Facebook just declared war against "disruptive" information. In addition to hundreds of new human censors, they are training AI censors capable of identifying and deleting 'unacceptable' information found in the discussions of all two billion members in real time. This development highlights what the real danger posed by a socially networked world actually is.
Facebook, with a COMPLETE social graph, becomes more than an advertising platform. It becomes an arm of government.
Some random items of interest:
Trump is in the White House today because an open source insurgency put him there. I first wrote about Trump's open source insurgency a year and a half ago (February 2016).
Here's a framework for understanding how social networking is changing US politics. It's raw, simple and (hopefully) useful.
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The political parties and the media aren't the primary actors in the US political system anymore. Increasingly, politics is being waged online by networks. A fight between two powerful and very different online social networks (I gave them names that are both descriptive of how they operate and easy to remember):
Charlottesville wasn't a standard protest. It was a social blasting cap. An open invitation to a public fist fight between the left and right. A fight orchestrated to create widespread social disruption. A fight the police didn't want to referee. A fight that was allowed to escalate for hours.
Some items of interest:
I recently ran into a European counter-terrorism expert who complained that it was getting very difficult to build a fake profile on Facebook. Every time his team tried to set up a fake profile, it was shut down in less than 24 hours. Here's why he ran into problems.
The Ukrainian SBU now believes that the destruction of arms depot at Balakliya in March that did a billion dollars in damage was carried out by a small drone armed with a thermite grenade.
Six years ago, I floated a business plan, for building a new type of company to building extremely valuable databases. Apparently, it was far more insightful than anticipated. What changed? AIs (more specifically, deep learning/ConvNet).