The ugly dark side of Facebook memes

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

Jack Stuef
BuzzFeed

James Denham does not have a strong social media following. He’s basically anonymous; type his name into Google, and you’re not going to find anything about him. But in January, Denham ran across an image of what appeared to be two teenagers cruelly hanging a puppy by a string and posted it to his Facebook wall. Text on the image implores users to “share this picture” and contact authorities if they recognize the perpetrators.

The photo has since been shared over 70,000 times from this profile, making it among the most widely viewed content on the site. Yet what Denham didn’t realize at first is this image has been circulating on the Internet for years, and the culprits were identified long ago. The photo is completely useless at this point. It appears somebody eventually notified Denham of the image’s past, as he has left multiple comments on his post trying to alert other users to its history. But it’s been in vain. The photo continues to be spread around by oblivious people every day, despite the comments and despite being of absolutely no use to the world.

Facebook is great for sharing funny things, but the truly funny ones almost always come from somewhere else. These don’t. These are Facebook’s memes.

The Facebook share button, in its current iteration, allows users to take content from another user’s profile and re-post it on their own profiles, along with a byline from the original poster. By design, it works like Tumblr’s reblog or Twitter’s retweet function. In practice, it can work more like a human centipede.

These shared items, which are usually an image that has text, or sometimes an image accompanied by an urban-legend type caption, carry on the legacy of chain emails that were a major part of Internet culture in the 90s. Such spam has since diminished  as Internet content has grown and, along with its users, become more sophisticated. That these dumb images, which regularly accumulate tens or hundreds of thousands of “shares,” now rival even the most “liked” articles and videos on Facebook, is an embarrassment for the social network.

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

 

Urban legends
Some of these shares,  like this one recounting a hoax story about a woman on an airplane complaining about sitting next to a black man, got their start as  chain emails. Snopes.com dates  this tale back to 1998. On Facebook, a photo of a white flight attendant is used to make the story shareable. At least one posting of this urban legend has more than 100,000 shares and likes combined. Note: That’s just a single post on one profile – there are many, many more.

The NAACP’s Facebook page, by contrast, had less than 106,000 likes at the time of this post. Perhaps if that organization had spent more time spreading made-up stories about bigots in the sky and less time trying to get civil rights legislation passed, it would be more popular on Facebook today.

The users who post these things are often shameless and have no qualms about asking for shares in the caption or in the image itself. 

Quotations of dubious origin are also a favorite Facebook meme. People elsewhere on the Internet have debunked the attributions on Betty White and John Wayne quotes, but that hasn’t made a difference.

The debunkings of these memes are never going to be shared nearly as broadly as the memes themselves, which seem like they will become viral intermittently in perpetuity. John Wayne and Betty White will be “saying” these things on Facebook until its users forget who they are. At that point, the quotes will be attributed to elderly stars like Justin Bieber and that dog from “The Artist.”

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

 

Of course, we can’t expect like-hungry trolls to stop at photos of abused puppies. Congratulations, babies with serious medical conditions — you’re all Facebook famous! Such memes use the same tactic: exploit a small dying child’s photographs; write a breathless, obviously fallacious caption about how this kid will only get the medical care he or she needs if the meme scores enough likes and shares; and watch the attention roll in. Meanwhile, the child either recovers without your help or dies. Or the child’s been dead for years.

Political rhetoric
Despite Facebook sponsoring presidential debates, interviewing newsmakers and commissioning opinion polls, keeping up appearances as an important American institution and serious media organization concerned with civic values, the prevailing political discourse is as rotten as any Facebook meme.

It’s telling that the only political item on Facebook’s top 40 “most shared” news article list of 2011 was a blurry, resized infographic of debatable accuracy: Occupy Party vs Tea Party Comparison. That’s exactly the sort of thing that becomes a Facebook political meme, albeit even more poorly made and less likely to be factual.

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

 

The image above, as BuzzFeed’s J.P. Moore reported in January, has been among the most widely shared by conservatives on Facebook. It’s brilliantly stupid the way only chain e-mail propaganda can be.

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

 

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

 

These two memes are among the most widely shared by liberals, and they’re both wildly inaccurate. The “Who Increased the Debt?” chart had already been discredited  by political fact-check blogs many months before it appeared on Facebook. The photo of Mitt Romney is a 2008 Getty image showing the presidential candidate going through airport security before boarding a plane. But somebody decided it looked like the official wanding him was actually shining his shoes, so another meme predicated on misinformation was born.

These political memes may be the most insidious of all, because they could – theoretically – have serious effects not only on the discourse, but on election outcomes as well. Political images spread quickly in part because Facebook users’ friends are by and large demographically similar to themselves. Most conservatives are mostly friends with conservatives; most liberals are mostly friends with other liberals. These politically insular memes confirm and strengthen users’ ideological beliefs, and truth is optional. One can’t just dismiss these memes because they’re dumb, poorly made and factually challenged. Facebook is huge, and this is its most popular content.

Facebook may now be America’s greatest entertainment, but the junk content that is increasingly working its way into our news feeds makes eHow articles look like the Great American Novel.

Facebook would be more enjoyable for some people if it went back to the basics and focused on its original role as a virtual hub for maintaining real-life friendships. As some have suggested, it could encourage users to take time to mass-unfriend people and prune their network into a group of true friends they actually care about. Instead of worrying about the threats posed by other kinds of social networks and jamming similar features into Facebook after they become popular elsewhere (Instagram, for instance), the company could focus on cautiously improving what it does best and learn to live among a community of social networks that offer different things to different people. But it seems there’s no turning back. 

Still, if enough people complain about these memes littering the site, I’m sure Facebook will find a way to clean it up for the users who don’t want to see it. The company eventually managed to tuck “Mafia Wars” requests away into the profiles of people who actually want to play the game, to the relief of the majority of its users who just can’t seem to see the vital importance of helping a friend steal a virtual handgun in text-based Chicago. That’s no small feat.

More from BuzzFeed: 

• What’s the most liked photo on Instagram?
• Our emoticons, ourselves: An interview with the inventor or the Internet smiley
• Silicon Valley was almost in Boston

 

Article source: http://digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/21/11311604-the-ugly-dark-side-of-facebook-memes?lite

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Ex-lover punished for Facebook revenge

Picture this … Usmanov outside his Ultimo apartment. Photo: Anthony Johnson

People can now be held accountable for their actions on social media.

A jilted boyfriend who put nude pictures of his former lover on Facebook has been sentenced to six months’ jail – the first social networking-related conviction in Australian history and one of just a handful in the world.

Ravshan ”Ronnie” Usmanov told police: ”I put the photos up because she hurt me and it was the only thing [I had] to hurt her.”

The six pictures, according to court documents, showed his ex-girlfriend ”nude in certain positions and clearly showing her breasts and genitalia”.

Shortly after posting the pictures on his Facebook page in October last year, Usmanov emailed his girlfriend with the message: ”Some of your photos are now on Facebook”. She had ended their relationship and moved out of their shared home less than three months earlier.

The woman, who The Sun-Herald has chosen not to identify, ran to Usmanov’s flat at Pyrmont, demanding he take down the pictures. When he refused, she called the police.

Privacy experts say Usmanov’s case has exposed the ”tip of the iceberg” of online offences that rarely go punished. Sentencing the 20-year-old, the Deputy-Chief Magistrate, Jane Mottley, said she was ”deterring both the offender and the community generally from committing similar crimes”. She said: ”New-age technology through Facebook gives instant access to the world. Facebook as a social networking site has limited boundaries. Incalculable damage can be done to a person’s reputation by the irresponsible posting of information through that medium. With its popularity and potential for real harm, there is a genuine need to ensure the use of this medium to commit offences of this type is deterred.

”The harm to the victim is not difficult to contemplate: embarrassment, humiliation and anxiety at not only the viewing of the images by persons who are known to her but also the prospect of viewing by those who are not. It can only be a matter for speculation as to who else may have seen the images, and whether those images have been stored in such a manner which, at a time the complainant least expects, they will again be available for viewing, circulation or distribution.”

The court could cite just one other relevant case in which a 20-year-old New Zealand man was sentenced to four months’ jail in Wellington in 2010 for posting nude pictures of his ex-girlfriend on Facebook.

Usmanov, a credit controller for a shipping company, pleaded guilty to publishing an indecent article but appealed the six-month sentence that was to be served as home detention. Justice Reg Blanch of the District Court confirmed the original sentence but quashed the home detention order in favour of a suspended sentence on February 15.

Court papers from the original sentencing reveal discussion over the gravity of Usmanov’s offence. His lawyer, Maggie Sten, argued his was not a ”serious offence”. Ms Mottley fired back: ”What could be more serious than publishing nude photographs of a woman on the internet, what could be more serious?” She added: ”It’s one thing to publish an article in print form with limited circulation. That may affect the objective seriousness of the offence but once it goes on the worldwide web via Facebook it effectively means it’s open to anyone who has some link in any way, however remotely.”

David Vaile, the executive director of the cyberspace law and policy centre at the University of NSW, said crimes of harassment when conducted online were not taken as seriously as physical offences.

”In a sense this is the tip of the iceberg,” he said. ”There are very few convictions under harassment and indecent publication. It’s not treated as the same way as, say, breaking into a bank website. There is more police support for criminal damage. In this case, he didn’t slash her tyres in an act of revenge. He slashed her reputation.”

Facebook Australia did not return calls.

The privacy expert Alec Christie a partner at law firm DLA Piper, said the federal government review of privacy stemming from the Australian Law Reform Commission report should include online measures.

”She should be able to take action for the invasion of her privacy but she can’t at the moment. In the online world it is not a Polaroid shared with people at the pub; it’s a Polaroid shared with a billion people or more.”

When approached by The Sun-Herald last week, Usmanov declined to comment. In mitigation, Ms Sten said: ”He was upset so he put the photos up on Facebook. He did this to hurt her. He’s sorry he did that. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. It’s just not something he would normally do.”

Article source: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/exlover-punished-for-facebook-revenge-20120421-1xdpy.html

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Facebook Invites More Comment on Policy Changes

Facebook began notifying some of its members Friday night that it is reopening the comment period for changes in its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR).

In a message sent to more than 2000 members who “liked” the Facebook Site Governance Page, where the social network fields comments about the SRR changes, the social network said:

“Based on your feedback, today we announced new revisions to the proposed changes to the SRR. Even where we did not make revisions, we have provided an explanation of the original change. We’ve re-opened the comment period for the new proposed SRR to provide you with another opportunity to review the proposed changes and give us feedback before we finalize them.”

Members have until April 27 to comment on the latest version of the SRR.

One of the recent changes to the SRR strikes a section of the document that could have been interpreted as empowering Facebook to block the use of the service by selected users or activists. Those changes [PDF] provided that:

“Some or all of Facebook’s services and features may not be available to users in certain geographic areas.  We reserve the right to exclude or limit the provision of any service or feature in our sole discretion.”   

Facebook said it is scrapping the section based on comments from its members. “After reviewing your comments to this proposed language, we decided that the additional provision we proposed was open to misinterpretation,” it explains. “The proposed change was intended to cover circumstances that may prevent us from providing our services. For instance, the Internet may go down, certain features may not be available in some locations, or a regime may block our service in their country.”

In addition to asking for more comments on its SRR, Facebook also took the opportunity to address criticisms of the previous draft of the document.

For example, one critic said changes in the SRR were designed to allow Facebook to expand its data collection activities from its members. Facebook said that isn’t so. How it collects and uses data is governed by its Data Use Policy, which isn’t changing at this time.

It’s easy to understand how people can be confused by Facebook’s moves. Throughout the SRR, all references to “privacy policy” — the former name for the Data Use Policy — were changed to Data Use Policy. That made some commenters believe that the SRR and Data Use Policy were the same document.

Replacing “privacy policy” with “data use policy” in the SRR was done to make the SRR consistent with the Data Use Policy, which was renamed in September 2011, Facebook explains.

The SRR was also rapped for allowing a member’s friends to share the member’s information with apps used by the friends. Facebook says that change, too, was made to make the SRR jibe with the Data Use Policy which, since 2007 has read:

“If you, your friends, or members of your network use any third-party applications developed using the Facebook Platform…those Platform Applications may access and share certain information about you with others in accordance with your privacy settings.”

Facebook adds that users can control how their data is shared with apps. However, it entails hunting through privacy controls and making “granular” changes to an account.

Provisions on tagging Facebook members in photos are also being altered in the SRR. Facebook is removing a prohibition against tagging members who don’t want to be tagged and replacing it with a notice that the social network “offers social reporting tools to enable users to provide feedback about tagging.”

The earlier version of the revised SRR elicited many comments from members on a number of topics unrelated to the SRR itself, including their distaste on the network’s Timeline redesign. It also required Facebook to give members a vote on proposed changes in the SRR if more than 7000 of them posted a comment on the changes. That’s been changed to make obtaining a vote more difficult:

“If more than 7000 users post a substantive comment on a particular proposed change, we will also give you the opportunity to participate in a vote in which you will be provided alternatives.”

Follow freelance technology writer John P. Mello Jr. and Today@PCWorld on Twitter.

Article source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/254215/facebook_invites_more_comment_on_policy_changes.html

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Chavez’s weeklong silence spurs uncertainty

CARACAS, Venezuela –  Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been out of sight for a week, speaking only through Twitter messages and written statements while undergoing cancer treatment in Cuba.

The lack of any appearances on television has Venezuelans wondering about what his unusual silence might say about his struggle with cancer, and whether Chavez may be coping with a particularly tough phase of radiation therapy.

More than two dozen messages have appeared on Chavez’s Twitter account since he left for Cuba on April 14. His messages have cheered on his supporters with messages such as, “Let’s continue building socialism!”

But he has not mentioned much about his cancer treatment. National Assembly President Diosdado Cabello reiterated on Friday that Chavez is expected to return to Venezuela next week.

Article source: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/04/21/chavez-weeklong-silence-spurs-uncertainty/

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Rupert Murdoch launches Twitter broadside against UK government

Rupert Murdoch has taken to Twitter to make a series of swipes at the government, from plans to lend £10bn in extra funding to the International Monetary Fund and the “pasty tax”.

Murdoch tweeted that George Osborne’s decision to contribute more funds to the IMF was “mad” and criticised the government’s energy, education and tax policies.

The head of News Corp is in London to give evidence at the Leveson inquiry into media standards next week. The inquiry has turned its attention to relationships between the press and politicians and if Murdoch’s tweets are anything to go by, it has soured considerably between the 81-year-old and the Conservative party.

Murdoch wrote in one tweet: “Back in Britain. Govt sending IMF another ten bn to the euro. Must be mad. Not even US or China chipping in. Same time taxing hot food.”

In another tweet, Murdoch criticised plans to build wind turbines to generate renewable energy: “English spring countryside as beautiful as ever if and when sun appears! About to be wrecked by uneconomic ugly bird killing windmills. Mad.”

On the subject of schooling, he called state education in the UK a “crime against the young”. “Only one answer, really fix public education and give everyone equal opportunity.”

Osborne has been forced to defend his decision to pledge £10bn more to the IMF, which critics have said will be used for more bailouts of the eurozone. The chancellor has insisted the increased funding is vital for protecting jobs and growth in this country, despite criticism of the extra burden on taxpayers.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/apr/21/rupert-murdoch-uk-government-twitter?newsfeed=true

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Twitter and LinkedIn Manage Tasks With Asana, New API Means Robots Can Too

What could be a better endorsement of your product’s quality than having some of the hottest companies in tech relying on it? Launched in November, task management software Asana is already being used by Twitter, Uber, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Rdio, NationBuilder, and Airbnb. This week, Asana released a REST API to let customers build custom interfaces and in-roads to its productivity tool. A few examples of what you could build include a desktop app for viewing assigned tasks, or a dashboard for monitoring your team’s current projects.

At an event to celebrate the startup’s progress on Thursday night, co-founder (and Facebook co-founder) Dustin Moskovitz and advisors like Ron Conway watched proudly as Asana’s other co-founder Justin Rosenstein delivered a rousing speech. “In just five months, customers have created 10 million tasks. Even more impressively, they’ve completed 4 million of them.”

Asana’s product allows teams to assign, collaborate on, and complete tasks in sync such that everyone knows what they and their peers should be working on. If you loathe email, endless meetings, and bloated layers of management and bureaucracy, Asana could be the answer. While the austere gray and white interface can seem drab at first, it’s designed to disappear so you can focus on the task at hand. Disclosure: I’m friends with employees at many companies we cover including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Asana too.

At San Francisco’s Hops Hominy, Rosenstein beamed while noting, “Asana is becoming the center of people’s work. Over 25% of weekly active users use the product ever single day, Monday through Friday. And 75% of the people who adopt Asana are retained.” He told the story of a Menlo Park biotech company called Emerald Therapeutics started by two of the world’s top scientists whose mission is to “end disease”. Its founders were forced to spend 100% of their time managing the company, but after adopting Asana to simplify coordination, they were able to put 75% of their time back towards science.

More impressive than these stats is the passion of Asana’s whole team for accomplishing the goal of “vastly increasing the speed and scope of every organization.” Rosenstein says “We see a future in which every organization on earth can coordinate their collective action perfectly, without effort, like a healthy brain. The Asana Project is about touching the heart of how people create together. The heart of how people self-actualize, help their fellow man, and manifest their potential.”

As the task management space crowds, Asana’s team will need that passion as it attempts to pull ahead of serious new competitors like Trello from Stack Exchange’s Joel Spolsky, and Salesforce’s Do, and displace established collaboration tools like Basecamp and Atlassian’s Jira that are deeply embedded in the workflows of many companies.

Rosenstein said “The API is the very first step of Asana’s larger platform strategy.” Its graphical user interface is quite minimalist and generalist, but Asana hopes to give developers and customers the power to specialize its tools for different verticals like software development, medicine, or news publishing. For now, the REST API can manage users, tasks, projects, stories, and workplaces. As an example, Asana offers an open source Chrome extension for instantly creating a task from text on any web page.

One thing’s for sure: email, while useful, is often the death of efficiency, so it’s exciting to see Asana is slaying that dragon for tech’s top companies. Task management is such a huge problem for so many people that there may be room for multiple solutions, but Asana is setting a quick pace on the path to helping us all reach our potential.

• ASANA
• JUSTIN ROSENSTEIN
• DUSTIN MOSKOVITZ

Asana is a web application that keeps teams in sync – a single place for everyone to quickly capture, organize, track and communicate what they are working on. It was founded by Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, and Justin Rosenstein, an alum of both Facebook and Google.

Learn more

Justin Rosenstein is the co-founder of Asana, a startup tackling the problem of workplace collaboration. Prior to Asana, he was the technical lead for Facebook Pages and Facebook Beacon. Prior to joining the social networking giant, Rosenstein spent three years as a product manager for Page Creator at Google. Rosenstein studied Mathematics at Stanford University.

Learn more

Dustin Moskovitz is a co-founder of Facebook and, more recently, Asana, a startup tackling the problem of workplace collaboration.

At Facebook, he was a leader in the technical staff, where he oversaw the major architecture of the site. He was also responsible for the company’s mobile strategy and development. Starting Facebook with founder Mark Zuckerberg from their dorm room, Dustin has been instrumental in the growth and development of the site since its inception. Dustin attended Harvard University as an…

Learn more

Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/21/asana-stats/

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Facebook flips the switch on its North Carolina data center, cooled with balmy …

Since breaking ground in Western North Carolina some 16 months ago, Facebook has been running at full speed to get its newest data center online. This week, Zuckerberg Co. flipped the switch. The new facility, located in Forest City, touts the “first major deployment” of the outfit’s Open Compute Project web servers and will be the first “live test” of the OPC’s outdoor air-cooling design. It tends to get pretty warm around those parts and humidity levels are a bit outside of ideal data center conditions. The Carolina facility will mirror the projected power utilization effectiveness (PUE) of FB’s Oregon data center at just a smidge above 1 – somewhere between 1.06 and 1.08 to be exact. In other words, this means the ratio of power used by the structure and the actual power sent to the hardware is almost perfect with minimal energy loss. No matter, it’ll still be using plenty of power. A second identical building is slated to open on the site later this year, but for now, hit the source link for a bit more info on the initial launch.

Article source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/21/facebook-flips-the-swtich-on-its-north-carolina-data-center/

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Facebook for Android version 1.9 is out

The 360° Conversation around Cloud Computing

TECH VISUALIZER brings the social conversation to life… powered by Brocade

Learn More raquo

Article source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-for-android-version-19-is-out/12033

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The ugly dark side of Facebook memes

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

 

Jack Stuef
BuzzFeed

James Denham does not have a strong social media following. He’s basically anonymous; type his name into Google, and you’re not going to find anything about him. But in January, Denham ran across an image of what appeared to be two teenagers cruelly hanging a puppy by a string and posted it to his Facebook wall. Text on the image implores users to “share this picture” and contact authorities if they recognize the perpetrators.

The photo has since been shared over 70,000 times from this profile, making it among the most widely viewed content on the site. Yet what Denham didn’t realize at first is this image has been circulating on the Internet for years, and the culprits were identified long ago. The photo is completely useless at this point. It appears somebody eventually notified Denham of the image’s past, as he has left multiple comments on his post trying to alert other users to its history. But it’s been in vain. The photo continues to be spread around by oblivious people every day, despite the comments and despite being of absolutely no use to the world.

Facebook is great for sharing funny things, but the truly funny ones almost always come from somewhere else. These don’t. These are Facebook’s memes.

The Facebook share button, in its current iteration, allows users to take content from another user’s profile and re-post it on their own profiles, along with a byline from the original poster. By design, it works like Tumblr’s reblog or Twitter’s retweet function. In practice, it can work more like a human centipede.

These shared items, which are usually an image that has text, or sometimes an image accompanied by an urban-legend type caption, carry on the legacy of chain emails that were a major part of Internet culture in the 90s. Such spam has since diminished  as Internet content has grown and, along with its users, become more sophisticated. That these dumb images, which regularly accumulate tens or hundreds of thousands of “shares,” now rival even the most “liked” articles and videos on Facebook, is an embarrassment for the social network.

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

 

Urban legends
Some of these shares,  like this one recounting a hoax story about a woman on an airplane complaining about sitting next to a black man, got their start as  chain emails. Snopes.com dates  this tale back to 1998. On Facebook, a photo of a white flight attendant is used to make the story shareable. At least one posting of this urban legend has more than 100,000 shares and likes combined. Note: That’s just a single post on one profile – there are many, many more.

The NAACP’s Facebook page, by contrast, had less than 106,000 likes at the time of this post. Perhaps if that organization had spent more time spreading made-up stories about bigots in the sky and less time trying to get civil rights legislation passed, it would be more popular on Facebook today.

The users who post these things are often shameless and have no qualms about asking for shares in the caption or in the image itself. 

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

 

Quotations of dubious origin are also a favorite Facebook meme. People elsewhere on the Internet have debunked the attributions on Betty White and John Wayne quotes, but that hasn’t made a difference.

The debunkings of these memes are never going to be shared nearly as broadly as the memes themselves, which seem like they will become viral intermittently in perpetuity. John Wayne and Betty White will be “saying” these things on Facebook until its users forget who they are. At that point, the quotes will be attributed to elderly stars like Justin Bieber and that dog from “The Artist.”

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

 

Of course, we can’t expect like-hungry trolls to stop at photos of abused puppies. Congratulations, babies with serious medical conditions — you’re all Facebook famous! Such memes use the same tactic: exploit a small dying child’s photographs; write a breathless, obviously fallacious caption about how this kid will only get the medical care he or she needs if the meme scores enough likes and shares; and watch the attention roll in. Meanwhile, the child either recovers without your help or dies. Or the child’s been dead for years.

Political rhetoric
Despite Facebook sponsoring presidential debates, interviewing newsmakers and commissioning opinion polls, keeping up appearances as an important American institution and serious media organization concerned with civic values, the prevailing political discourse is as rotten as any Facebook meme.

It’s telling that the only political item on Facebook’s top 40 “most shared” news article list of 2011 was a blurry, resized infographic of debatable accuracy: Occupy Party vs Tea Party Comparison. That’s exactly the sort of thing that becomes a Facebook political meme, albeit even more poorly made and less likely to be factual.

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

 

The image above, as BuzzFeed’s J.P. Moore reported in January, has been among the most widely shared by conservatives on Facebook. It’s brilliantly stupid the way only chain email propaganda can be.

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

 

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

 

These two memes are among the most widely shared by liberals, and they’re both wildly inaccurate. The “Who Increased the Debt?” chart had already been discredited  by political fact-check blogs many months before it appeared on Facebook. The photo of Mitt Romney is a 2008 Getty image showing the presidential candidate going through airport security before boarding a plane. But somebody decided it looked like the official wanding him was actually shining his shoes, so another meme predicated on misinformation was born.

These political memes may be the most insidious of all, because they could – theoretically – have serious effects not only on the discourse, but on election outcomes as well. Political images spread quickly in part because Facebook users’ friends are by and large demographically similar to themselves. Most conservatives are mostly friends with conservatives; most liberals are mostly friends with other liberals. These politically insular memes confirm and strengthen users’ ideological beliefs, and truth is optional. One can’t just dismiss these memes because they’re dumb, poorly made and factually challenged. Facebook is huge, and this is its most popular content.

Facebook may now be America’s greatest entertainment, but the junk content that is increasingly working its way into our news feeds makes eHow articles look like the Great American Novel.

Facebook would be more enjoyable for some people if it went back to the basics and focused on its original role as a virtual hub for maintaining real-life friendships. As some have suggested, it could encourage users to take time to mass-unfriend people and prune their network into a group of true friends they actually care about. Instead of worrying about the threats posed by other kinds of social networks and jamming similar features into Facebook after they become popular elsewhere (Instagram, for instance), the company could focus on cautiously improving what it does best and learn to live among a community of social networks that offer different things to different people. But it seems there’s no turning back. 

Still, if enough people complain about these memes littering the site, I’m sure Facebook will find a way to clean it up for the users who don’t want to see it. The company eventually managed to tuck “Mafia Wars” requests away into the profiles of people who actually want to play the game, to the relief of the majority of its users who just can’t seem to see the vital importance of helping a friend steal a virtual handgun in text-based Chicago. That’s no small feat.

More from BuzzFeed: 

• What’s the most liked photo on Instagram?
• Our emoticons, ourselves: An interview with the inventor or the Internet smiley
• Silicon Valley was almost in Boston

 

Article source: http://digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/21/11311604-the-ugly-dark-side-of-facebook-memes

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"Money grabbing little tramp": Ched Evans’ team-mate in foul-mouthed Twitter …

A team-mate of a footballer jailed for five years for raping a teenager “too drunk to consent” has sparked fury by branding the victim a “slag” and “money-grabbing little tramp”.

Wales international Ched Evans cried hysterically as he was found guilty of the attack in May last year.

Following the verdict, the 23-year-old’s Sheffield United team-mate Connor Brown posted a foul-mouthed rant on his Twitter page.

The 19-year-old branded the law “a load of f*****g s**t” and showed his support for Evans by adding: “I’m with you geez”.

He then accused the 19-year-old victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, of being a “money-grabbing little tramp”, according to the Daily Mail.

He continued his extraordinary attack by writing: “If ur a slag ur a slag don’t try get money from being a slag (sic) … Stupid girls… I feel sick.”

The offending tweets, which were shared with his 776 followers, were later removed from his profile.

He later restricted his Twitter account so his tweets could not be viewed.

 

Evans was convicted of raping the teenager after a night out in North Wales following a trial at Caernarfon Crown Court.

His co-defendant, Port Vale defender Clayton McDonald, was acquitted of the same charge.

After McDonald, 23, was found not guilty, the pair celebrated by banging heads together in the dock.

But Evans looked shocked as he was convicted of raping the 19-year-old, who said she woke up “confused and dazed” and could not remember what happened.

Sentencing him, Judge Merfyn Hughes QC said: “You have thrown away the successful career in which you were engaged.

“The complainant was extremely intoxicated. CCTV footage shows, in my view, the extent of her intoxication when she stumbled into your friend.

“She was in no condition to have sexual intercourse.”

He added: “The long-term psychological consequences to the victim are not lessened by the fact she has no recollection of the offence.”

 

Evans had boasted to cops after his arrest that he and McDonald “could have had any girl” they wanted in a nightclub they had been to.

He told them: “We were drinking, having fun there. It’s not uncommon we pick up girls. Clayton’s an attractive guy. We are footballers, that’s how it is.

“Footballers are rich, they have got money, that’s what the girls like.”

The jury had heard Evans’ victim went willingly to the hotel with McDonald after she approaching him on a street corner in Rhyl, North Wales, a seaside town where the men had been on a night out.

The pair got a taxi to the hotel, a Premier Inn in Rhuddlan, walked inside “linking arms” and went to his room.

They began having sex and eventually Wales international Evans, of Penistone, South Yorks, arrived.

The players gave conflicting evidence as to what happened next – with McDonald claiming Evans asked if he could get involved, while Evans claimed McDonald asked if he wanted sex with the victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

She told police she awoke the next morning “confused and dazed” and feared her drink may have been spiked.

She said: “My clothes were scattered around on the floor. I just didn’t know how I got there.”

 

The jury was played two video interviews she gave to police in which she described drinking four double vodkas and a shot of Sambuca.

“I felt tipsy but not out of control,” she said. “I usually drink more than that. I haven’t blacked out before, not being able to remember anything.”

The jury was also told that as the three were in bed, Jack Higgins, an “associate” of the players, and Ryan Roberts, Evans’ brother, watched through a window.

Video recordings found on Mr Higgins’ phone showed he had been filming or trying to film the incident.

Evans and McDonald, of Crewe, Cheshire, have been friends since joining Manchester City aged 10.

Despite being cleared, McDonald waited in the dock with Evans until the jury returned with his verdict.

 

Lawyers for Evans, whose first name is short for Chedwyn, may appeal against his conviction.

David Fish QC said today: “This is a sad day for Mr Evans finding himself at the bottom of the pit.”

He said his client’s promising career was “in ruins”. He added: “Its effect will be felt severely and quickly…. It will be a very difficult sentence to serve.”

A statement from Sheffield United, which signed Evans for £3million in 2009, said the club needed time “to consider the matter fully”.

DCI Steve Williams, of North Wales Police, said: “I would like to pay tribute to the courage of the victim.

“I sincerely hope that the guilty verdict will provide some closure on this horrendous ordeal.”

Nita Dowell, of the Crown Prosecution Service in Wales, said: “Evans took advantage of a vulnerable young woman who was in no fit state to consent to sexual activity.”

Article source: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/ched-evans-team-mate-brands-victim-801734

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