disgust

Here’s an interesting Times article that boils down to what was done with the data obtained via a Facebook quiz app. Note that Facebook did not create this app, but a third party consultant. The intent? To distill enough information about a given voting segment to create political messaging designed to influence those voters.

Although the title is quite misleading, it does capture the fact that people willingly gave clues regarding their political-psychological leanings while “taking the quiz”. Seems harmless, right?

Yeah.

However, they didn’t know that the author was also scraping their profile to gather more information about them and that of their friends. The app author was paid more than $800,000 to create the app… so I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that they weren’t simply trying to figure out your hair color.

Unfortunately, this article is behind the Times pay wall so you’ll have to use one of your 5 monthly free reads if you don’t have a subscription.

How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions

Full Article: nyti.ms/2GB9dK4

It’s amazing (and very sad) to watch the downfall of American “journalism”. #smh.

I’m calling it “journalism” because that’s what they insist on calling it. I mentioned “American” because I don’t regularly visit other countries so I can’t speak on the quality of their news. What I do know is that the major purveyors of news in this country have apparently sold their journalistic integrity in order to ATTEMPT to stay relevant to NEW readers.

You know, “generation ‘N'” and the like. The same kids who aren’t reading the news anyway.

For a while now I’ve been becoming more and more jaded with the landscape and priority of retorted news. If it isn’t death, murder, destruction, sports, politics or the weather then it probably won’t be reported. The prattling that the New York Times peddles as “journalism” gives me hives and makes me itch to the point where I want to pour bleach into my brain and scratch my eyeballs out. We won’t even talk about CNN.

This is getting long-in-the-tooth, so let me finish up by saying that I really hope the people who SELL NEWS will go back to the glory days of true investigation, caring about the intellectual impact of their product and making a difference in our lives… Rather than focusing on how many retweets they can get on Twitter.

Thoughts from "him"

Stuff that makes me go "Hmmmm…"

American Journalism, oh how far you’ve fallen

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