I’m convinced: death to Facebook

One of Facebook’s very own internal reports on the state of Facebook has seen the light of day, and it is revolting.

Its revelations include:

  • As of October 2019, around 15,000 Facebook pages with a majority US audience were being run out of Kosovo and Macedonia, known bad actors during the 2016 election.
  • Collectively, those troll-farm pages—which the report treats as a single page for comparison purposes—reached 140 million US users monthly and 360 million global users weekly. Walmart’s page reached the second-largest US audience at 100 million.
  • The troll farm pages also combined to form:
    • the largest Christian American page on Facebook, 20 times larger than the next largest—reaching 75 million US users monthly, 95% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
    • the largest African-American page on Facebook, three times larger than the next largest—reaching 30 million US users monthly, 85% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
    • the second-largest Native American page on Facebook, reaching 400,000 users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
    • the fifth-largest women’s page on Facebook, reaching 60 million US users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
  • Troll farms primarily affect the US but also target the UK, Australia, India, and Central and South American countries.
  • Facebook has conducted multiple studies confirming that content more likely to receive user engagement (likes, comments, and shares) is more likely of a type known to be bad. Still, the company has continued to rank content in user’s newsfeeds according to what will receive the highest engagement.
  • Facebook forbids pages from posting content merely copied and pasted from other parts of the platform but does not enforce the policy against known bad actors. This makes it easy for foreign actors who do not speak the local language to post entirely copied content and still reach a massive audience. At one point, as many as 40% of page views on US pages went to those featuring primarily unoriginal content or material of limited originality.
  • Troll farms previously made their way into Facebook’s Instant Articles and Ad Breaks partnership programs, which are designed to help news organizations and other publishers monetize their articles and videos. At one point, thanks to a lack of basic quality checks, as many as 60% of Instant Article reads were going to content that had been plagiarized from elsewhere. This made it easy for troll farms to mix in unnoticed, and even receive payments from Facebook.

Troll farms. It’s all troll farms, as far as you can see. This service I signed up for to keep in touch with family has instead become a service for Eastern European assholes to keep in touch with me.

Although, I guess things do change. If Facebook had stayed true to its original purpose, we’d be using it to track hot girls on campus. The legitimate social functions were just a passing phase in Facebook’s process of becoming whatever the hell it is now.

I’ll be posting my announcement that I’m leaving Facebook right now, and let it sit there for a few days…and then I’ll nuke my account during my Sunday livestream. That’ll be fun.

Depressingly accurate lesson

If there’s one thing this year has taught us, it’s that Americans are staggeringly selfish. Not just like your meat-and-potatoes “don’t want to share” selfish. Total apocalyptic “I will let you die rather than inconvenience myself” selfish.

There is such a deep vein of this selfishness running through the country that you can get rich, or elected to the highest political office, or run any corrupt scam you want, if you can just tap into it. It has infiltrated our educational institutions, our churches, our businesses, and our media. It’s the rot that’s going to destroy the country.

Good luck to the future society that crawls over our corpse to take over the world. I hope you don’t catch the disease from us.

Futile whining

Ouch. This article hits pretty hard. I’d say it’s an accurate summary of how many faculty feel as a result of the pandemic.

A lot of people get into higher ed because they feel like this is a stable profession. So much of the higher ed workforce over the past few decades has changed in ways that don’t normally break through to public perception. I would say less than half of many faculties are tenured. Other people are contingent, hired every year, every semester. And the workload in a lot of student-facing positions is totally overwhelming for people too. These are people who are working really long hours, often on the weekend. The pay isn’t great, and they don’t really see an opportunity for professional advancement. That was an underlying issue before the pandemic, but COVID showed that the lows can be even lower than what people had anticipated.

To me, the theme of these breaking-point moments is when campuses were asking their employees to give up their own personal lives, to put their health in jeopardy during the pandemic without really acknowledging what that took and what the workers were sacrificing.

Seth Stevenson: As these schools reopen, what kind of reactions are you hearing about mask and vaccine mandates, and teaching virtually as opposed to in person?

If you’re at a public institution, the policies your school can adopt have always been in line with what the state allows. But because masks and vaccines have become so politicized, it’s a good chance that, in Republican-leaning states, you’re not going to have mandates, and people might not even be tested regularly. A lot of schools don’t put up the resources for that. If you’re at a private institution, you’re going to have a lot more flexibility. The campus leaders there are far more likely to mandate masks and vaccines and schools in states that voted for President Joe Biden. So there’s a real anger, particularly in red-state public schools, of people not feeling like the health and safety of their family members is being valued.

The people in charge of these schools are kind of a tough spot, right? They’ve got a pretty complicated challenge to deal with.

I think there is an acknowledgment that, especially at state institutions, to some degree their hands are tied. And I think that acknowledgment is far overshadowed by a sense of, Wow, this institution, my employer, there’s a lot of hypocrisy here.

There’s a podcast associated with it, too. There’s been an interesting rupture as a consequence of the pandemic, and most importantly, the fumbling approach of the institution to it. I’ve had a huge loss of faith in the university and the university administration — I don’t trust them at all to operate in the best interests of the faculty or students.

Also, the politicization is here in the blue states, too. I did not care much for our Democratic governor before, since his primary strength in the election was that he’d appeal to outstate Minnesota, the rural, red part of the state, and that’s what he has done. All along he has taken the minimal steps, and he’s folded up the tent as soon as he could (for instance, abandoning the mask mandate prematurely). I trust him even less now.

Boy, it sure feels good to vent on a blog that will have no effect and that the administration would never read and where my concerns can be totally ignored. It’s so nice and reassuring to know I don’t matter.

What kind of ridiculous poison will they ingest next to avoid a simple vaccination?

Back in the long-ago, when I did animal surgeries, I was familiar with Betadine. It was a routine part of our prep work. You anesthetize the cat, and then you put lots of Nair on the surgical field to remove the hair, then you wipe off the hair with the Nair and use a razor to shave off any remaining stubble, and finally, you swab the skin thoroughly with a Betadine solution to sterilize it. It was potent stuff. End result: a bald cat with clean bright reddish-orange skin.

I would never have dreamed of drinking or gargling that stuff. Why would anyone in their right mind do something that stupid?

I did not consider the lunacy of anti-vaxxers.

As if attempting to one-up last week’s stupidity with regards to ivermectin, anti-vaxxers on Facebook and Twitter are advocating for a new and unproven Covid-19 treatment: Betadine, an antiseptic used to treat cuts and scrapes.

Povidone iodine, often sold under the brand-name Betadine, is an iodine-based treatment largely for topical use that kills bacteria. It’s a “commonly used cleanser in the ER and OR,” says Kenneth Weinberg, an emergency room physician in New York City. “If you’re in the ER and someone has a wound to sew it up, you use it to clean with.” When told that anti-vaxxers had taken to gargling with Betadine, Weinberg said, “Fuck me! Of course they are.”

They’re also using 1% Betadine eye-drops. This is insane.

Needless to say, the side effects of ingesting Betadine can be nasty. Weinberg said that when he was doing his residency, he treated a patient who went into kidney failure after drinking iodine and had to be on dialysis (he eventually recovered, but only after he’d started urinating reddish-brown). “I’m sure it would cause all kinds of GI symptoms as well if you ate or drank enough of it,” he says. When asked if gargling Betadine could reduce the effects of Covid-19 or prevent transmission, Weinberg said, “Fuck no.”

I think I like that doctor.

If I may make a suggestion: these people are using it improperly. In my experience, you always had to treat with Nair first, then the Betadine. I’m sure it would improve the efficacy if they first drank a few tablespoons of that stuff, then gargled with Betadine. (SUGGESTION MADE IN JEST: do not consume calcium hydroxide. I don’t want to see that the next mad fad among these wackaloons is something I joked about.)

Hey, everyone. GET THE VACCINATION. Jesus.

I’m mad as hell, too

Like Amanda Marcotte, I’m tired of the WATBs who have decided to perpetuate the pandemic as a political game.

…who I am mad at is the willfully unvaccinated, people who, out of irrationality and often raw Republican tribalism, got us into this mess in the first place. I am incandescent with rage that millions of Americans are putting it on the rest of us to protect them from COVID-19, just so they can avoid a simple, free shot that is available at every pharmacy.
Republicans, always ready to destroy lives for some perceived political gain, aren’t even hiding anymore that they think being pro-COVID is good politics. As CNN reports, there’s “a GOP-wide effort to use the fears and frustrations of Americans worried about another round of school closures and lockdowns as cudgels against their Democratic opponents.”
But, of course, the return of restrictions is the direct result of Republican efforts to dissuade Americans from getting vaccinated and keep those COVID-19 case rates high. It’s important to remember that this is still a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Case rates are rising rapidly among the unvaccinated, who tend to reject other prevention measures along with vaccines. There are also breakthrough infections, though they affect fewer than one-third of 1% of the vaccinated.

It’s not just the inconvenience of wearing a mask these awful people are rejecting — it’s the vaccine, which is incomprehensible to me. It only takes a few minutes, you walk in to a pharmacy, you fill out a little paperwork, and you walk out with greatly enhanced resistance to the virus. Why would you not do that? The right-wingers have to invent all kinds of nonsensical excuses about microchips and imaginary serious side-effects to justify their recalcitrants. Meanwhile, the rest of us get to suffer the larger inconvenciences, and the pandemic continues on.

Or worse. Here’s a professor at Texas A&M who had the experience of a student dying.

It’s not worth it if even one student has to die to get an education. And Texas is one of the worst.

In Texas, Republican leadership and right-wing ideology has led to low vaccination rates and subsequently to hospitals overflowing with COVID-19 patients. Gov. Greg Abbott, being a Republican, refuses to do anything to mitigate the spread of the disease. So instead, he’s leaning on hospitals to deprive other people of necessary medical care, such as delaying surgeries, to keep hospital resources free to tend to the waves of unvaccinated COVID-19 patients. However angry I am at losing my gym class (also important for physical health, I’ll point out), it likely pales in comparison to the rage of someone who has to put off surgery to fix a debilitating but not fatal condition, all because some Fox News junkie thought a quick jab in the arm takes away his “freedom”. Not being able to walk because your knee surgery keeps getting delayed is the far greater loss of freedom.

I’m doing my part, wearing a mask indoors everywhere I go. My university now requires a mask for everyone, and has also mandated vaccines, but everywhere I go in town, no one is wearing a mask…and we know that only 50% of the population of Stevens county is vaccinated, in part because this is a largely Republican part of the state. Would you believe that only 46% of the Trumpkins are vaccinated? They’re dragging the rest of us down!

A husband’s revenge

Yesterday was Mary’s birthday. I performed the ritual.

“What can I get you?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Can I take you out for a nice dinner?”

“No.”

“Can I cook you a nice dinner? Whatever you’d like.”

“There’s some acorn squash we need to use up.”

“That’s it? Just bake some squash?”

“Yes.”

So I obeyed. Nothing special. One squash, baked. Done.

Today is the day after her birthday. The geas is lifted, I can do whatever I want. So tonight I whipped up some Cod Provençal: cod cooked in fresh tomatoes from her garden, onions, garlic, olives, mushrooms, corn, and lots of basil. Don’t tell her it was almost as easy as the squash.

See what happens when you don’t give me good ideas?

Boghossian quits! PSU students can celebrate!

The infamous ignoramus Peter Boghossian has resigned from Portland State University, and of course he does it with a long-winded tedious whine about how he was oppressed and his free speech abridged. You can read the whole thing if you want in an appropriate venue, the Daily Mail. I just want to single out one misbegotten complaint.

Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.

…

I never once believed — nor do I now — that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.

Oh, bullshit. If you want to expose them to the full range of ideas, from the sublime to the ridiculous, just tell ’em to go browse Facebook. This is not how teaching works. Part of what you must do is act as an informed guide, who can show students the best ideas and help them to understand why they are good. What do they learn from bringing in a flat-earther? Nothing of value, except that they should follow the example of their teacher and accommodate madness and stupidity. I would never, for instance, give a creationist free reign in one of my classes to explain his bad ideas; I will instead use that time more productively to explain why those ideas are bad. If a student wants to discuss such ideas with me, I’m happy to do so and will treat them respectfully, but I will not and should not give such claims the benefit of my attention without ripping them to shreds.

If a student were to leave my classes without having been led to the knowledge that informs us about the shape of the world, the age of the Earth, or the patterns of our changing climate, I would be a bad teacher. Like Boghossian. But then, maybe he’s one of those namby-pamby feels-over-facts guys who doesn’t believe that some ideas are correct and others are not.

Now we just have to wait for the other shoe to drop. I don’t think he would have quit without some fall-back position already lined up. Which conservative think-tank will be paying his salary in the future, do you think?