<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Orsan Senalp</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:orsan1234@gmail.com">orsan1234@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
Date: Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 3:06 PM<br>Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: <nettime> Facebook's Mood Study: Orwellian newspeak 2.0<br>To: <a href="mailto:networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org">networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org</a><br>
<br><br><div dir="auto"><div><br></div><div><br>Begin forwarded message:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><b>From:</b> nettime's avid reader <<a href="mailto:nettime@kein.org" target="_blank">nettime@kein.org</a>><br>
<b>Date:</b> 9 Jul 2014 07:53:13 GMT+2<br><b>To:</b> <a href="mailto:nettime-l@kein.org" target="_blank">nettime-l@kein.org</a><br><b>Subject:</b> <b>Re: <nettime> Facebook's Mood Study: Orwellian newspeak 2.0</b><br>
<br></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>Facebook's Psychological Experiments Connected to Department of Defense</span><br><span>Research on Civil Unrest</span><br><span></span><br><span><a href="http://scgnews.com/facebooks-psychological-experiments-connected-to-department-of-defense-research-on-civil-unrest" target="_blank">http://scgnews.com/facebooks-psychological-experiments-connected-to-department-of-defense-research-on-civil-unrest</a></span><br>
<span></span><br><span>01.Jul.2014 | SCG</span><br><span></span><br><span>It turns out that one of the researchers who ran Facebook's recent</span><br><span>psychological experiments received funding from the U.S. Department of</span><br>
<span>Defense to study the contagion of ideas</span><br><span></span><br><span>There has been quite a bit of chatter this past week after it was</span><br><span>revealed that a recent Facebook outage was the result of a psychological</span><br>
<span>experiment that the company conducted on a portion of its users without</span><br><span>their permission. The experiment, which was described in a paper</span><br><span>published by Facebook, and UCSF, tested the contagion of emotions on</span><br>
<span>social media by manipulating the content of personal feeds and measuring</span><br><span>how this impacted user behavior.</span><br><span></span><br><span>Over 600,000 users were used as guinea pigs without their consent, which</span><br>
<span>raises a number of serious ethical and legal questions (particularly due</span><br><span>to the fact that this study received federal funding), however there is</span><br><span>an even more disturbing angle to this story. It turns out that this</span><br>
<span>research was connected to a Department of Defense project called the</span><br><span>Minerva Initiative, which funds universities to model the dynamics,</span><br><span>risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.</span><br>
<span></span><br><span>In the official credits for the study conducted by Facebook you'll find</span><br><span>Jeffrey T. Hancock from Cornell University. If you go to the Minerva</span><br><span>initiative website you'll find that Jeffery Hancock received funding</span><br>
<span>from the Department of Defense for a study called "Cornell: Modeling</span><br><span>Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes". If you go to</span><br><span>the project site for that study you'll find a visualization program that</span><br>
<span>models the spread of beliefs and disease.</span><br><span></span><br><span>Cornell University is currently being funded for another DoD study right</span><br><span>now called "Cornell: Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social</span><br>
<span>Contagions" (you'll find the description for this project on the Minerva</span><br><span>Initiative's funding page).</span><br><span></span><br><span>The Department of Defense's investment in the mechanics of psychological</span><br>
<span>contagion and Facebook's assistance, have some very serious</span><br><span>implications, particularly when placed in context with other scandals</span><br><span>which have broken in the past two years.</span><br>
<span></span><br><span>First of all we know that Facebook willingly participated (and</span><br><span>presumably is still participating) in the NSA's PRISM program by giving</span><br><span>the agency unfettered access to user communications. We also know that</span><br>
<span>the U.S. government has invested heavily in technology used to track and</span><br><span>model the spread of opinions on social media.</span><br><span></span><br><span>The U.S. government hasn't sought these capabilities for the sake of</span><br>
<span>science. We know from the Cuban Twitter scandal, where the U.S. State</span><br><span>Department where got caught red handed attempting to topple the Cuban</span><br><span>government through social media, that these capabilities are already</span><br>
<span>being used for offensive operations. Combine that with the fact that the</span><br><span>U.S. Military got exposed in 2011 for developing 'sock puppet' software</span><br><span>to create fake online identities and spread propaganda and an ominous</span><br>
<span>picture snaps into focus.</span><br><span></span><br><span>The U.S. government is militarizing social media through a combination</span><br><span>of technology and social sciences, and Facebook is helping them.</span><br>
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