Tag: social networks
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This just in: Obama defriends Wright on Facebook!
Andy Borowitz breaks the story in the Huffington Post: In an act that campaign insiders said indicated an irrevocable break with his former pastor, Sen. Barack Obama today de-friended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Facebook. It looks like all the fears about the divisiveness within the Democratic party are, if anything, understated. I didn’t realize…
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Facebook flakiness: reliability problems, or an attack?
Facebook once again is in the middle of major flakiness right now: links to nowhere, spontaneous logouts. The best thing to do when something like this happens is to treat it as a sign that it’s a good time to take a break from Facebook for a little while. So I decided to write this…
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Community defense vs. trolls in the One Million Strong for Barack Facebook group
Like a lot of political sites these days, the Barack Obama Facebook page and One Million Strong for Barack group have been suffering from an infestation of trolls and hate speech. Obama supporters, like others, use Facebook to help with “get out the vote” work (for example posting links to information about polling places) and…
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Voting rights victories in LA County and Texas!
Update, March 6: democracy largely (albeit imperfectly) prevailed in the LA County mess; 47,153 “double bubble†votes were counted in Los Angeles County. What about Ohio? We shall see … Julia Rosen’s Victory post yesterday on Courage Campaign’s blog announced Dean Logan’s agreement to count every possible LA County decline-to-state ballot, and followup mail from…
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Facebook: censoring political speech
Update on February 22: How to respond when Facebook censors your political speech is up on Tales from the Net and Wired’s How-to Wiki and links back to comments in this thread. Alas, the Facebook Barack Obama discussion board was deleted on February 20, so many of the links here go off to oblivion. If…
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“Yes We Can” do grassroots campaigning for Obama on Facebook
The Yes We Can/Sí Se Puede video’s already got at least a million hits on YouTube — 566,000 for the one I linked to here, a couple more instances with 285,000 and 140,000, and then a long tail curve … How many people will watch it if we get it all over Facebook? I dunno,…
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How’d it get through QA — and why didn’t they fix it?
Over on Tales from the Net, I’ve been discussing Kevin Poulsen’s articles about a MySpace security bug that allowed access to photos in profiles that had been marked as “private”. It had been well known for months, but MySpace didn’t fix it until the day after Kevin’s first article. In the interim, somebody wrote an…
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My “interventions” are admired!
From Moderator’s closing statement in The Economist’s debate on social networking technologies in education: I also admired the interventions from JON PINCUS, who pointed out that supporters of the motion underestimated “the risks that the new technologies will in practice reinforce (rather than counter) existing negative biases and trends in the educational system”. He also…
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More (negative) attention to Facebook’s privacy practices
With a two-part series on TPM Cafe’s Table for One, an article in the Mercury News on Christmas Day, and the recent settlement of a suit on text messaging, Facebook continues to become a focus for discussion of privacy issues. To some extent this is a consequence of their size and success: they’re a high-profile…
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Antifreeze for the winter in Seattle
There was a great article in the Seattle PI on Friday about Seattle Anti-Freeze and how their participative, theme-based gender-balanced parties are “finding a cure for the common cold”. Gayle Laakmann, one of Anti-freeze’s founders, interned for me several years ago at Microsoft Research, and since this gave me an opportunity to get in on…