The Government Wants To Censor #SocialMedia By Studying ‘Social Pollution’ On Twitter

• Caller.

Months after the Federal Communications Commission was forced to withdraw a newsroom study many viewed as an attempt to censor the media, the government is making a second attempt by studying “social pollution” on Twitter, and engaging in a free-speech analysis one FCC commissioner described as “straight out of a George Orwell novel.”

The National Science Foundation — the federal agency charged with promoting science, advancing welfare and securing national defense — is funding said study by researchers at Indiana University, who will mine Twitter data and categorize users’ politically related tweets into convenient government definitions of “social pollution,” “social epidemics” and “misinformation.”

Two of those same researchers, Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini, co-authored a paper in 2012 examining social media use during the 2010 midterm election, which focused on “right-leaning Twitter users” who exhibited “greater levels of political activity, a more tightly interconnected social structure, and a communication network topology that facilitates the rapid and broad dissemination of political information.

http://goo.gl/ciJfli

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Gee, I've got #TCOT in my Twitter Handle, @ParalegalGeorg #TCOT - guess that counts?

  

New sensors will scoop up 'big data' on Chicago

By David Heinzmann, Tribune reporter

12:02 p.m. CDT, June 23, 2014

The curled metal fixtures set to go up on a handful of Michigan Avenue light poles later this summer may look like delicate pieces of sculpture, but researchers say they'll provide a big step forward in the way Chicago understands itself by observing the city's people and surroundings.

The smooth, perforated sheaths of metal are decorative, but their job is to protect and conceal a system of data-collection sensors that will measure air quality, light intensity, sound volume, heat, precipitation and wind. The sensors will also count people by measuring wireless signals on mobile devices.

Some experts caution that efforts like the one launching here to collect data from people and their surroundings pose concerns of a Big Brother intrusion into personal privacy.

http://goo.gl/JbmwkT

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Image en.wikipedia.org

Facebook to Track Users’ Activity on Other Sites, Apps

Facebook on Thursday announced changes in how it tracks users and targets ads. Above, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg in April. (Ben Margot / Associated Press)

ROBERT FATURECHIcontact the reporter

Facebook will soon start tracking what users in the U.S. do not just on Facebook but also on other websites and apps to more effectively target them with ads.

The practice is common — even for some ad networks Facebook partners with — but the social network had previously based its ads mainly on what people did on Facebook, such as what pages they liked.

Users “want to see ads that are more relevant to their interests,” Facebook said in an announcement about the changes Thursday.

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-facebook-track-users-other-sites-20140612-story.html

ACLU Sues After Illinois Mayor Has Cops Raid Guy Parodying Him on Twitter

• BY KIM ZETTER  
 
• 06.12.14  |  
 
• 1:54 PM  |  
 
• PERMALINK
• 
  
  Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis. Image: Ron Johnson/AP
  Countless parody Twitter accounts have been created over the years — British Petroleum, Mark Zuckerberg, the NSA, the Queen of England and even God.
  In each case, the target of the account either did nothing in response or simply requested that the owner of the account clearly label it a fake.
  Not the mayor of Peoria, Illinois, however.
  Mayor Jim Ardis directed his city manager to use the police to hunt down the author of a parody account about him and threatened Twitter with litigation unless it suspended the account, which it did. Now a man who was raided and arrested for creating the account is suing the mayor, a former police chief, and others for violating his constitutional rights.
  http://www.wired.com/2014/06/peoria-mayor-twitter-parody/?mbid=social_twitter

Rise of the Campus Brown Shirts

A fusillade of attacks by students and faculty on commencement speakers and honorary degree awardees at four of our better known schools — Smith, Haverford, Rutgers and Brandeis — has tarnished this year’s commencement season beyond any in recent memory.  Speakers as distinguished as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde, former Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been forced to withdraw even as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the most courageous fighters of oppression on the planet, had to walk from her honorary degree from a university established in the shadow of the Holocaust. Go figure.

What next? The Bill of Rights gets repealed?  An academic “War on Women”? (Three of the four attacked are female.) A new generation of undergraduate Brown Shirts comes back from 1930s Berlin to smash every college window and burn every school library book by unapproved authors in a renewed Kristallnacht?

Of course all of the above dignitaries finally walked away voluntarily from their campus honors, underlining the juvenile absurdity of these same students and faculty, not to mention the paleo-milquetost behavior of their administrations. Mercifully,William G. Bowen, the former Princeton president who replaced Lagarde as Haverford commencement speaker, called out the protestors as “immature” and “arrogant” during his speech, an understatement, to be sure, but welcome nonetheless.

http://goo.gl/CGpWb7

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