"Arseniy, they will soon kick your ass", or what's going viral in Ukraine's social media - Fort Russ

It seems to me they won’t simply kick your ass, but rather f*ck you over thoroughly as a failed petty thief from a provincial town square. No, Senya, it won’t be a bullet to the head, because there is no evidence of head existing where the bullet needs to go. Your head somehow has not been in evidence.

Seems to me the first to start f*cking with you are the Maidan people who were inspired by your fiery speeches about justice and fighting oligarchs during the cold winter days of 2014, then were themselves shot in the head.

They’ll beat you because you delivered the country to one or more oligarchs, they’ll also beat Poroshenko who quickly put together his People’s Front (read: Front against the People). You were so united when it came to the Ukrnafta vote. So we no longer need money in the budget?

They’ll also beat you, Senya, for all the dirty deals in the Cabinet. The coal contracts, the electricity contract with Russia, Mokhnik and his waste disposal, Ukrspirt, etc., etc., etc.

That’s because, Senya, the chief doctor is responsible for the entire hospital, colonel for the regiment, and Prime Minister for the entire Cabinet of Ministers. He also answers for all the appointments to the Cabinet. Tell me, Senya, what idiot named an individual with barely an undergraduate degree to head the Ministry of Education, thus demonstrating that one does not need to have education to head the Ministry of Education?

They’ll beat you with quiet enjoyment and undisguised pleasure for failing to pick up money off the ground and put it into the long-suffering budget. Senya, you are a well-educated kid from a family whose roots go back to an eternally persecuted and educated nation. You no doubt know what Al Capone went to prison for. He ended up there for the banal failure to pay taxes. Senya, what’s so difficult in comparing ministers’, judges, prosecutors’ tax payment records with the registers of their declared property? I’m telling you, Senya, there’s enough money there for three budgets, with enough to left over to repay the IMF. Best of all, there’s nothing left to prove. Everything has been documented since 2000, unless I’m mistaken.

And what have you done? You cut retirement pensions.

Complete story at - "Arseniy, they will soon kick your ass", or what's going viral in Ukraine's social media - Fort Russ

Please Manipulate Me | The Smirking Chimp

What do you call it when media try to manipulate your feelings without first asking for informed consent?

Tuesday.

Example: The average Facebook user sees only 20 percent of the 1,500 stories per day that could have shown up in their news feed. The posts you receive are determined by algorithms whose bottom line is Facebook's bottom line. The company is constantly adjusting all kinds of dials, quietly looking for the optimal mix to make us spend more of our time and money on Facebook. Of course the more we're on Facebook, the more information they have about us to fine-tune their formulas for picking ads to show us. That's their business model: We create and give Facebook, for free, the content they use and the data they mine to hold our attention, which Facebook in turn sells to advertisers.

Those are the terms of service that everyone, without reading, clicks "I Agree" to -- and not just for Facebook. We make comparable mindless contracts all the time with Gmail, Yahoo, Twitter, Amazon, Siri, Yelp, Pandora and tons of other apps, retailers and advertiser-supported news and entertainment. If you're online, if you use a smartphone, you're an experimental subject in proprietary research studies of how best to target, engage and monetize you. They're always testing content, design, headlines, graphics, prices, promotions, profiling tools, you name it, and you've opted in whether you realize it or not.

Many of these experiments hinge on our feelings, because much of what makes us come, stay, buy, like, share, comment and come back is emotional, not rational. So it should surprise no one that Facebook wants to know what makes its users happier. But when they acknowledged last month that they had tested -- on 700,000 people, for one week -- whether increasing the fraction of upbeat posts in their news feeds made them feel more upbeat (it did), a firestorm broke out.

Complete story at - Please Manipulate Me | The Smirking Chimp

The Secret Service wants software that detects social media sarcasm. Yeah, sure it will work.

The Secret Service is looking to buy software that can detect sarcasm on social media. Whatever. We're sure it will work.

In a work order posted online Monday, the agency said it wants analytics software that can, among other things, synthesize large sets of social media data and visually present that data. The request for proposals was first reported by nextgov.com.

More specifically, the orders ask for a long list of specific tools, including the ability to identify social media influencers, analyze data streams in real time, access old Twitter data and use heat maps. And it wants the software to be compatible with Internet Explorer 8. (The agency is asking for a blanket purchasing agreement over a five-year period, which shows just how often the government updates its technology.)

Then there's the request to sift through the heaps of snark on Twitter and other social media services: "Ability to detect sarcasm and false positives," the request reads.

Complete story at - The Secret Service wants software that detects social media sarcasm. Yeah, sure it will work.

Are these people writing snarky tweets? (Reuters/Kacper Pempel/Files)

How Washington and its Allies Use Social Media to Topple Governments & Manipulate Public Opinion | SCG News

The U.S. government's latest attempt to topple Cuba using social media is just the tip of the iceberg, but what's really interesting is how connects to the Ukrainian crisis.

On April 2nd the Associated Press released an report exposing how the U.S. government recently attempted to topple the Cuban government yet again. This time the plot hinged on the creation of a communications network called "ZunZuneo" which was essentially a primitive version of Twitter. The plan, which was cooked up by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. State Department, was to build up a large following of users and then push them towards revolt. The network was built using shell companies and financed through a foreign bank to hide their connection to Washington. The Obama administration defended the program saying that it "had disclosed the initiative to Congress".

Of course we all know that attempting to topple a foreign government is perfectly fine as long as you let congress know a bit in advance.

As shocking and absurd as these revelations may be to the general public, the truth of the matter is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The U.S. government and its allies have been using the internet as a covert weapon for some time now. Much of the evidence of these activities got mainstream coverage, but the corporate media is very careful not to refer to that evidence in the context of current events.

So let's connect a few dots here.

In 2011 it came to light that the U.S. military had developed a 'sock puppet' software for creating and managing fake online identities. These sock puppet accounts were to be used to spread propaganda on social media sites, forums and blogs. The software which was described as an "online persona management service" allows one soldier to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world. When this program was exposed the U.S. government claimed that the program was never used on English speaking audiences. Considering that these are the same people who swore up and down that the NSA surveillance program never targeted U.S. citizens, we can take that with a grain of salt, but it's worth noting that they explicitly acknowledged in their statement that the program was intended for covert operations in foreign countries.

A leaked document recently made public by Glenn Greenwald showed that the UK's GCHQ has been running a similar program through a unit called the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (or JTRIG). You can download the file that Greenwald leaked here..

Complete story at - How Washington and its Allies Use Social Media to Topple Governments & Manipulate Public Opinion | SCG News

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