这是一个可怕的周末，充满了仇恨引发的暴力、丑陋的言辞和令人担忧的民主理想的倒退。今天，我将重点介绍两种方式来描述我们所看到的，从美国到巴西。虽然两者都没有给我们带来任何安慰，但它们确实为我认为将伴随我们很长一段时间的现象提供了有益的名称。

第一种是随机恐怖主义：“利用大众、公共传播，通常针对特定的个人或群体，煽动或激发恐怖主义行为，这些行为在统计上很可能发生，但似乎是随机发生的。”我在数据科学家艾米莉·戈尔森基（Emily Gorcenski）周五的一篇文章中遇到了这个想法，他用它把最近的四起袭击联系在一起。

在她的文章中，Gorcenski认为，各种右翼阴谋论和欺诈，通过主流媒体和社交媒体放大，导致越来越多的**抓狂和实施暴力。”“右翼媒体是一个向右倾的梯度，朝着暴力和压迫的方向发展，”她写道这其中的一个症状是，你基本上保证会随机产生****。就像爆米花粒爆裂。”

周六，另一个内核出现了。罗伯特A。鲍尔斯是犹太教堂枪击案的嫌疑人，造成11人死亡，他沉浸在网络阴谋文化中。他经常向Gab发帖，Gab是一个推特克隆人，强调****，已成为白人民族主义者青睐的社交网络。Julie Turkewitz和Kevin Roose在《****》上描述了他可恨的观点：

After opening an account on it in January, he had shared a stream of anti-Jewish slurs and c***piracy theories. It was on Gab where he found a like-minded community, reposting messages from Nazi supporters.

“Jews are the children of Satan,” read Mr. Bowers’s biography.

鲍尔斯被拘留了——他的生命被犹太医生和护士救了——大概再也不会自由了。然而，盖布的生命可能会受到威胁。两个支付处理器，PayPal和Stripe，与云主机Joyent一样，将网站平台化。该网站在其主机提供商GoDaddy要求其寻找另一家后于周一关闭。它的创始人在推特和其他地方发布了挑衅的信息，承诺它将生存下去。

Gab拥有很多令人深感不安的内容，对其支持者来说，这就是重点。他们认为****是一项权利，应该行使。当然，认为Gab或任何其他单一平台“导致”凉亭行动似乎是错误的。毕竟，仇恨是一个生态系统。但他的行动发生在一次协调一致的努力中，目的是集中注意力于一队移民前往美国寻求难民。

右翼媒体，最著名的是福克斯新闻，提出了这样一种观点，即该商队与犹太亿万富翁（也是大屠杀幸存者）乔治·索罗斯有关。佛罗里达州共和党人马特·盖兹（Matt Gaetz）是一位真正的国会议员，他暗示这辆大篷车是由索罗斯出资的。鲍尔斯热情地在社交媒体上推广这些阴谋论。

鲍尔斯在最后一篇关于Gab的文章中写道：“我不能坐视我的人民被屠杀。去你的光学系统。我要进去了。”

个人行为是随机的。但由于各种媒体中反移民言论的兴起，这一点在统计上已成为可能。我担心，在当前的热度消退之前，我们会看到更多这样的情况。

我今天想到的第二个概念是民主衰退。这一想法已有大约十年的历史，即民主正在全球范围内倒退。《经济学人》在一月份对此进行了报道：

The tenth edition of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index suggests that this unwelcome trend remains firmly in place. The index, which comprises 60 indicators across five broad categories—electoral process and plurali**, functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties—concludes that less than 5% of the world’s population currently lives in a “full democracy”. Nearly a third live under authoritarian rule, with a large share of those in China. Overall, 89 of the 167 countries assessed in 2017 received lower scores than they had the year before.

今年1月，《经济学人》认为巴西是一个“有缺陷的民主国家”。但在本周末之后，该国的民主自由可能会经历更为急剧的下降。正如所料，极右翼候选人贾伊尔·波索纳罗（Jair Bolsonaro）在选举中轻松战胜了他的左派对手，他对该国以前的军事独裁表示赞同。

在我今天读到的最好的一篇文章中，BuzzFeed的Ryan Broderick——他当时正在巴西参加选举——将Bolsonaro的选举置于互联网和社交平台的背景下。布罗德里克专注于互联网媒体与承诺回归常态的极右翼领导人之间的共生关系。互联网媒体擅长于营造永久的危机感和愤怒感。

Typically, large right-wing news channels or c***ervative tabloids will then take these stories going viral on Facebook and repackage them for older, mainstream audiences. Depending on your country’s media landscape, the far-right trolls and influencers may try to hijack this social-media-to-newspaper-to-television pipeline. Which then creates more content to screenshot, meme, and share. It’s a feedback loop.

Populist leaders and the legi*** of influencers riding their wave know they can create filter bubbles inside of platforms like Facebook or YouTube that promise a safer time, one that never existed in the first place, before the protests, the violence, the cascading crises, and endless news cycles. Donald Trump wants to Make American Great Again; Bolsonaro wants to bring back Brazil’s military dictatorship; Shinzo Abe wants to recapture Japan’s imperial past; Germany’s AFD performed the best with older East German voters longing for the days of authoritariani**. All of these leaders promise to close borders, to make things safe. Which will, of course, usually exacerbate the problems they’re promising to disappear. Another feedback loop.

当然，第三个反馈回路是在社交媒体生态系统促进一种永久的危机感和愤怒感，以及随机但统计上可能产生的国内****之间。

也许专制主义者和大型科技平台的全球崛起只是相互关联，没有任何因果关系可以证明。但我越来越想知道，如果科技公司假设某种程度的因果关系是真实存在的，并且假设是真实存在的，他们会怎么做，我们是否会从中受益。

民主

在社交媒体上，仇恨没有答案

你不必到Gab去看讨厌的帖子。Sheera Frenkel、Mike Isaac和Kate Conger报道了过去一周的国内恐怖袭击在曾经比较快乐的地方是如何发生的，最著名的是Instagram：

On Monday, a search on Instagram, the photo-sharing site owned by Facebook, produced a torrent of anti-Semitic images and videos uploaded in the wake of Saturday’s shooting at a Pitt**urgh synagogue.

A search for the word “Jews” displayed 11,696 posts with the hashtag “#jewsdid911,” claiming that Jews had orchestrated the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Other hashtags on Instagram referenced Nazi ideology, including the number 88, an abbreviation used for the Nazi salute “Heil Hitler.”

研究人员称，针对犹太人的攻击在Instagram和Twitter上不断上升

就在周六犹太教堂袭击发生之前，大卫·英格拉姆（David Ingram）发布了一篇关于在社交平台上袭击犹太人的惊人增长的报道：

Samuel Woolley, a social media researcher who worked on the study, ****yzed more than 7 million tweets from August and September and found an array of attacks, also often linked to Soros. About a third of the attacks on Jews came from automated accounts known as “bots,” he said.

“It’s really spiking during this election,” Woolley, director of the Digital Intelligence Laboratory, which studies the intersection of technology and society, said in a telephone interview. “We’re seeing what we think is an attempt to silence conversati*** in the Jewish community.”

在2016年美国大选之前，俄罗斯在Facebook上发布的虚假信息针对乌克兰

Dana Prist、James Jacoby和Anya Bourg报告说，乌克兰在信息战方面的经验为Facebook提供了一个早期且未被注意的警告：

To get Zuckerberg’s attention, the president posted a question for a town hall meeting at Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters. There, a moderator read it aloud.

“Mark, will you establish a Facebook office in Ukraine?” the moderator said, chuckling, according to a video of the assembly. The room of young employees rippled with laughter. But the government’s suggestion was serious: It believed that a Kiev office, staffed with people familiar with Ukraine’s political situation, could help solve Facebook’s high-level ignorance about Russian information warfare.

欧洲议会呼吁对Facebook进行全面审计

Natasha Lomas报道了欧盟在数据隐私问题上对Facebook施加压力的最新举措：

MEPs are urging the company to allow European Union bodies to carry out a full audit to assess data protection and security of users’ personal data, following the scandal in which the data of 87 million Facebook users was improperly obtained and misused.

In the resolution, adopted today, they have also recommended Facebook make additional changes to combat election interference — asserting the company has not just breached the trust of European users “but indeed EU law”.

Facebook、谷歌可能在亚洲、拉丁美洲面临数十亿美元的新税收

受欧盟的启发，全世界越来越多的**正在考虑根据Facebook和谷歌等外国科技公司的收入而不是利润征税。

Facebook的政治广告政策遭遇了一个反特德·克鲁兹的迷因页面

这是另一个Facebook黑钱的案例，来自Donie O'Sullivan。谁在Crush Cruz Facebook页面后面？

The “Crush Cruz” page on Facebook first appeared on September 12th. Since then the person or people behind the page have spent almost $6,000 on dozens of Facebook ads, which doesn’t sound like much, but according to Facebook data reviewed by CNN Business, the page could have reached more than a million Texans. Facebook took away the page’s ability to run political ads in its current form after CNN Business inquired about it.

在**管理的战争室里，打击印尼假新闻

Facebook有一个选举战室。现在，印度尼西亚也是！

More than 187 million people are expected to cast their votes when the country goes to the polls on April 17. With six months of campaigning left, a deluge of political and social narratives — true and false — are being distributed to shape voters’ views.

In an attempt to stem that flow, Indonesia’s Ministry of Communicati*** has established a ‘war room,’ where a surveillance team of 70 engineers monitor social media traffic and other online platforms 24 hours a day. When Bloomberg visited on Wednesday, more than a dozen engineers were keeping a close eye on posts about an incident in West Java on Oct. 22, in which a flag bearing an Islamic creed was burned, prompting outrage across the country.

2018年中期选举：网络安全和俄罗斯黑客仍然是一个主要问题

本杰明·沃福德（Benjamin Wofford）调查了美国选举制度的安全性，结果非常担心：

The country’s election vulnerability falls into three broad camps: 1) the targeting of individual campaigns, which are susceptible to email theft and other meddling; 2) the hacking of our national discourse, or “information operati***,” which are the propaganda efforts designed to sow discord; and perhaps most dangerously, 3) the technology itself that underlies the country’s election infrastructure.

In the past two years, federal and state officials have scrambled to harden a system that is almost perfectly vulnerable to the kinds of meddling and mischief on offer from Russian (or other) adversaries. One reason for this vulnerability: The basic configuration of American electi*** dates to 1890 — a chaotic ritual designed, literally, for another century.

硅谷如何帮助民主党人在2018年夺取国会席位

托尼·罗姆关注硅谷资金流入民主党竞选活动的情况(还有一个敷衍的“这将导致更多共和党人的偏见主张”的角度，我认为这有点夸大，基本上不相干，因为共和党人在2018年之前就这么说了，并将继续这样说，直到宇宙热死。）

Many of these newly awakened tech workers are motivated by Trump’s controversial policies on issues including immigration, and they’re focused on closing what they perceive to be an innovation gap with the GOP, two years after Trump effectively tapped Facebook, Twitter and other data-heavy tools on his road to victory. One outgrowth of the Valley’s efforts, a service called MobilizeAmerica, has helped Baer find potential supporters in Florida’s 18th District, a chunk of the state about the size of Rhode Island. The tool helped the campaign knock on more than 2,000 doors during a campaign event held a month before Election Day, aides said.

“After the 2016 election, I think we saw a number of individuals in the tech space, in Silicon Valley and also around the country, frankly saying they wanted to use technology for good,” said Baer, who stands to become Florida’s first openly le**ian representative in Congress if she wins. “And because of that, we’ve seen a proliferation of new tools.”

在别处

塞萨尔·萨约克的社交媒体之路：从食物照片到党派之怒

凯文·鲁斯（Kevin Roose）通过推特和Facebook的帖子记录了这名被指控的邮件**手向边缘阴谋理论家和****的转移。2016年，他的情况似乎发生了变化。

But before Mr. Sayoc’s accounts were taken down, The New York Times archived their contents. And a closer study of his online activity reveals the evolution of a political identity built on a foundation of false news and misinformation, and steeped in the insular culture of the right-wing media. For years, these platforms captured Mr. Sayoc’s attention with a steady flow of outrage and hyperpartisan clickbait and gave him a public venue to declare his allegiance to Mr. Trump and his antipathy for the president’s enemies.

On social media, none of this behavior is particularly out of the ordinary. In fact, to many of his followers, Mr. Sayoc may have appeared to be just one of many partisan keyboard warriors working through their rage.

Instagram在努力执行自己的准则后删除了米洛·伊安诺普洛斯的**帖子

我一点也不清楚为什么Instagram在公众愤怒之后才删除一篇称上周发给民主党人的邮件**没有爆炸的“悲伤”帖子。但确实如此。

推特将删除“like”工具，以提高辩论质量

这里有一则消息来源不充分，可能是虚假的，关于Twitter取消其核心参与机制之一的报道——而且“很快”就要启动了！一家普通的公司会否认这一点，但Twitter首席执行官杰克·多尔西（Jack Dorsey）表示，公司正在“重新考虑一切”，这可能包括一项如此激烈的措施。在这里，我发现推特对“透明度”的拥抱令人尴尬——它的实际效果是**更多的混乱和不确定性，从而损害对公司的信任(廖香农（Shannon Liao）更详细地解释了为什么like按钮可能不会出现在任何地方。）

Facebook上充满了情感支持团体

下面是莎拉·张对Facebook群组的一个很好的产品批评。Facebook让人们很难联系到，即使是为了方便联系而**在一起的小团体：

Other moderators have noticed how Facebook’s algorithm shapes the discussion in groups. Posts in a group, not unlike the newsfeed, are sorted algorithmically by default. “If you click on the group, it tends to be the most popular content, but it’s not the most relevant,” says Dana Lewis, a member of several diabetes groups. For example, according to Lewis, the algorithm might keep showing a post whose question has been answered. And it might de-prioritize posts from new members that don’t get much engagement—ensuring they get even less engagement in a form of algorithmic ghosting. It’s not exactly a friendly welcome to a support group. “I don’t think Facebook has done a good enough job,” says Lewis. “They have a lot of room to improve.” A Facebook spokesperson noted that members can choose to see most-recent posts first, and admins see posts in their approval queue in reverse chronological order.

Snap首席执行官任命首席商务官，然后改变了主意

莎拉·弗里尔（Sarah Frier）在《Snap》中饰演的埃文·斯皮格尔（Evan Spiegel）令人难以置信的糟糕形象：

On a recent Friday, Kristen O’Hara got a major promotion: to become Snap Inc.’s chief business officer. Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel made it official by alerting her direct reports, according to people familiar with the matter.

Two days later, he changed his mind, rescinded the offer and hired Jeremi Gorman, who oversaw ad sales at Amazon.com Inc. The switch was jarring for Snap’s sales division, as O’Hara was well-liked, according to people familiar with the matter. Now she’s gone.

中国的LinkedIn蜂蜜陷阱

乔纳斯·帕雷罗·普莱斯纳（Jonas Parello Plessner）写道，中国曾利用LinkedIn招募他为间谍：

Back in 2011-2012, I was asked to connect over LinkedIn by a handsome Chinese woman representing a recruitment company, DRHR, in China. I accepted. She had LinkedIn connecti*** to well-seasoned China scholars, which lowered my alertness. Back then I had just started a book project on how Chinese companies risk manage in fragile environments around the globe, so I was interested in connecting with Chinese companies through DRHR. Initially not much came of the connection.

On a later trip to Beijing, she suggested an opportunity to meet. My LinkedIn contact never showed but claimed she had important business in Hangzhou. Instead, at the St. Regis, a five-star hotel where foreign delegati*** often congregate, I was greeted by three inc***picuous Chinese men. They vaguely presented themselves as representatives of a Chinese state-sp***ored think tank, but never provided me with business cards. In China, this is as awkward and unusual as being naked in a meeting. I soon understood that they worked to recruit Westerners on behalf of the Chinese party-state.

硅谷开始出现关于屏幕和孩子的黑暗共识

Nellie Bowles报告说，在大型科技平台工作的父母更有可能限制孩子的屏幕时间：

Ms. Stecher, 37, and her hu**and, [Facebook engineer] Rushabh Doshi, researched screen time and came to a simple conclusion: they wanted almost none of it in their house. Their daughters, ages 5 and 3, have no screen time “budget,” no regular hours they are allowed to be on screens. The only time a screen can be used is during the travel portion of a long car ride (the four-hour drive to Tahoe counts) or during a plane trip.

发射

Pixelfed：Instagram的分散式应用

Pixelfed是一个开源的联合平台：与Mastodon类似，但用于漂亮的图片。有趣的主意-如果你尝试了，请告诉我。

拿

推特应该停止转发

泰勒·洛伦兹说Twitter应该摆脱转发(对位：我喜欢转发！）

The quest to accrue retweets regularly drives users to tweet outlandish comments, extremist opini***, fake news, or worse. Many users knowingly tweet false and damaging information and opini*** in an effort to go viral via retweets. Entire Twitter accounts have been built on this strategy. If Twitter really wants to control the out-of-control rewards mechani**s it has created, the retweet button should be the first to go.

Retweets prey on users’ worst instincts. They delude Twitter users into thinking that they’re contributing to thoughtful discourse by endlessly amplifying other people’s points—the digital equivalent of shouting “yeah, what they said” in the midst of an argument. And because Twitter doesn’t allow for editing tweets, information that goes viral via retweets is also more likely to be false or exaggerated. According to MIT research published in the journal Science, Twitter users retweet fake news almost twice as much as real news. Other Twitter users, desperate for validation, endlessly retweet their own tweets, spamming followers with duplicate information.

资金紧张的Snapchat是否应该售罄？到Netflix？

Josh Contine告诉Netflix购买Snap：

That’s why I think Netflix could be a great acquirer for Snap. They’re both video entertainment companies at the vanguard of cultural relevance, yet have no overlap in products. Netflix already showed its appreciation for Snapchat’s innovation by adopting a Stories-like vertical video clip format for discovering and previewing what you could watch. The two could partner to promote Netflix Originals and subscripti*** inside of Snapchat. Netflix could teach Snap how to win at exclusive content while gaining a place to distribute video that’s under 20 minutes long.

最后。。。

推特说，它“犯了一个错误”，没有删除佛罗里达州爆炸案嫌疑人的推特

据称，佛罗里达邮件**袭击者曾向许多人发送威胁性推特。其中一些人将其报告为威胁，推特（Twitter）一如既往地告诉骚扰受害者，事实上，他们没有受到骚扰。然后，据称此人发送了一堆邮件**，推特认为，事实上，这些推特毕竟是威胁。

在我看来，Twitter作为一家公司的定义特征是一种普遍的不幸。等到有人发了**才承认是的，好吧，那个推特是一个威胁，这代表着疏忽的新低点。公司似乎并没有把这一事件当作危机来对待。

应该这样。

跟我说

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