Lev Grossman was granted access to Mark Zuckerberg when the Facebook CEO went to India to promote internet access. When Grossman asks whether internet.org is self-serving, Zuckerberg allows only that it may, one day, several decades down the line, pay off: “If you do good things for people in the world, then that comes back and you benefit from it over time.”

Dave Wehner, Facebook’s finance chief, is more forthright. “I do think that over the long term, that focusing on helping connect everyone will be a good business opportunity for us.” If Facebook becomes one of the top services in these countries, he explained in a recent earnings call, “then over time we will be compensated for some of the value that we’ve provided.”

That is a fair goal for any profit-seeking company. And besides, isn’t some access better than none at all? John Naughton of the Guardian argues that this is not the case:

This is a pernicious way of framing the argument, and we should resist it. The goal of public policy everywhere should be to increase access to the internet—the whole goddam internet, not some corporate-controlled alcove—for as many people as possible. By condoning zero-rating we will condemn to a lifetime of servitude as one of Master Zuckerberg’s sharecroppers. We can, and should, do better than that.

Already services are starting to move away from the open web and to Facebook. And it’s happening not just in the poor world, but in poor parts of the developed world, where there also exists a sense among some that using an app isn’t the same as using the internet, which requires a web browser like Safari or Internet Explorer. Salix Homes manages government-owned subsidized housing in some the poorest parts of Salford, a deprived area in the north of England. Salix recently decided to accept complaints and rent payments from its tenants on Facebook.

“We took the view that let’s go where people are rather than force them to go to our website,” says James Allan, the firm’s marketing manager. As a result, interactions are up 90% while traffic on the website has fallen.

Allan is not in the business of deciding whether Facebook’s omnipresence among less affluent internet users is a good or bad thing. It is simply a thing. But as LIRNEasia’s Samarajiva says, “It has very serious implications. It’s a proprietary platform. It’s not the open internet that we love and cherish.” Yet he is optimistic that Facebook eventually will lead its users to that place.

“Maybe it will introduce them,” he says, “to the larger concept of the internet. They’re already on the internet. They just don’t know they’re there.”

A note on the methodology: The surveys of Indonesia and Nigeria used through this piece were administered by GeoPoll, which uses SMS to conduct real-time surveys without the need for face-to-face interaction in remote areas. This survey was conducted in late December in Indonesia and Nigeria, with 500 respondents from each country, equaling a margin of error of 4.38% at the 95% confidence level. For more information on this methodology visit research.geopoll.com. In addition, Quartz also commissioned surveys of India, Brazil, and Indonesia from Jana, whose members are reached via smartphone. Quartz asked Jana respondents, “Do you agree with the statement ‘Facebook is the Internet’?” Quartz also asked a representative sample of Americans the same question using SurveyMonkey.

I question whether "policymakers" and "businesses" are going to let one bratty billionaire kid force them to "play by the rules of one company." Uh, I don't *think* so...unless they write the rules, of course.

[gnosticheresy_2]

Stupid prediction: Facebook will eventually be classed and regulated as a public utility

[seemslikeadream]

Facebook Legacy: How to Choose an Heir to Your Account

[Nordic]

Weird. Facebook is very odd when somebody dies. In recent years I've known 2 guys very well who have died and who I shared FB with. One was a suicide and the other a motorcycle wreck. Having their FB "status" show up postmortem is so weird. Usually people mourning, publicly, on Facebook. Other times communicating to the living spouse.

Just realized I've known two suicide victims from just a couple of years both in my business.

[elfismiles]

Facebook accused of tracking all users even if they delete accounts, ask never to be followed
Network tracks its users so that it can give them more tailored advertising
Andrew Griffin
Tuesday 31 March 2015
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style ... 46631.html

[Luther Blissett]

Facebook's 10-Year Plan To Become The Matrix
Facebook doesn't want to live in your analog world. It wants you to move farther into its digital one.

In 10 years, Facebook would like anyone, anywhere, to be able to strap on a virtual reality headset and share moments with friends and family across the world. It’s the vision of a digital utopia that Facebook reps shared onstage during the annual F8 conference. Mark Zuckerberg himself pointed to a simple graph showing that we're sharing more and more complex experiences. The natural endpoint is virtual and augmented reality.

If you look beyond the silly goggles for a moment, it’s a beautiful conceit about connecting humanity. Except for one thing: They don’t want to simply map Facebook on a world that already exists, adding share buttons to life events. They want to suck the real world inside Facebook's virtual walls. They want you to live in the Facebook Matrix.

Michael Abrash, the chief scientist of Oculus VR (itself owned by Facebook) quoted the movie more than once, saying it gave him “a deep sense of what VR could be,” referencing red and blue pills and the nature of reality. Then, over the course of about 20 minutes of presenting visual illusion after visual illusion, he made a strong case that Morpheus’s fundamental question of the film, “What is real,” is extremely well-founded by perceptual science. He showed off optical illusions like the Ames window and the McGurk effect, among others, to prove the point that reality can be illusory.

Then, in a relatively aggressive turn of events, Abrash declared, “Unlike Morpheus, I’m not offering you a choice [of pills] today. No matter what you pick, we’re heading down the rabbit hole together.”

So what is down that rabbit hole? Is it virtual reality that’s waiting for us? Yes, but it’s not quite that simple: Facebook is building an entire infrastructure to suck your physical life into its digital world, and there are three pieces of--let's say evidence--that point me to this conspiracy theory of a conclusion.

First, earlier in the F8 conference, Facebook made another big announcement. Its widely used app development platform Parse had been enhanced to let developers tap into the Internet of Things ecosystem with just a few lines of code. Its example? An automatic plant watering system. Literally, a few lines of code brought it online and gave it logic. You might simplify that idea by saying a few lines of code made a relatively dumb device able to talk to Facebook.

Second, for the things in ours lives that can't be connected to Parse--such as live events like basketball games--Facebook demonstrated an algorithm it developed that can discern hundreds of different sports occurring in real time. It's the sort of visual artificial intelligence we've seen mastered by Microsoft. And sure, while it's just for sports, it proved a point. Facebook is building out the capability to automatically define the world around you just by seeing it through a camera.

And third, Abrash detailed a tiny bit more on what using Oculus Rift in the future might look like. Today, users are stuck looking at a video game or movie that takes up their entire perception. But eventually, Abrash said the platform would evolve.

“You’ll be able to pull the real world into virtual reality so you can pick up your coffee cup [at your desk],” he said. “You’ll be able to map your surroundings so you can stand up and walk around.”

That mapping point might sound familiar: A major PC gaming company named Valve is developing virtual reality hardware with the smartphone manufacturer HTC. Its coup de grâce is its ability to map your room automatically, allowing you to walk around a virtual space without banging your head in your real space.

In 10 years, Facebook would like anyone, anywhere, to be able to strap on a virtual reality headset and share moments with friends and family across the world. It’s the vision of a digital utopia that Facebook reps shared onstage during the annual F8 conference. Mark Zuckerberg himself pointed to a simple graph showing that we're sharing more and more complex experiences. The natural endpoint is virtual and augmented reality.

If you look beyond the silly goggles for a moment, it’s a beautiful conceit about connecting humanity. Except for one thing: They don’t want to simply map Facebook on a world that already exists, adding share buttons to life events. They want to suck the real world inside Facebook's virtual walls. They want you to live in the Facebook Matrix.

Michael Abrash, the chief scientist of Oculus VR (itself owned by Facebook) quoted the movie more than once, saying it gave him “a deep sense of what VR could be,” referencing red and blue pills and the nature of reality. Then, over the course of about 20 minutes of presenting visual illusion after visual illusion, he made a strong case that Morpheus’s fundamental question of the film, “What is real,” is extremely well-founded by perceptual science. He showed off optical illusions like the Ames window and the McGurk effect, among others, to prove the point that reality can be illusory.

Facebook is building an entire infrastructure to suck your physical life into its digital world.
Then, in a relatively aggressive turn of events, Abrash declared, “Unlike Morpheus, I’m not offering you a choice [of pills] today. No matter what you pick, we’re heading down the rabbit hole together.”

So what is down that rabbit hole? Is it virtual reality that’s waiting for us? Yes, but it’s not quite that simple: Facebook is building an entire infrastructure to suck your physical life into its digital world, and there are three pieces of--let's say evidence--that point me to this conspiracy theory of a conclusion.

First, earlier in the F8 conference, Facebook made another big announcement. Its widely used app development platform Parse had been enhanced to let developers tap into the Internet of Things ecosystem with just a few lines of code. Its example? An automatic plant watering system. Literally, a few lines of code brought it online and gave it logic. You might simplify that idea by saying a few lines of code made a relatively dumb device able to talk to Facebook.

Second, for the things in ours lives that can't be connected to Parse--such as live events like basketball games--Facebook demonstrated an algorithm it developed that can discern hundreds of different sports occurring in real time. It's the sort of visual artificial intelligence we've seen mastered by Microsoft. And sure, while it's just for sports, it proved a point. Facebook is building out the capability to automatically define the world around you just by seeing it through a camera.

And third, Abrash detailed a tiny bit more on what using Oculus Rift in the future might look like. Today, users are stuck looking at a video game or movie that takes up their entire perception. But eventually, Abrash said the platform would evolve.

“You’ll be able to pull the real world into virtual reality so you can pick up your coffee cup [at your desk],” he said. “You’ll be able to map your surroundings so you can stand up and walk around.”

That mapping point might sound familiar: A major PC gaming company named Valve is developing virtual reality hardware with the smartphone manufacturer HTC. Its coup de grâce is its ability to map your room automatically, allowing you to walk around a virtual space without banging your head in your real space.

But for Facebook’s purposes, Abrash didn't just agree with Valve's approach, he drew a line in the sand. Oculus Rift is not augmented reality--it is not a Microsoft Hololens, or a Magic Leap that paints a few digital images on top of the real world. Abrash says that you will bring your real coffee cup into the Facebook Matrix and drink it there.

Couple Abrash’s point of view with the fact that Facebook is developing the Parse technology to connect our devices to the cloud and the AI capability to identify the world around us via visual algorithms--and I know I’m sounding loony here--and you have an entire infrastructure that allows you to interact with real physical things inside your fake digital world, just as Abrash teased.

It all leads to Facebook's 10-year virtual reality conclusion: When our friends are connected, our devices are connected, and our faces are connected, we'll all trap ourselves within the walls of Facebook, too starry-eyed to ever leave.

[Nordic]

http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/ ... activists/

Facebook Is Throttling Nonprofits And Activists
By B. Traven / valleywag.gawker.com
Facebook Is Throttling Nonprofits and Activists

So far coverage of Facebook's plan to squeeze the organic reach of Pages has focused on its impact on "brands" that spam us with ads and promotions. But nonprofits, activists, and advocacy groups with much fewer resources (and no ad budgets) are also being hugely affected. It's starting to look like Facebook is willing to strangle public discourse on the platform in an attempt to wring out a few extra dollars for its new shareholders.



Put simply, "organic reach" is the number of people who potentially could see any given Facebook post in their newsfeed. Long gone are the days when Facebook would simply show you everything that happened in your network in strict chronological order. Instead, algorithms filter the flood of updates, posts, photos, and stories down to the few that they calculate you would be most interested in. (Many people would agree that these algorithms are not very good, which is why Facebook is putting so much effort into refining them.) This means that even if I have, say, 400 friends, only a dozen or so might actually see any given thing I post.

One way to measure your reach, then, is as the percentage of your total followers who (potentially) see each of your posts. This is the ratio that Facebook has more-or-less publicly admitted it is ramping down to a target range of 1-2% for Pages. In other words, even if an organization's Page has 10,000 followers, any given item they post might only reach 100-200 of them. In the case of my organization, that ratio is already down from an average of nearly 20% in 2012 to less than 5% today—a 75% reduction.

Another way of looking at it is in terms of what our reach would have been if Facebook hadn't shifted the goalposts. From February to October 2012 our posts reached about 18% of our followers, on average [see graph above]. If that percentage had stayed the same as our followers grew over the past two years, then each item we posted today would theoretically reach about 1,000 people.

The actual average for the second week of April? 79.

Facebook Is Throttling Nonprofits and ActivistsSExpand

Lots of people have no problem with making Mountain Dew or Sony pay for what was previously free advertising—never mind that Facebook had already encourage them to pay for more likes with the promise that they would be able to broadcast to those followers for free. Nobody needs to shed a tear for the poor souls at Proctor & Gamble who have been forced to rejigger some small piece of their multibillion dollar advertising budget.

But Facebook has also become a new kind of platform for political and social advocacy. We may scoff at overblown "saving the world" rhetoric when it comes from Silicon Valley execs, but in places like Pakistan (not to mention in Tahrir Square or the Maidan) the idea of social media as an open marketplace of social and political ideas is taken quite seriously. That all goes away if nobody can even see your posts.

In the more prosaic world of nonprofits, Facebook has also become a crucial outreach tool and an effective way to stay in touch with supporters and partners. Many organizations funded by government or foundation grants are not even legally allowed to spend that money on advertising—and many more simply don't have the budget for it regardless.



Facebook urgently needs to address the impact that its algorithm changes are having on nonprofits, NGOs, civil society, and political activists—especially those in developing countries, who are never going to be able to "pay to play" and for whom Facebook is one of the few really effective ways to get a message out to a wide audience without government control or censorship.

Improving the quality of posts on Facebook is a laudable goal, but it must be done in a transparent manner. For all the gripes people have about Google and their search algorithm, they are very clear about what they consider "quality" content and even provide free tools to help ensure pages have what their robots like to see. An algorithm change that results in a huge swath of legitimate, non-spam users losing 75% of their reach should not be deployed in secret.

In the meantime, there are still some social networks that don't presume to know what you want to see in your timeline and will blast every one of your messages to every one of your followers. At least for now. Twitter just went public last November and will need to show a profit someday.

B. Traven is a pseudonym. He runs social media for a mid-sized international NGO in Washington, D.C.