US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9103

On November 01 2017 05:14 Mohdoo wrote:
Since I love sharing local Portland political drama for you guys:

Pretty hilarious situation: Guy who worked for Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) radio after growing up in an area known as a very rich white town around Portland tried running for city council. He comes from your classic family with money and was able to get his own bar up and running with a few of his other friends who also have family money to pat themselves on the back for being entrepreneurs. He talks about how he reads the news and hasn't really been involved much until now. But it gets a little dicey.

In no uncertain terms: This dude should straight up not be a member of city council. Great. But there are also some people putting him on full blast because there are 3 women of color running for city council. They are basically shaming him into quitting because they are saying his presence is a huge disrespect to women of color. L O L.

Sure, he's a spoiled little shit who has grown up thinking he is exceptional. But this goes off the deep end on the other side of things to. Just in case any of you have a bucket of popcorn nearby.

https://www.facebook.com/SpencerForPortland/posts/129171144409902

Also, his website. Check the experience portion LMAO

http://www.spencerforportland.com/

Edit: Here's the cringey shit I am talking about:


straight up racism

On November 01 2017 05:27 Danglars wrote:

What a shitshow.

A gunman emerged from a crashed Home Depot truck and opened fire after apparently plowing down four riders Tuesday afternoon on a Lower Manhattan bike path, eyewitnesses said.

The NYPD reported one man was in custody after initial reports of gunfire set off a mad scramble in the downtown area. Police flooded the area shortly after the first shots were fired around 3 p.m.

“I thought it was Halloween (prank) or something,” said witness Tawhid Kabir, 20, of Queens. “I saw the gun running in a circle and I realized it was serious.”

Video showed four bodies scattered alongside the path on the West Side off the Hudson River. The truck crashed into another vehicle at West and Chambers Streets.

“He shot about 15 times toward the pier and down West St.” one witness told the Daily News. There was no immediate word on deaths or injuries, although witnesses said two bodies were covered with blankets at the scene.

The smell of gun powder hung in the air as police shut down the West Side Highway mid-afternoon on Halloween.

Mayor de Blasio was briefed on the situation, and confirmed there was no active threat.

Witness Frank Brito, 45, told The News he saw two trucks crash into each other and then a heavyset man in a blue tracksuit get out of one and chase someone, firing five or six times.

Reports of an active shooter came in about 3 p.m.

On November 01 2017 05:27 Mohdoo wrote:


Portland has a few Facebook groups that are basically ANTIFA on steroids or ANTIFA purely applied to black stuff. Judging by the comments and the very similar number of likes for comments bashing the guy, it seems like this whole thing got posted across those groups. You can also see that it's ~30 people who are doing most of the commenting. It still does showcase some really fucked up shit though. This is the same town that had a taco cart shut down because of cultural appropriation.

On November 01 2017 05:14 Mohdoo wrote:
Since I love sharing local Portland political drama for you guys:

Pretty hilarious situation: Guy who worked for Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) radio after growing up in an area known as a very rich white town around Portland tried running for city council. He comes from your classic family with money and was able to get his own bar up and running with a few of his other friends who also have family money to pat themselves on the back for being entrepreneurs. He talks about how he reads the news and hasn't really been involved much until now. But it gets a little dicey.

In no uncertain terms: This dude should straight up not be a member of city council. Great. But there are also some people putting him on full blast because there are 3 women of color running for city council. They are basically shaming him into quitting because they are saying his presence is a huge disrespect to women of color. L O L.

Sure, he's a spoiled little shit who has grown up thinking he is exceptional. But this goes off the deep end on the other side of things to. Just in case any of you have a bucket of popcorn nearby.

https://www.facebook.com/SpencerForPortland/posts/129171144409902

Also, his website. Check the experience portion LMAO

http://www.spencerforportland.com/

Edit: Here's the cringey shit I am talking about:


straight up racism

On November 01 2017 05:35 Slaughter wrote:
Seems like Portland is having severe Trump PTSD and is worried another rich white guy who doesn't have experience will win out for a political office. Most of the comments seem to be angry that he has inserted himself into the race when there are 3 people in it already who (according to them) have been highly involved in the community.

On November 01 2017 05:30 Nevuk wrote:

www.nydailynews.com
So far 6 dead reported


https://twitter.com/NYPDnews/status/925446084574498818

On November 01 2017 05:41 GreenHorizons wrote:


Still no idea why ~500 people were shot (50+ killed) in Vegas, but the news is already talking about this being investigated as a terrorist attack.

On November 01 2017 05:37 zlefin wrote:

It's not necessarily new; there's been people like this for ages. They're jus tgetting more press than they used to get.

On November 01 2017 00:44 Doodsmack wrote:


And any notion of Kelly being an apolitical general has now jumped the shark.

On November 01 2017 05:33 KwarK wrote:
Surely the issue is that he's someone from an incredibly overrepresented background with no real life experience or important skills who is attempting to beat people from a poorly represented background in a race which, if he wins, will perpetuate exactly those problems. He still has the right to run, but it's a monument to hubris and privilege to do so.

On November 01 2017 05:41 GreenHorizons wrote:


Still no idea why ~500 people were shot (50+ killed) in Vegas, but the news is already talking about this being investigated as a terrorist attack.

In July 2016, the aftermath of a police shooting of an African-American man was broadcast live on Facebook. Instantly, Americans of all stripes used the platform to step up the race wars and attack each other. Across the world, in India this past summer, a post of a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad on Facebook sparked mob violence in which one person died.

And now, U.S. lawmakers are looking into Facebook's culpability after evidence that Russia-linked operatives placed ads on its platform during the 2016 presidential election in an effort to disrupt democracy.

In whatever corner of the world Facebook is operating, it has become clear that people are using this powerful platform as a communications tool in ways that Mark Zuckerberg never envisioned. He started the company as a young Harvard undergrad 13 years ago to connect students. It expanded exponentially since then under his supremely techno-utopian vision of connecting the world.

For Zuckerberg, connecting the world means bringing people together. But increasingly the platform is being used by some very powerful elements to do the exact opposite: sow divisions. That's led Facebook struggling almost every week to offer explanations for misleading and divisive news on its platform.

It's a huge blind spot for Zuckerberg, by his own acknowledgement. Indeed, he is fast coming to terms with the power of his platform to cause harm. Last November, Zuckerberg dismissed as "a pretty crazy idea" the notion that fake news influenced the U.S. presidential election.

But in the face of evidence, he shifted his stance. In September this year, he put up a post on his personal page saying he regretted calling it crazy: "This is too important an issue to be dismissive." He followed that up with another post promising to do better: "For the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together, I ask forgiveness and I will work to do better." According to interviews with current and former employees and other technology leaders close to the company, the 33-year-old CEO is now struggling to course correct.

"When it was Harvard or just the Ivies, they had norms that worked," says Tarleton Gillespie, a communications expert at Microsoft Research who is writing a book about harmful speech online titled Custodians of the Internet. But once everyone from moms breastfeeding their babies to white supremacists came in, he says, the system broke down. "Facebook was less prepared to make decisions about acceptable speech," he says.

Couple that lack of preparedness with the desire to ramp up a company at unimaginable speed. Facebook has grown in the span of just 13 years from a handful of college students to over 2 billion monthly users; with advertising revenue close to $27 billion last year alone. Along the way, it has hooked legacy media too. Many news organizations depend on Facebook to drive traffic and a number of other outlets, including NPR, have paid partnerships with Facebook.

Call it ambition or naïveté. The company's early mantra, "move fast and break things," proved to be a winning approach to software development. Not so much to human relationships. It was a classic Silicon Valley case of product before purpose.

Facebook leaders now say that, perhaps by moving too quickly, they failed to anticipate all the ways in which people could abuse their platform. For a group of engineers focused on data and algorithms, it's like the modern version of Frankenstein: they've created a monster whose powers they're just beginning to understand.

To do it, the company will need to shift the focus of its metrics. People who've work at Facebook say that from Day 1, Zuckerberg has been fixated on measuring engagement: how much you like, click, share, up to what second you watch a video. In product meetings, current and former employees say, any suggestion to tweak News Feed — Facebook's signature product — must include a deep analysis of how that would increase or decrease engagement. This dogged focus on metrics is also apparent from the company's own blog posts and research.

But it's the negative engagement — Russian operatives, trolls, hate groups — that the CEO and his leadership team has been far slower to register. Now the company is scrambling to figure out how to monitor and quantify the bad. It's hiring more than 4,000 new employees to weed out fake accounts and violators.

One problem: A key data source the company has been relying on — users to report bad content — is chronically unreliable, according to people at Facebook who've had to analyze it. Users flag a lot of things that they shouldn't. For instance, they can report a post as fake news because they disagree with it; others can say a business page is offensive when actually it's just a competitor they want to take down. Facebook's leaders have publicly said they stand behind this crowdsourcing approach. But, inside the company, people know this system just doesn't work.

One Facebook employee tells NPR that recently, engineers in-house began to do random sampling of News Feed — to proactively look for violations (not just wait for users to flag content). "We're trying," the employee says. "But you can't look for new bad behavior. It's a hopeless exercise." Meaning, you can only find violations that you know to look for. Prior to 2016, political interference in elections wasn't even a category on the radar of the engineers leading these efforts.

There's political pressure to clean up. This week the House and Senate are holding three hearings on election interference by the Russians, calling on Facebook, Twitter and Google representatives to testify.

There's also a notable shift in the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley. In a recent interview with CNN, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams said "Facebook is filled with crap ads"; and that all the ad-driven platforms (Twitter included) are benefiting from fake information, "generating attention at pretty much any cost. That's the most broken thing about the information economy we live in."

Inside Facebook, there's a deep conflict. On the one hand, employees who've spoken with NPR feel terribly that Facebook is a space for Russian operatives, hate speech and extremists. Engineers and product managers are racing to fix it, working overtime, reading history books on Russian propaganda techniques — just to try to wrap their minds around how the past is repeating itself, through new technologies.

At the same time, they're indignant, believing they've created a beautiful, seamless technology that does more good than harm, and that Facebook engineers aren't responsible for human nature.

What's clear is that Facebook is trying to understand its own platform's ability to cause harm. What's unclear is: Can Facebook stop it?

On November 01 2017 06:27 ZeaL. wrote:


If we killed off twitter tomorrow, nothing of value would be lost. Why are people using such a garbage platform to disseminate their essays?