zeynep tufekci Profile picture
Sep 5, 2018 7 tweets 2 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
Sheryl Sandberg is asked about selling/sharing data. She says "we sell ads", implying they don't sell data. That's true, but no defense. Facebook sells users' attention to advertisers by profiling them based on extensive surveillance. That's the root problem. #techhearings
Sandberg/Facebook is asked what they don't allow. She says "hate speech/bullying, etc."—as per TOS. Fine, but the real action is the process that FB (and the industry) uses to police content. That's where it all goes down, as shaped by business model—how the cost center operates.
Marco Rubio asked a very good question. It's one thing for Sandberg/Dorsey to come wrapped in "our values" to the US Congressional hearings. But they operate worldwide—billions of people use these sites as public/social sphere. This is a crucial, thorny issue. #techhearings
Another great question from Senator Heinrich. "Authentic" as a word only does so much work—mostly works when paired with "foreign" and "coordinated". Facebook leans on that phrase, but it really only does fairly little work considering what the core problem is.
Harris/Sandberg exchange on how "white men" got to be a "protected category" on Facebook but not "black children" is telling in how the public conversation misses core problems. Sandberg said it was a mistake, ok but it was a consequence of business model/scale, not some hatred.
Dorsey's own opening statement talked about incentives, and how the business models and incentives on these platforms interact with human/social dynamics. Kinda surprising that there aren't more questions on that: that's the crucial issue.
Every journalist tweeting or periscoping that “clown,” and @Twitter for making his stunt a moment and showing me—what will it take for you to stop being played? You’re big part of the problem. If harassing Sandy Hook families won’t do it, what will it take to understand the game?

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More from @zeynep

Oct 9, 2018
I call this the Beto effect. Hard to believe but many Dem candidates are underfunded because the party is.. well, it's the party that lost 2016. But a few splashy races give the opposite impression—the way holding the presidency 2008-2016 hid the electoral collapse of the party.
Having studied movements/opposition in many countries, one frequent theme in losing efforts is the ratio of attention to factors not-under-their-control vs. factors under their control! This may get people upset with me but both Dem leaders & "resistance" often share this trait.
Where is the effort to balance funding so that obviously super-safe Dem seats aren't raising millions while first-time candidates building infrastructure (for the future, if not this election) have real money? Don't see it. It's like 2016 didn't happen. 2008-2016 didn't happen.
Read 8 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
This meme is going around is so so terribly ignorant of what Tea Party actually did that it’s painful, unless it’s deliberately misleading. Tea Party took over *electorally* by being energized *and* strategic and well-funded—the protests mattered some but only through that path.
There is actually a lot the left and the Dems could learn from the Tea Party experience but it requires actually finding out what happened. Not writing your own ignorant narrative.
This isn’t an argument for or against direct action. Successful movements use a range of tactics—deployed strategically. But the way Dems/left have let electoral infrastructure become hollow on their side for decades is the a big reason *under their control* for their weakness.
Read 8 tweets
Oct 5, 2018
That hoax is oversold, authors *very* deliberately misrepresenting what they did. If you fake data and get published, that’s fraud, not hoax. If you cherrypick pick a nice sentence from review that rejects paper, that’s not a successful hoax. See: michaelkeenan.tumblr.com/post/178734541…
Predatory journals? Real problem. Some crappy work getting in? Issue in many fields. A reasonable discussion about the scope of humanities? Sure. But bring along discussing economics and it’s wild assumptions, too. This hoax isn’t a critique of academia. It’s a misleading stunt.
Sokal did something important. I applaud bullshit detection. This is just playing to the lucrative, anti-intellectual academia-bashing—right & left versions. It’s the difference between asking, say, clinical trials to be pre-registered and grifting by peddling anti-vaccination.
Read 6 tweets
Oct 5, 2018
Yazidi leader Nadia Murad won the Nobel Peace Prize!! Dear Journalists who'll interview her: PLEASE DON'T ASK HER TO RECOUNT THE SAME HARROWING STORY OF HER CAPTIVITY BY ISIS. She told it again and again—at great expense to her—to get media attention. Stop it now, please. Please.
Journalists (and public!) should watch "On Her Shoulders"—a documentary about Murad and the Yazidi plight. Our demand that marginalized victims tell their story again and again and again, cry for cameras again and again and again, before we pay attention exacts a huge toll.
My heart sank when I saw her pic in news—she faces many threats from extremists. But good news instead! Ask her about the Yazidi plight, the remarkable efforts to restore what was so terribly broken, the diaspora... Please no more wringing tears out of these brave, strong women.
Read 4 tweets
Oct 3, 2018
Foreign meddling is real but it's a symptom not the actual illness: our domestic polarization and how our public sphere operates. We're looking for ibuprofen to cure an infection. For a solution, focus less on less Russia, more on the US. My NYT piece: nytimes.com/2018/10/03/opi…
I find the evidence of RU meddling to be credible and so much of it happened in public! It might have had an impact given the close election—especially through hacked emails and also how media went along with that part. It's still not the correct focus to try to fix what ails us.
I do not disagree though the issue of the emails isn't totally disconnected from the RU meddling (through hacked emails which merged with "emails"). I wrote at length about how trad media dropped the ball from before the election. Not one or the other.
Read 9 tweets
Sep 30, 2018
“Hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in South Texas.”
“Children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.”
“These midnight voyages are playing out across the country, as the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children — the largest population ever — whose numbers have increased more than fivefold since last year.”
Read 8 tweets

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