A short thread on one aspect of trolling on here, from my recent experience. I’ve got a fair number of followers. I tweet about controversial topics - and yet I don’t get trolled that much. A bit, but not thatmuch. There are times, though, that I *do* get trolled a lot. 1/n

The pattern is pretty clear, and has been played out a few times over the last few days. I get into a conversation about a topic that could be considered race-related. Empire. Immigration. Something like that. And that conversation includes a highish profile BAME person. 2/n
More often than not, a BAME woman. In those cases, it takes very little time for the trolls to come steaming in. Most of them seemingly rational, taking issue with some technical point, but quickly descending into something much worse. 3/n
When I look at the profiles of the trolls, they’re often relatively innocuous. Not saying ‘Hey, I’m a racist troll, a white supremacist’ at all. Not likely to be caught by any kind of anti-troll measures. Instead, they look relatively normal. 4/n
But what happens is very much about racism, and often misogyny. Attacks that are - or appear to be - not that dramatic on their own. Not rape threats or death threats, or ‘go home’ or things like that, but designed to undermine, to disturb, to annoy - but with an undercurrent 5/n
Nothing that something like the Online Harms White Paper as it stands will address - and this, for me, is an occasional annoyance. For the BAME women, it looks to me as though this is what happens all the time. That matters, and matters a lot. 6/n
Amongst other things, it means that people (like me) who don’t get to experience this need to be *very* careful not to image that their own experience is in any real way representative. We shouldn’t pretend that we know what it’s like. We don’t. 7/n
We can have clues, and insights - as now - but that doesn’t mean we understand in any meaningful way. We need to understand at least that. And it means that we need to think differently about trolling, and not imagine there are easy solutions. 8/n
None of this is easy, and there aren’t technical or legal solutions that will deal with the underlying societal problems either. We need to be aware of that too. /ends

More from For later read

This response to my tweet is a common objection to targeted advertising.

@KevinCoates correct me if I'm wrong, but basic point seems to be that banning targeted ads will lower platform profits, but will mostly be beneficial for consumers.

Some counterpoints 👇


1) This assumes that consumers prefer contextual ads to targeted ones.

This does not seem self-evident to me


Research also finds that firms choose between ad. targeting vs. obtrusiveness 👇

If true, the right question is not whether consumers prefer contextual ads to targeted ones. But whether they prefer *more* contextual ads vs *fewer* targeted

2) True, many inframarginal platforms might simply shift to contextual ads.

But some might already be almost indifferent between direct & indirect monetization.

Hard to imagine that *none* of them will respond to reduced ad revenue with actual fees.

3) Policy debate seems to be moving from:

"Consumers are insufficiently informed to decide how they share their data."

To

"No one in their right mind would agree to highly targeted ads (e.g., those that mix data from multiple sources)."

IMO the latter statement is incorrect.

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The first ever world map was sketched thousands of years ago by Indian saint
“Ramanujacharya” who simply translated the following verse from Mahabharat and gave the world its real face

In Mahabharat,it is described how 'Maharishi Ved Vyasa' gave away his divine vision to Sanjay


Dhritarashtra's charioteer so that he could describe him the events of the upcoming war.

But, even before questions of war could begin, Dhritarashtra asked him to describe how the world looks like from space.

This is how he described the face of the world:

सुदर्शनं प्रवक्ष्यामि द्वीपं तु कुरुनन्दन। परिमण्डलो महाराज द्वीपोऽसौ चक्रसंस्थितः॥
यथा हि पुरुषः पश्येदादर्शे मुखमात्मनः। एवं सुदर्शनद्वीपो दृश्यते चन्द्रमण्डले॥ द्विरंशे पिप्पलस्तत्र द्विरंशे च शशो महान्।

—वेद व्यास, भीष्म पर्व, महाभारत


Meaning:-

हे कुरुनन्दन ! सुदर्शन नामक यह द्वीप चक्र की भाँति गोलाकार स्थित है, जैसे पुरुष दर्पण में अपना मुख देखता है, उसी प्रकार यह द्वीप चन्द्रमण्डल में दिखायी देता है। इसके दो अंशो मे पीपल और दो अंशो मे विशाल शश (खरगोश) दिखायी देता है।


Meaning: "Just like a man sees his face in the mirror, so does the Earth appears in the Universe. In the first part you see leaves of the Peepal Tree, and in the next part you see a Rabbit."

Based on this shloka, Saint Ramanujacharya sketched out the map, but the world laughed
The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.