Twitter says users may see a drop in their followers as it begins removing suspicious accounts it has locked.
This is exactly what Facebook should be doing…constantly. It’s also why I spend so very little time on either of these social media platforms, and in fact, sadly, am very suspicious of all social media now that is based on accruing followers, click-like buttons, anonymous comments etc.
I publish my blog, in my control, respond to known or verified contacts, and generally just hope for the best that readers find my content useful to their lives.
Shannon Van Sant, NPR
Twitter has begun removing millions of locked accounts from users’ lists of followers, in an attempt to crack down further on social media fraud.
The move will eliminate tens of millions of frozen accounts Twitter has deemed suspicious and reduce the total combined follower count on the platform by about 6 percent.
“Most people will see a change of four followers or fewer; others with larger follower counts will experience a more significant drop,” wrote Twitter’s legal, policy and trust and safety lead Vijaya Gadde in a corporate blog post. “We understand this may be hard for some, but we believe accuracy and transparency make Twitter a more trusted service for public conversation.”
In May of this year Twitter announced that it was locking almost 10 million suspicious accounts per week and removing many for anti-spam policies. “Due to technology and process improvements during the past year, we are now removing 214% more accounts for violating our spam policies on a year-on-year basis,” Twitter said in a company blog post.
Twitter has come under criticism for allowing hate speech and has also been used as a tool for Russian influence. NPR’s Tim Mak and Libby Berry reported that Russia’s “information attack against the United States” during the 2016 campaign included Russians posing as American social media users and creating fake Twitter accounts that purported to be local newspapers.
“NPR has reviewed information connected with the investigation and found 48 such accounts. They have names such as @ElPasoTopNews, @MilwaukeeVoice, @CamdenCityNews and @Seattle_Post.
” ‘A not-insignificant amount of those had some sort of variation on what appeared to be a homegrown local news site,’ said Bret Schafer, a social media analyst for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks Russian influence operations and first noticed this trend.
“Another example: The Internet Research Agency created an account that looks like it is the Chicago Daily News. That newspaper shuttered in 1978.”
Mak reports these fake Twitter accounts distributed genuine news, building trust with readers, possibly for “some future, unforeseen effort.”
“Another twist: These accounts apparently never spread misinformation. In fact, they posted real local news, serving as sleeper accounts building trust and readership for some future, unforeseen effort.
” ‘They set them up for a reason. And if at any given moment, they wanted to operationalize this network of what seemed to be local American news handles, they can significantly influence the narrative on a breaking news story,’ Schafer told NPR. ‘But now instead of just showing up online and flooding it with news sites, they have these accounts with two years of credible history.’ “
Mak reports Twitter suspended these fake accounts, which were created in Russia.
Twitter says its continued crackdown on fraudulent accounts will not impact its total number of users. CFO Ned Segal said in a tweet that “most accounts we remove are not included in our reported metrics as they have not been active on the platform for 30 days or more, or we catch them at sign up and they are never counted.”
In a statement, Unilever’s chief marketing officer, Keith Weed, said, “Our digital ecosystem is being polluted by a growing number of fake user accounts, so Twitter’s commitment to cleaning up the digital space should be welcomed wholeheartedly by everyone, from users of the platforms, to creators and advertisers. People having an artificially-inflated follower count made up of bots and redundant accounts is at best deceiving and at worst, fraud. It serves no one and undermines trust in the entire system.”
“Greater transparency leads to greater authenticity, which in turn builds trust,” Weed continued. “This is a big step for the industry and I hope others will follow suit.”
A child plays with a mobile phone while riding in a New York subway in December. Two major Apple investors urged the iPhone maker to take action to curb growing smartphone use among children.
Ok…fine, but if parents cave to their kids’ whining, and pouting when it’s time for lockdown, it won’t matter. For many of the kids who are fixated to mobile devices and/or social media, fixing the problem has been undermined by their parents’ addiction, or unwillingness to clamp down. The ship has sailed on helping older teens and young adults already captured take in the world beyond a phone screen. Hopefully, the next generation might regain the ability to straighten their necks, and look up.
Laura Sydell/NPR
June 4, 2018
Apple on Monday announced a new app to allow users to get reports on how much their kids are using particular apps on their iPhones and iPads.
Apple is calling the app Screen Time, and it will let parents set time limits on how long their children can use apps, from Netflix to Snapchat, said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. Screen Time would also allow parents to limit access to some apps and websites. One option is designed to get kids to unplug from their devices at bedtime.
The new feature — announced at the company’s annual conference for developers in San Jose, Calif. — will be part of the next Apple mobile operating system, iOS 12, which is expected out later this year.
Users will now be able to get a few summary of the time they spend on the phone and how long they are on certain apps. Users will also be able to set a time limit for themselves on a particular app.
“We know, this is something that can help families achieve the right balance for them,” Federighi said.
In an interview Monday with NPR, Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “We have never been about maximizing the number of times you pick it up, the number of times you use it.
“All of these things are great conveniences of life,” he said. “They change your daily life in a great way. But if you’re being bombarded by notifications all day long, that’s probably a use of the system that might not be so good anymore.”
Apple also launched a “Families” webpage in March, outlining ways in which parents can utilize the company’s pre-existing features.
“We first introduced parental controls for iPhone in 2008, and our team has worked thoughtfully over the years to add features to help parents manage their children’s content,” Federighi said.
Apple’s announcement Monday follows pressure from activist shareholders to take the lead in developing controls to help parents limit iPhone use by teens and children.
In January, Jana Partners and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or CalSTRS, wrote a letter to Apple about growing “societal unease” about overuse of technology and in particular smart phones, which at some point could turn people away from buying Apple products. They called upon Apple to take a stronger role in helping parents control their children’s use of electronic devices.
CalSTRS and Jana, which, combined, owned about $2 billion in Apple stock, say the company could help minimize “unintentional negative consequences” of overusing digital devices and spending too much time on social media.
Charles Penner, a partner with Jana Partners, said the investment firm sees Apple’s latest moves as positive.
“We’re still reviewing it, but Apple appears to have addressed the vast majority of our concerns, and we look forward to seeing their follow-through,” Penner said.
One study by nonprofit group Common Sense Media said that 78 percent of teens check their phones at least hourly and 50 percent report feeling “addicted” to their phones.
Right now, controls give two options — all on or all off. Shareholders want more options for controls that help with screen-time management. They also requested that Apple convene a panel to study the issue.
Monday’s announcement addresses some of the concerns of the shareholders.
Apple’s initiative is the latest push from technology companies under pressure to address smartphone addiction.
“We need to have tools and data to allow us to understand how we consume digital media,” Tony Fadell, a former senior Apple executive, told Bloomberg in May. “We need to get finer-grain language and start to understand that an iPhone is just a refrigerator, it’s not the addiction.”
Google announced similar controls in May for its Android P operating system, which include expanded do-not-disturb controls and ways to track app usage. Google introduced a “wind down” mode that changes the screen’s brightness and color scale later in the evenings. The new software will also allow users to set time limits on apps, similar to what Apple plans to roll out.
Understand the new environment we are all in regarding the fight for credible news reporting, and the lack of visible sourcing. Most especially, this is evident in the new distributors of news and information, that live entirely online, and have no legacy of respectable journalistic heritage, nor transparent pedigree of their writers and reporters.
When you realize this, you will come face to face with the reality, that finding credible news and information, is not simply about what you read that’s wrapped in someone’s crafty banner, catchy URL, self-stated mission, masthead, or attention-getting headline. It’s about what, and who, you proactively decide to trust as your source/s of news and information.
The temptation to click, read, share, and disseminate, provocative news we come upon in this new ecosystem is strong. I understand this. It’s so easy to pass along news, shares, online content, to any, and every social media feed we have access to. But, to do so, without qualifying, quantifying, or looking deeper to its origins, it’s sourcing, it’s depth of reporting, or any other checkboxes to gain context, is contributing, even if innocently, to the problem of misinformation and exaggerations that are warping our present day news culture.
There are millions of us who consciously, deliberately, pass on, and share, news and information that we believe in, and feel strongly about in trying to influence others, or to bond with our tribe. This is who we are, and have a right to be.
What I ask, and hope for, from myself, and online posters of all persuasions, on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and everywhere else, is to resist the urge to share any and all, news and info links that don’t show established journalistic roots, or traceable accountability for their content. In choosing what you read, and share, I ask that you make your decision on active, specific criteria in determining accuracy, and motive of the publisher.
This won’t be easy. You’ll need to accept inherent bias along the way. Don’t expect to be free of it, ever. But, if you dedicate to the truth, tarnished as it can be, not just dwelling on compatible positions, you will get through the weeds.
Do this, and it will help you to pick through the informational refuse littering our new, and misleading cyber ecosystem. It will help protect you, and all of us, from a dangerous and destructive atmosphere of continuous mistrust that is already pushing down on our airspace of communication. No matter who seems to be, or feels that they are, on the right side, that atmosphere will eventually suffocate us all.
We can rise above, and push through this muck. It just takes willpower, and work. Same as it ever was.
I have lots of company joining me, exhausted with the ongoing news cycles for the last year and a half. It’s not subsiding any time soon. I’m thinking years. Given the American culture, and habits of, news reporting, its consumption, buying it, selling it, sponsoring it, and distributing it, I see an almost constant peaking of news events on any, and every, level and scale, offered up almost daily, with no breather.
The comic parodies mocking the overwrought “Breaking News” interruption on cable news have long lost their humor yield. In real life, it’s exhausting, and almost surreal. There literally has not been a break from “breaking news.”
Maybe I’m just feeling vulnerable, but it feels like events are getting really serious now. There’s a convergence of multiple news happenings, any one of which alone, has global implications, coming up in days, or weeks, maybe a month, that’s going to put a collective hurt on the people, the governments, and the infrastructure in this country. It feels party-less, like, what could be about to happen, is about to mutate into a life of its own, with tentacles, and reach beyond where any forces fighting it, on either side of the oceans, can ever extend. A soulless enemy of cancerous mistrust that we made together as humanity into an incurable disease.
The U.S. power grid has been targeted before by hackers. Assessing the risk is years old, but now they’re officially in, and we’re sitting ducks. It is already known, that the level of consequence to the U.S. today, right now, would be colossal. Based on that fact alone, we are in big, big trouble. Grand-spectacle-wise, we lose any war before it even starts. Period. Done. Well-Done.
Three articles below. All chilling. Make special note of the Vocative article, from April 2017.
Let’s play a game: The next time you’re sitting among a group of friends or out on a date, measure how much time passes before someone grabs their phone to look at it.
How long can you last?
“If that happens, that’s when dinner ends,” said Judith Martin, the Washington Post writer whose Miss Manners column is syndicated to 200 newspapers a week.
“I don’t think anyone would dare do that to me,” she said.
Most of us don’t have the authority that comes with 40 years of being Miss Manners, but no matter who you are it can be near impossible to pry anyone away from their mobile playthings. (Harder still: Are your friends or partner more into their smartphone than they are into you?)
The problem of looking at our devices nonstop is both social and physiological.
The average human head weighs between 10 and 12 pounds, and when we bend our neck to text or check Facebook, the gravitational pull on our head and the stress on our neck increases to as much as 60 pounds of pressure. That common position, pervasive among everyone from paupers to presidents, leads to incremental loss of the curve of the cervical spine. “Text neck” is becoming a medical issue that countless people suffer from, and the way we hang our heads has other health risks, too, according to a report published last year in The Spine Journal.
And the remedy can be ridiculously simple: Just sit up.
Social psychologists like Amy Cuddy claim even standing in a confident posture, with your head up and shoulders back, can heighten testosterone and cortisol flow in the brain, preventing much of the above. So, why aren’t we heeding these signs? It might be simple denial.
Inattentional blindness is a problem
Some 75 percent of Americans believe their smartphone usage doesn’t impact their ability to pay attention in a group setting, according to the Pew Research Center, and about a third of Americans believe that using phones in social settings actually contributes to the conversation.
But does it?
Etiquette experts and social scientists are adamantly united: Nope.
That “always-on” behavior that smartphones contribute to causes us to remove ourselves from our reality, experts said. And aside from the health consequences, if we’re head down, our communication skills and manners are slumped, too. But, ironically, that might not be how most of us see ourselves.
“We think somehow that this antisocial behavior is not going to affect me,” said Niobe Way, professor of applied psychology at New York University.
Ms. Way studies technology’s role in shaping adolescent development. These head-down interactions take us away from the present, no matter what group we’re in, she said. And it’s not just a youth problem. It’s ingrained, learned, copied and repeated, much of it from mimicking adults. When kids see their parents head down, they emulate that action. The result is a loss of nonverbal cues, which can stunt development.
“What’s happening more and more is we’re not talking to our children,” Ms. Way said. “We put them in front of the tech when they’re young, and when we’re older, we’re absorbed in our own tech.”
You’ve seen it: Think of how some parents deal with screaming toddlers. “Here kid, take this iPhone and go to town,” according to Ms. Way — not, “Let’s talk this out, what seems to be the problem, son?’”
She added: “We think, ‘Somehow my kids will know what’s a good and bad interaction, they’ll have empathy.’ But when I go upstairs into my son’s room and seven teens are all looking at their phones, none of them saying a word, there’s all sorts of disengagement happening. It’s not Facebook that’s the problem, it’s how we’re using Facebook.”
All ages are affected
A study in 2010 found that adolescents ages 8 to 18 spent more than 7.5 hours a day consuming media. Since then, our digital addictions have continued to, in some ways, define our lives: In 2015, the Pew Research Center reported that 24 percent of teenagers are “almost constantly” online.
“Mobile devices are the mother of inattentional blindness,” said Henry Alford, the author of “Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That: A Modern Guide to Manners.” “That’s the state of monomaniacal obliviousness that overcomes you when you’re absorbed in an activity to the exclusion of everything else.”
The social scientist Sherry Turkle analyzed 30 years of family interactions in her book “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.” She found that children now compete with their parents’ devices for attention, resulting in a generation afraid of the spontaneity of a phone call or face-to-face interaction. Eye contact now seems to be optional, Dr. Turkle suggests, and sensory overload can often mean our feelings are constantly anesthetized.
Researchers at the University of Michigan claim empathy levels have plummeted while narcissism is skyrocketing, with emotional development, confidence and health all affected when we tuck our chins in and let our heads hang like human ostriches.
Facebook’s former president, Sean Parker, recently said the platform was designed to be addictive and to “consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible,” which he characterized as boosting our self-esteem, ever-present in the dopamine hit of likes.
“It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” he said. “It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
That said: You’re probably reading this story on a mobile device right now. And that’s O.K.! (As long as you’re not behind the wheel.) We’re not here to tell you to throw away your iPhone and abandon digital media. But like many addictions, admitting a problem is the first step to treatment. And, mercifully, the fix isn’t anti-tech — it’s pro-conversation, according to Dr. Turkle.
Make an effort to interact with people
Digital detoxes have never been so popular, but they’re no cure-all, and realistically, there simply isn’t a black-and-white fix.
The simplest answer for all of us is biblical: Do unto others — and maybe do it without clutching your smartphone. Next time you’re in the checkout lane or stopped at a red light, look around. How many people are really there with you?
“Actual human beings, in the flesh, take precedence,” Ms. Martin chided. “To ignore people you’re with is rude, whether you ignore them for virtual friends or distant friends by snubbing them.”
It sounds so obvious it almost borders on stupid. But like Dr. Turkle’s hope of building dialogue, not denigrating the digerati, it’s an obvious dialogue we’re not having enough of.
Mr. Alford, who used to write a monthly manners column for The New York Times, described the issue as a “monomaniacal obliviousness” of being absorbed in an activity to the exclusion of the rest of the world.
“To treat the person standing in front of you as secondary to your phone, is usually, as the kids say, a micro-aggression,” he said.
Many Silicon Valley pundits go to war when anyone so much as suggests that tech’s merits aren’t uniformly positive. But in light of the brutal schoolyard that social media has become, that approach now appears moot.
Young or old, we’re all a generation of literal test cases. Etiquette, manners, body language, the way we respond, interact and even look is changing. We’re missing a whole life happening a mere 90 degrees above our smartphones. Start looking up.
“Never be the first person in the group to whip out his phone,” Mr. Alford said. “Don’t be Patient Zero.”
Correction 1/30/2018: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of car accidents attributed to the use of smartphones. About one quarter of car accidents in the United States are caused by texting and talking on the phone while driving, not solely by texting.
Adam Popescu is a writer living in Los Angeles who contributes frequently to the Times. He can be reached on Twitter at @adampopescu
Uber has acknowledged that the personal information of 57 million customers and drivers was hacked last year.
I have never trusted the Uber model because I never liked its CEO and co-founder, Travis Kalanick.
The privacy theft UBER engaged in with its app update earlier this year revealed the first public glance at how he ran this business. I am sure most riders let it slide. They shouldn’t have. Kalanick proceeded to get in deeper trouble stealing software, sexually harassing employees, and supporting a trashy workplace culture.
He was finally pushed out by shareholders, but now this!
It’s time for another company to try and provide a sharing service like this. The concept is promising, but I don’t like UBER executing it. Try LYFT. Or just plan ahead and call a cab.
Convenience should not blind us to risk and exploitation. UBER is not to be trusted.
