Facebook self-censorship: What happens to the posts you don’t publish?

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It's at this point that you reconsider your status update.
Photo by Slate

On Second Thought …
Facebook wants to know why you didn’t publish that status update you started writing.

By Jennifer Golbeck

The code in your browser that powers Facebook still knows what you typed—even if you decide not to publish it. It turns out that the things you explicitly choose not to share aren’t entirely private.

Facebook calls these unposted thoughts “self-censorship,” and insights into how it collects these nonposts can be found in a recent paper written by two Facebookers. Sauvik Das, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon and summer software engineer intern at Facebook, and Adam Kramer, a Facebook data scientist, have put online an article presenting their study of the self-censorship behavior collected from 5 million English-speaking Facebook users.

Read more:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/12/facebook_self_censorship_what_happens_to_the_posts_you_don_t_publish.html

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Kids Christmas Caroling at St. John of the Cross Parish, Ta’ Xbiex, Malta

Kids Christmas Caroling at St. John of the Cross Parish, Ta’ Xbiex, Malta: see video on web URL below:

Christmas Caroling St. John of the Cross Ta’ Xbiex Dec 2013 from Ivan M. Consiglio on Vimeo.

accompanied by their catechism tutors and parents, some pic snaps of the proceedings in the parish neighbourhood streets.

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A reminder to those poor souls live on air IN FRONT of the damn studio camera

This is a reminder to those poor souls IN FRONT of the damn camera, when live and on air: wait for the PRODUCER or the FLOOR MANAGER to signal you are flippin’ clear !!!

Sospesa la giornalista di Rainews24 Laura Tangherlini: ‘Me so rotta er ca…’

Laura Tangherlini, giornalista di Rai news 24: La bella e brava giornalista di Rai News 24è incappata in una gaffe tremenda durante un fuori onda del telegiornale che in pochissimo tempo ha fatto il giro della Rete

 

La gaffe della giornalista di Rai News 24 Laura Tangherlini (“Me so’ rotta er c….o!“) ha fatto il giro del web, e il video del suo fuori onda è stato cliccatissimo negli ultimi giorni. La trentunenne jesina, però, è stata sospesa dall’azienda, visto l’evidente danno di immagine causato. Ma che cosa è successo nello specifico?

Qualche giorno fa la Tangherlini, trentunenne marchigiana, durante la diretta del canale all news Rai dopo avere annunciato la pubblicità è incappata in un’esclamazione ben poco urbana, pensando di non essere più in onda. E così, dopo il garbato “Ci vediamo tra poco con gli aggiornamenti e le notizie. Restate con noi“, credendo di non avere più il microfono aperto si è lasciata andare a un commento (indubbiamente divertente) poco rispettoso della Rai: “Restatece voi, perché io me ne vado, può esse. Me so’ rotta er c….o!“.

Jesina di origini ma stabilitasi a Roma da ormai sei anni (dopo aver frequentato l’università anche a Bucarest), la giornalista di Rai News 24 ha evidentemente lasciato trasparire l’accento romano acquisito negli ultimi tempi. A dire la verità, l’errore – al di là della gaffe della giornalista – è stato della regia, che ha lasciato il microfono della Tangherlini aperto per molti secondi dopo il lancio della pubblicità. Il video della gaffe, come detto, è stato ripreso dai più importanti siti Internet, venendo visto da migliaia di persone.

La Rai non poteva che adottare un provvedimento disciplinare nei confronti della Tangherlini che, contattata al telefono dal Resto del Carlino, ha preferito non commentare la notizia. “Scusatemi, ho già avuto parecchi guai, non posso dire nulla“.
Autrice di un libro dedicato alle storie di profughi siriani (Siria in fuga, edito da Poiesis) frutto dei suoi viaggi in Giordania e Libano, la giornalista marchigiana ha conosciuto una popolarità inaspettata, e forse non voluta, negli ultimi giorni, come dimostrano i tanti commenti postati su Youtube sotto il video. Non solo: anche la sua pagina Facebook è diventata visitatissima nell’ultimo periodo.
Laura Tangherlini, tra l’altro, è anche in corsa per vincere il premio di telegiornalista dell’anno (concorso virtuale, avviato su Facebook), in una sfida all’ultimo clic con Barbara Capponi: chissà che questa sua gaffe non contribuisca ad aumentare il numero di voti per lei.

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Is charging for digital news a good thing?

Once unheard of, it soon will be the practice of more than 40% of U.S. dailies

“The New York Times” now has 727,000 digital subscribers.
(Photo: Angus Oborn, Getty Images/Lonely Planet Images)

Charging for digital news — erecting paywalls — is not a panacea for the many problems newspapers face as they struggle to adapt in the Internet era. But it’s an important arrow in the quiver. It’s a critical new source of revenue for news outlets that desperately need them in the wake of a steep decline in ad dollars.

Some early attempts to charge for digital content were short-lived, among them TimesSelect, which placed New York Times columnists behind a paywall, so there was much skepticism when the paper began charging for digital content in March 2011.

The New York Times now has 727,000 digital subscribers. While advertising revenue continues to shrink, the newspaper industry’s circulation revenue rose by 5% last year, thanks to those digital pennies. It was the first such increase since 2003.

Change had come so quickly that it’s hard to remember how bold and against-the-grain the Times’ move was. For years, the prevailing mantra was that on the Internet, information wants to be free. Digital enthusiasts portrayed it as virtually the moral equivalent of a constitutional right.

Newspaper companies, understandably baffled by the digital maelstrom engulfing them, figured they better get in on the action. They started posting their expensively gathered news content on the Web, for free, all the while charging for it in print. The hope was that their handiwork would attract lots of digital readers and that advertising dollars would follow.

READ FULL ARTICLE: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/rieder/2013/11/20/charging-for-digital-content/3650943/?goback=%2Egde_45264_member_5812046841352585216#%21

FOLLOW THE DDEBATE ON LINKEDIN.COM: http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&srchtype=discussedNews&gid=45264&item=5812046841352585216&type=member&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_pd-ttl-hdp&fromEmail=&ut=2uSj_xnmbJPm01

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EBRD fraudulently helping Latvia to enter the Euro currency, see video – “Lettonia”‏

The EBRD is helping Latvia to enter the Euro currency by fraud, take a look at this video “Lettonia”, ‏by Italian journalist Mauro Caterina.

During the global financial crisis, which erupted in 2008, Latvia was on the verge of bankruptcy. In 2009, the country’s second largest bank, Parex banka, was nationalized and Latvia asks the Troika (IMF, World Bank and Eu) a loan of 7.5 billion euro. Even the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) participates in the rescue of Parex banka. Indeed, in 2009 the EBRD decide to buy 136 million euro in shares. This is the story of a fraud which has as protagonists the EBRD, the Latvian government and Parex banka. All this has been publicly denounced by the whistleblower John Christmas, American banker who worked for Parex banka and now accuses the EBRD to have used the money of European taxpayers for financial fraud.

It is a huge Russian Mafia crime in Europe involving the “EBRD” (“BERS” in Italian). The victims include all people of Malta and Italy, because the EBRD is helping Latvia to enter the Euro currency by fraud. This fraud is so large (billions of euros affecting millions of people) that it should be in the “Wall Street Journal” and “Financial Times.” The main challenge in bringing this to public attention is that 99% of journalists cannot understand the fraud.

The fraud is very similar to Enron, except it is in Europe and the victims are taxpayers. Journalists almost never understand the technical details of the Enron fraud, but it got huge media exposure anyway.

Background: EBRD helping Latvia and Lithuania to falsify financial statements

John Christmas is the whistleblower from Parex Bank of Latvia. Parex was a specialist in offshore deposit services for Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Central Asia. Parex employees discussed links to the KGB and Parex was intermediary in major corruption cases throughout the region. John Christmas has been threatened and exiled since 2005.

The threats and most of the whistleblowing have never been investigated except for a limited investigation by the FBI in 2007. The United States Department of Justice collected a record-breaking settlement from Daimler in 2010, and one of the frauds from my whistleblowing tied in with the case. That fraud is explained on the website www.LawlessLatvia.com and can be confirmed, however Latvian officials did nothing until 2013 when they announced nobody would be prosecuted because the “statute of limitations” expired.

Meanwhile, the Latvian government has worked in cooperation with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to cover-up the truth about Parex. Parex collapsed in late 2008 and got bailed out in 2008 and 2009 by the Latvian government (funded by the IMF and European Union) and EBRD. Evidence indicates that the EBRD transaction was fraudulent – an announced stock “sale” that was reversible with an undisclosed “put option” thus making it effectively a “loan.” Because of this, the financial statements of Latvia are currently fraudulent.

The fraud is explained on three videos on the “LatviavEBRD” Youtube channel. The videos have over a quarter-million views. Also, an independent journalist Mauro Caterina produced the video cited at the top of this blog entry, about the fraud. The EBRD refuses to respond.

John Christmas has a background in banking. He has been employed by commercial banks in the United States and Europe in a variety of functions ranging from commercial lending to capital markets and investment banking. As a self-employed property developer, he initiated the Riga International Business Park project in Latvia. He is a citizen of Latvia, and has been a resident of Malta since 2009. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics at Dartmouth College and a Master of Business Administration degree in Finance at Cornell University. He currently holds positions in Malta and the Cayman Islands. He is a member of the UK CFA Society with an Investment Management Certificate.

John Christmas believes EBRD employees refuse to respond because they want to pretend that they don’t know about the whistleblowing. It is a strategy of maintaining “plausible deniability” for when their actions inevitably blow up in the future. While the EBRD remained silent, it was interesting for John Christmas to receive information about a new similar fraud in Lithuania.

A journalist interviewed him about Parex and the EBRD a few months ago and claimed that senior people told him during interviews that the EBRD’s 2013 bailout of Ukio Bank in Lithuania was similarly fraudulent. He never published the interviews, and he made it clear that he was afraid for his personal safety. A pattern has emerged.

EBRD officials are conspiring with bureaucrats in Eastern Europe to help them to temporarily cover-up frauds so that these countries can sneak into the Eurozone and issue bonds without cracking down on the corruption that
is burning up their tax revenue.

Can the European Central Bank and Eurostat please contact the EBRD and the finance ministries of Latvia and Lithuania to ask them to explain the EBRD bailouts of Parex and Ukio? Are the allegations true that in both situations, the EBRD conducted false/reversible “investments” in worthless assets using money from unknowing taxpayers to protect local oligarchs and falsify national financial statements?

The integrity of the Eurozone is at risk if this problem is ignored. John Christmas fears a repeat of the situation in 2001 when Goldman Sachs helped Greece to hide part of it’s debt so it could enter the Eurozone. The result was disaster for all Europeans including Greeks. This information needs to be distributed to hundreds of relevant people and John Christmas asks all of them to write to the EBRD.

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Facebook Self-Censorship: Posts You Write But Don’t Publish Tracked | TIME.com

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The social network monitors what you say — and what you don’t say.

Chances are, Facebook doesn’t really care what you almost chose to post on your ex-boyfriend’s wall one drunken night before deciding you really didn’t want him to read it. Unless, of course, your ex-boyfriend works at Facebook.

Read more: Facebook Self-Censorship: Posts You Write But Don’t Publish Tracked | TIME.com

http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/16/facebook-is-keeping-track-of-every-post-you-write-and-dont-publish/

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Malta in the media’s cross hairs on its sale of citizenship

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The sale of Maltese citizenship has stirred lots of international media interest, most of it taking a bad and dim view of the whole scheme.

It may have been a bit hasty, but it remains amazing how some larger states get away with worse shit, whilst smaller states are badgered and bullied!

European citizenship for sale
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/business/2013/12/16/dnt-soares-malta-mulitpassport-europe.cnn.html

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Internet: Bots Responsible for More than 60% of All Web Traffic | TIME.com

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If you are visiting this page, the chances are that you are not a human, at least according to research.

A study by Incapsula suggests 61.5% of all website traffic is now generated by bots. The security firm said that was a 21% rise on last year’s figure of 51%.

Some of these automated software tools are malicious – stealing data or posting ads for scams in comment sections.

Online traffic from bots in 2013  — automated softwarethat include everything from hacking tools to spammers to search engine catalogers — is up 21 percent from 2012, when 51 percent of website visits already came from bots. Thirty-one percent of bots are malicious, according to the study, but spam bots decreased from two percent of traffic last year to half-a-percent in 2013.

Read more:
Internet: Bots Responsible for More than 60% of All Web Traffic | TIME.com

http://techland.time.com/2013/12/13/robots-have-taken-over-the-internet/

And in more detail at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25346235

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Obama’s Orwellian Image Control

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Obama’s Orwellian Image Control
By SANTIAGO LYON
Published: December 11, 2013 in The New York Times

THE Internet has been abuzz over the spectacle of President Obama and the prime ministers of Britain and Denmark snapping a photo of themselves — a “selfie,” to use the mot du jour — with a smartphone at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela in South Africa on Tuesday.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/12/opinion/obamas-orwellian-image-control.html?ref=opinion&_r=3&

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Facebook Admits Organic Reach Is Falling Short, Urges Marketers to Buy Ads

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Facebook is being more blunt about the fact that marketers are going to have to pay for reach.

By Cotton Delo (cdelo@adage.com)
originally published on Thu, 05 Dec 2013 07:00:00 -0500

If they haven’t already, many marketers will soon see the organic reach of their posts on the social network drop off, and this time Facebook is acknowledging it. In a sales deck obtained by Ad Age that was sent out to partners last month, the company states plainly: “We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.”

It’s a big shift from the stance Facebook took a year ago, when agencies including GroupM called out the fact that posts published by clients were being seen by fewer of their fans.

At the time, Facebook contended that algorithmic changes had been made to weed out spammy, non-engaging content, but that the median reach of pages hadn’t budged. It particularly objected to the inference that the changes had been made to spur marketers to spend more on ads to make up for lost reach.

But now Facebook is making the case for marketers to do just that. In the document, titled “Generating business results on Facebook,” the paragraph in which the impending drop-off in organic reach is revealed concludes with an ad pitch; marketers are told they should consider paid distribution “to maximize delivery of your message in news feed.”

The three-page document also contains a section that repositions how marketers should think about fan acquisition: as a tool for making paid advertising more effective. While free distribution of content is mentioned, it’s the third business benefit listed after “improve advertising effectiveness” (through ads with social context, which is enabled by a substantial fan base) and “lower cost for paid distribution” (since Facebook makes it cheaper to deliver ads with social context.)

In other words, the main reason to acquire fans isn’t to build a free distribution channel for content; it’s to make future Facebook ads work better.

“Your brand can fully benefit from having fans when most of your ads show social context, which increases advertising effectiveness and efficiency,” the document states.

The fact that less and less of brands’ content will surface is described as a result of increased competition for limited space, since “content that is eligible to be shown in news feed is increasing at a faster rate than people’s ability to consume it.” Publishers are one factor in the heightened competition, since Facebook announced earlier this week that links to news articles will be given more prominence , especially on mobile devices, via an algorithm change.

A Facebook spokesman confirmed that the overall organic reach of Facebook posts from brands is in slow decline.

“We’re getting to a place where because more people are sharing more things, the best way to get your stuff seen if you’re a business is to pay for it,” he said.

The drop-off in organic reach continues to be a touchy subject for brands — especially those who invested in growing their fan bases. And it’s going to oblige them to up their content creation game in order to emerge organically from the morass of stories eligible to enter users’ news feeds, according to Digitas VP-Social Marketing Alex Jacobs. But having paid distribution on Facebook is also a given if they want to maintain the reach they may have once had when Facebook was a younger network and users had fewer connections to bombard them with content.

“If brands were to continue reaching the same amount of people as a percentage of their fan base, [Facebook would] be giving preferential treatment to them over a user,” he said. “It’s just the fact of the matter in terms of platform growth and the amount of content that’s getting posted.”

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