Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I swear, each month of 2020 will have its own history degree.

Consistently wrong since 2002

How do you get liars to care about the truth?

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Are you … from the future?

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

The house always wins.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

No one could have predicted…

Shelter in place is one thing. shelter in pants is quite another.

There’s some extremely good trouble headed their way.

Han shot first.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Naturally gregarious and alpha

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

They are all Michael Cohen now.

Good luck with your asparagus.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

… makes me wish i had hoarded more linguine

The willow is too close to the house.

You are here: Home / The Stupidity Concentrator

The Stupidity Concentrator

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Is it shocking to anyone that the anti-vax movement’s Internet HQ is Facebook, the AOL* of the 2010’s?

The Guardian found that Facebook search results for groups and pages with information about vaccines were dominated by anti-vaccination propaganda, and that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm steers viewers from fact-based medical information toward anti-vaccine misinformation.

I wonder why:

Facebook enables advertisers to promote content to nearly 900,000 people interested in “vaccine controversies”, the Guardian has found.

Other groups of people that advertisers can pay to reach on Facebook include those interested in “Dr Tenpenny on Vaccines”, which refers to anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny, and “informed consent”, which is language that anti-vaccine propagandists have adopted to fight vaccination laws.

For all the talk of AI and “algorithms”, the algorithm that Facebook and YouTube use is pretty simple:  find out what people who care about topic X search for and watch, and give them more of it.  This is a recipe for the aggregation of stupidity when there’s a lot of idiocy surrounding topic X. In the case of vaccines, only people who are looking for excuses to shore up their stupid intuitions about vaccines are searching on social media, so the social media “AI” clumps them all together and gives them a playground where their dumb shit can fester and grow.  The non-stupid parents either just take their pediatrician’s word, or they use Google to find recommendations from trusted authorities like the CDC.

Zuckerberg and other tech bros say they want to do something about this, but it costs money to tune their algorithms, and it also costs money to curtail advertising.  So they make noises about changing, but when I searched Google today for “facebook vaccine” the first two results that aren’t news stories are Facebook pages for anti-vax grifters (the “Vaccine Resistance Movement” and “Vactruth.com”).

These assholes need regulation.

* This isn’t really fair – AOL was where the dummies lived, but it wasn’t a stupidity concentrator.

Reader Interactions

108Comments

  3. 3.

    Derelict

    “algorithm that Facebook and YouTube use is pretty simple: find out what people who care about topic X search for and watch, and give them more of it.”

    YouTube, I’m not so sure about that. I visit nothing but Leftwing blogs, and search for mostly technical engineering-type information through YouTube. Yet, the YouTube algorithm consistently delivers recommendations for nothing BUT Rightwing nonsense–Fox News, videos of Trump’s latest speech, all of Trump’s campaign commercials, Greg Guttfeild nonsense, etc.

    So not so much giving me more of what I want as trying to force-feed me Rightwing propaganda. And that’s no accident.

  4. 4.

    satby

    I just now had to rebut an anti-vax post from someone who should know better. Don’t ignore them when you see them, fight back. Most people share without thinking; some share things they don’t agree with, not realizing their contrary comment doesn’t always share with it. I stay in it because it allows me to stay in touch with friends in other countries, so while I stay there it’s important to fight the disinformation when I can.

  10. 10.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Baud: The other day, I saw someone mention the FBization of Instagram. I think they were talking about practices rather than ownership, but I’m not sure. I’m an Instagram failure. I’ve tried to post there consistently because I write YA and that’s where my audience is, but I can’t figure out how to use it in a way I like. I just prefer words.

  12. 12.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Baud: Hey, if Baud 2020 is going to take off, you have to make selfies for twitter. I look forward to seeing them :-)

  14. 14.

    The Midnight Lurker

    I dunno… the needle on my Stupid-Shit-O-Meter has been stuck in the red for a couple of years now. I changed the battery, but…

    And I just saw that Chris Wallace has been branded a ‘traitor’ by Fox viewers because he was ‘too tough’ on Lumbergh or someone, by pointing out their rank hypocracy or something.

    Yeah… must be the batteries.

  15. 15.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Derelict: Agreed. Most of my YouTube consumption is Hindi movie music, recipes, how to tech videos but YouTube keeps recommending rancid propaganda RWNJ propaganda videos. This is after I have chosen all the do not track options on Google.

  19. 19.

    RSA

    Sometimes I’ll see arguments, even from well-informed technical people, that filtering is too difficult and expensive (e.g. by relying on human judges) to be practical. They don’t seem to notice how much they sound like polluting energy companies, who would just LOVE to install mitigation devices if it weren’t for the cost. One of the challenges is that it’s much easier to measure physical pollution and estimate its costs to all of us than is the case with “social” pollution.

  20. 20.

    satby

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: @Baud: yeah, FB owns Instagram, and that is where most people under 40 post. And once FB bought Instagram the ads really became pervasive. I seldom use it because I think it’s boring (seriously, I don’t care how your lunch looks), but I glance and post to it occasionally.
    Dorothy, try just posting scenes reminiscent of scenes in your books and tie back to the book with a comment like “this is how I envisioned xxx”.
    It’s a harder medium for verbal rather than spacial types (for me too).

  26. 26.

    Leto

    NATO Group Catfished Soldiers to Prove a Point About Privacy

    The group “attempted to answer three questions,” Nora Biteniece, a software engineer who helped design the project, told WIRED. “The first question is, What can we find out about a military exercise just from open source data? What can we find out about the participants from open source data? And, can we use all this data to influence the participants’ behaviors against their given orders?”

    The researchers discovered that you can find out a lot from open source data, including Facebook profiles and people-search websites. And yes, the data can be used to influence members of the armed forces. The total cost of the scheme? Sixty dollars, suggesting a frighteningly low bar for any malicious actor looking to manipulate people online.

    …

    To recruit soldiers to the pages, they used targeted Facebook advertising. Those pages then promoted the closed groups the researchers had created. Inside the groups, the researchers used their phony accounts to ask the real service members questions about their battalions and their work. They also used these accounts to “friend” service members. According to the report, Facebook’s Suggested Friends feature proved helpful in surfacing additional targets.

    …

    But the StratCom report shows that Facebook’s efforts to crack down on this activity are having only middling success. Of the three pages the group created, one was shut down within a matter of hours, while the other two were cut off two weeks later after being reported to Facebook. Two out of the five phony profiles they created were never suspended. Neither were the closed groups. And StratCom’s experiment was tiny in comparison to the scams that some bad actors run, using hundreds of accounts, profiles, and pages.

    “We did this to test social media companies’ statements that they’re doing a lot to investigate and protect against malicious activity,” Bay says. “Obviously if it takes two people three weeks to find vulnerabilities within this context, they’re not doing enough.”

  31. 31.

    SFAW

    Re: anti-vaxxers:

    On Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me this weekend, Alonzo Bodden had a novel proposal to give the Traitor-in-Chief his wall: ship all the anti-vaxxers to the border, have them create a human “wall.” [He also noted that the cages to keep them are already there, a comment which drew a “Whoa!” (or something like it) from the audience.]

  32. 32.

    Spanky

    @Mathguy: McNamee has some pretty good insights (meaning I agree with them). This:

    The culture into which Facebook was born was this deeply libertarian philosophy that was espoused by their first investor, Peter Thiel, and the other members of the so-called “PayPal mafia”.

    They were almost single-handedly responsible for creating the social generation of companies. And their insights were brilliant. Their ideas about how to grow companies were revolutionary and extraordinarily successful. The challenge was that they also had a very different philosophy from the prior generations of Silicon Valley. Their notion was that disruption was perfectly reasonable because you weren’t actually responsible for anybody but yourself, so you weren’t responsible for the consequences of your actions.

    That philosophy got baked into their companies in this idea that you could have a goal – in Facebook’s case, connecting the whole world on one network – and that goal would be so important that it justified whatever means were necessary to get there.

    Of course, becoming a multi-billionaire in the process doesn’t hurt, either. But yeah, fuckin’ Libertarians.

  34. 34.

    SFAW

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    FTFY Free to a first time customer.

    Why are you telling Prufrock for Fuck The Fucking Yankees? Doesn’t seem relevant.

    [Still missing Steve Gilliard, in whose honor I writed that.]

  35. 35.

    Spanky

    @Bess: I didn’t even know Rush were still touring. And come to think of it, I can’t recall a single song of theirs.

  36. 36.

    CliosFanboy

    @Derelict: I don;t watch political videos and I rarely get RWNJs on my suggested list. generally I watch \music videos and clips from favorite old SciFi TV shows, so that’s what I see suggested.

  37. 37.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @RSA:

    One of the challenges is that it’s much easier to measure physical pollution and estimate its costs to all of us than is the case with “social” pollution.

    That’s easier than you think. Social pollution has infected 27% of the American electorate.

  38. 38.

    John S.

    @Spanky:

    Obligatory John Rogers quote:

    There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

  40. 40.

    Splitting Image

    @Derelict:

    YouTube, I’m not so sure about that. I visit nothing but Leftwing blogs, and search for mostly technical engineering-type information through YouTube. Yet, the YouTube algorithm consistently delivers recommendations for nothing BUT Rightwing nonsense–Fox News, videos of Trump’s latest speech, all of Trump’s campaign commercials, Greg Guttfeild nonsense, etc.

    So not so much giving me more of what I want as trying to force-feed me Rightwing propaganda. And that’s no accident.

    Youtube tracks you when you watch a video embedded on somebody else’s website, and their algorithm is simply too stupid to understand that bloggers often embed videos of politicians they hate and make caustic remarks about them. I used to read Slacktivist very regularly, and Youtube was constantly recommending videos about various “End of the World” conspiracies.

    That died down when I started going to Fred’s blog less often. I still get recommendations about Trump, as well as other Republicans who tend to be pilloried here and on other blogs I read (Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, etc.) Youtube’s algorithm simply assumes that if you watch a video about Marco Rubio doing something stupid, you must like Marco Rubio and duly supplies you with content from his adoring supporters. Ditto Trump, et al.

    Incidentally, Republicans get the same thing in reverse when they hate-watch videos about Obama or Hillary Clinton, then run to Twitter to cry about the conspiracy against conservatives.

  42. 42.

    Another Scott

    At least 922 people have died in the Measles epidemic in Madagascar. So far.

    (via Cheryl’s Twitter feed)

    Vlad’s fingers are all over the anti-vax stuff as well. He’s everywhere. BBC from 2018:

    Social media bots and Russian trolls have been spreading disinformation about vaccines on Twitter to create social discord and distribute malware, US researchers say.

    Troll accounts that had attempted to influence the US election had also been tweeting about vaccines, a study says.

    Many posted both pro- and anti-vaccination messages to create “false equivalency”, the study found.

    It examined thousands of tweets sent between 2014 and 2017.

    Vaccination was being used by trolls and sophisticated bots as a “wedge issue”, said Mark Dredze from Johns Hopkins University.

    “By playing both sides, they erode public trust in vaccination, exposing us all to the risk of infectious diseases,” he said.

    […]

    I know Popehat would say it’s not the RICO, but, maybe it really is the RICO…

    Grr…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  44. 44.

    tobie

    There is a candidate who has made digital privacy and regulating the big tech firms a central plank in her Presidential bid. Given that just about every aspect of our life is digitized at this point from social media to home appliances to credit cards and bus passes, it’s probably worth taking a listen.

  45. 45.

    Spanky

    Maybe about as far OT as you can get, but let us pause a moment in praise of Dick’s.

    A year ago, Dick’s Sporting Goods caught the national spotlight when the retailer said it would stop selling modern sporting rifles at its Field & Stream stores following the massacre at a Parkland, Fla., high school.

    But the Findlay-based chain didn’t stop there, and neither did the public’s response, which ranged from calls to support the retailer’s social stance to vows of never setting foot in a Dick’s store again. Sales in the year since have taken a hit as well, but analysts say that’s not the whole story.

    The company isn’t backing down and that may not hurt it too deeply in the end.

    Dick’s didn’t use half measures when it made its decision to drop the modern sporting rifles. Since February 2018, the retailer also said it would not return the rifles to the manufacturer, saying instead it would destroy the guns and send the parts to a salvage company to be recycled.

    And recently, Dick’s went a step further. It began a test removing virtually all of the hunting products — a low-margin business — from 10 of its stores where the department was underperforming, replacing it with things like batting cages for customers to test their swing.

  46. 46.

    David Evans

    Google (facebook moon landing). The first page of results is all about whether the landings were faked, with a clear majority for “yes” Sample argument:
    “They can put electric cars on the moon in the 60’s but the public can’t have them today in America. Yeah right.”

  47. 47.

    Brachiator

    Is it shocking to anyone that the anti-vax movement’s Internet HQ is Facebook, the AOL* of the 2010’s?

    So what? This is dumb. Eliminate or regulate Facebook and idiots will just congregate somewhere else.

    Some of this faux outrage used to be leveled against tv, magazines and newspapers. It’s hard to regulate stupidity. Some people are just to determined to hurt themselves.

  48. 48.

    Mathguy

    @Spanky: Damn, that’s awesome. I can’t believe a corporation in America would actually do that. And a massive GFY to Scheels for doubling down on guns.

  49. 49.

    Mr Stagger Lee

    There is an episode of the podcast, Behind the Bastards, that has Mark Zuckerberg as a subject.

  50. 50.

    Brachiator

    @Spanky:

    The culture into which Facebook was born was this deeply libertarian philosophy that was espoused by their first investor, Peter Thiel, and the other members of the so-called “PayPal mafia”.

    This is not true, or is severely reductive. The tech world and the Internets have always been dominated by idealists, inspired more by Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkien and other SF and fantasy authors than Ayn Rand. Also Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog.

    A good chunk of these people may be techno libertarians, but this is more because they don’t want ignorant non techies in the government messing with their high tech toys.

  52. 52.

    Kay

    Anne Applebaum
    ‏Verified account
    @anneapplebaum
    8h8 hours ago
    More
    America cannot be the champion of “liberty” or the “leader of the free world” if the free world — insulted by the U.S. president, snubbed by his surrogates — refuses to follow.

    Is there anything more pathetic than “leaders” with no followers? Stride boldly on, Mr. Pence. No one is behind you. It’s just you looking over at Ivanka, wondering why no one is applauding.

  53. 53.

    geg6

    OT, but I am at the local ER. My John called me at work and couldn’t speak properly. He’s being checked for stroke. He’s talking better now but still sometimes searches for words. No weakness in limbs or anything. Everyone cross their fingers, please.

  54. 54.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: The quality of YouTube comments varies wildly depending on the subject matter. Any video that gets sufficiently popular attracts people who are just pooping on the thread with racist or insulting stuff, but there’s a lot below that threshold.

  58. 58.

    Jeffro

    @rikyrah: have to agree…pounding on trumpov does no good, ’cause he doesn’t care and actually likes it. We need to hit the GOP daily, their Senators most especially, with reminders of how they are betraying the country/their constituents and just how bad the party’s chances are in 2020 with trumpov leading the ticket.

  59. 59.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Brachiator: I hung out on Usenet a lot in the 1990s, when access was initially mostly limited to universities and research institutions, and people who had enough technical know-how to roll their own feed over UUCP or something. The community there at the time is what I always think of as ur-Internet-techie culture.

    It was extremely, extremely male and white, and the political vibe was wildly disproportionately libertarian. There were a lot of liberals and traditional conservatives too, probably more than libertarians by absolute numbers, but the libertarians were more passionate about shouting people down, so they tended to dominate conversations.

    In the real-world tech community I think there’s overrepresentation of what I call “vulgar libertarians”: basically that empty quarter of the two-axis political charts that rich pundits imagine is centrism. The people who basically want to be left alone and freed from politics, and describe themselves as being “socially liberal and fiscally conservative”. It’s because they’re white guys with money.

  60. 60.

    Brachiator

    @schrodingers_cat:

    FB and Google are concentrating and weaponizing that stupidity and making billions of bucks off it. They need to be regulated as media companies, which is what they are

    I don’t think they are media companies at all.

    You want to regulate them, you need a new model.

    And algorithms and data harvesting is possible simply because billions of people are on the Internet.

    Also, I don’t trust the government. Threats of regulation also come with demands that these companies make techniques, data and information available to government and law enforcement.

    India is using controversy over WhatsApp to come up with schemes to shut down the Internet. The EU is using bullshit concern over copyright to try to control the flow of information.

    And the lame excuse is always that this is done to protect the public.

  62. 62.

    Jeffro

    @Brachiator:

    So what? This is dumb. Eliminate or regulate Facebook and idiots will just congregate somewhere else.

    Some of this faux outrage used to be leveled against tv, magazines and newspapers. It’s hard to regulate stupidity. Some people are just to determined to hurt themselves.

    The difference being, the Internet and platforms like FB exponentially speed up the cycles of/spread of bad information, and that information has consequences beyond those determined to hurt themselves.

    If the platforms won’t do something to regulate bad info (including but not limited to bad actors like hostile states) then society really must act.

  63. 63.

    tobie

    Does anyone know if Facebook paid any federal taxes in 2018? Google, Amazon, and Netflix all benefited from the new tax law and had to pay $0 to the US Treasury.

  64. 64.

    Amir Khalid

    @Yarrow:
    I have lately begun commenting on some YouTubers’ videos. I comment mostly on guitar-related content, usually to seek additional information and to engage with others who share my interests. Although there is one guy, a self-described libertarian, whom I called out for his advocacy of violent punishment for theft, and for gratuitous racism.

  70. 70.

    Brachiator

    @Matt McIrvin:

    It was extremely, extremely male and white, and the political vibe was wildly disproportionately libertarian. There were a lot of liberals and traditional conservatives too, probably more than libertarians by absolute numbers, but the libertarians were more passionate about shouting people down, so they tended to dominate conversations.

    I was there too, and if the scene was largely white it was because colleges and universities skewed white.

    Still there were Asians, women, Hispanics and blacks who were just as nerd techie and idealistic.

    And it was less that people were shouted down than they were ignored. And often still are

    The people who basically want to be left alone and freed from politics, and describe themselves as being “socially liberal and fiscally conservative”. It’s because they’re white guys with money.

    And yet the top guys at Microsoft, Google and other companies include Asians.

  73. 73.

    Brachiator

    @schrodingers_cat:
    The NYT had a story about India wanting to impose restrictions on the Internet. Maybe it was wrongheaded and incomplete. International sites have stories about Internet crackdown in Kashmir.

  76. 76.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Brachiator: I do know that there was a suicide attack in Kashmir and that Kashmiris elsewhere in India have been targeted by RWNJs with verbal threats and worse. I hadn’t heard of the restrictions on the internet. I follow a couple of Indian journalists on Twitter.

  77. 77.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Brachiator: I know a whoooole lot of techie South Asians, and when they express political opinions, on the whole they seem to be markedly more liberal-Democratic than the white guys. But the ones who really go far up the corporate ladder, they may be a different story.

  78. 78.

    Brachiator

    @Jeffro:

    If the platforms won’t do something to regulate bad info (including but not limited to bad actors like hostile states) then society really must act.

    Problem is, for example, that Trump defines bad info as the truth about him and other Republicans.

    Suppressing “the bad” while maintaining free flow of “the good” is tougher than people think.

    BTW, the deliberate flooding of Internet sites with crap from trolls, racists and others, how you gonna regulate that?

    And then we get to bots.

  80. 80.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Brachiator: Hold FB liable for the stuff published on their platforms. There have been deaths due to rumors spread on Whatsapp in Burma, in India etc. Prosecute them. They will figure out a way to police their own content/people better.

  81. 81.

    WereBear

    @satby: I just now had to rebut an anti-vax post from someone who should know better. Don’t ignore them when you see them, fight back.

    Agreed. I got into it with an anti-vaxxer on Twitter, and when I replied, “You do know that the doctor who started this theory in England had his license revoked, don’t you? You do know he has confessed he started this to make money?”

    Radio silence after that.

  85. 85.

    Ruckus

    @Spanky:
    That might get me to think of actually going into one of their stores if I ever again need any sporting goods. They bought a store I used to go into once in a while about 15-20 yrs ago and I went in once and saw the gun section. Haven’t been back since. Of course now I really don’t need anything so there are two chances of that, slim and none.

  86. 86.

    Robby-D

    Sorry if another commenter stated this already. FB derives revenue by segmenting their users and selling targeted ads. The very first thing I thought of when I read this post is that anti-vaxxers would be a great segment to target by anyone running a grift or selling snake oil, so they’re probably a very valuable segment that FB wants to have available to sell to advertisers. Additionally, allowing the mis-information to spread is a way of them better identifying the stupids, creating a larger segment and more revenues for FB.

  87. 87.

    J R in WV

    @tobie:

    There is a candidate who has made digital privacy and regulating the big tech firms a central plank in her Presidential bid. Given that just about every aspect of our life is digitized at this point from social media to home appliances to credit cards and bus passes, it’s probably worth taking a listen.

    And which candidate would that be, super-looser? You do NOT support you candidate by publishing great policy ideas you candidate has, and KEEPING THE NAME A SECRET~!!!!~

    What a dumb-ass, assuming everyone will know who you mean with your statement of policy advantages your prize candidate has without the name of the candidate! I would guess Sen. Warren, but just a wold guess.

  88. 88.

    Ruckus

    @David Evans:
    That’s a real good argument! I mean electric cars/trucks were invented by that weird guy with the name of something that smells that someone is supposed to apply to themselves to attract others.
    I wonder if any of these geniuses know that 100 yrs ago electric and steam were competing for dominance over gasoline as the motive source for vehicles. Of course steam needed a heat source and is mostly a pain in the butt to use as a motive source, so that failed to take off, but for short trips there really wasn’t any reason not to use electric – other than the weight/size of lead/acid batteries. And that a lot of areas were not heavily electrified yet.

  94. 94.

    J R in WV

    @Gravenstone:

    @J R in WV: Klobuchar.

    Wow! So she screws with departing employees’ future employment AND wants to improve digital security Also TOO? A good point for her, shame I can’t vote for a candidate who screws with employment issues for her former employees. Unions hate that stuff!

    Not just a bad boss, but trying to ruin the lives of people who tried to do a good job for her… wow.

  97. 97.

    Brachiator

    Totally OT for Southern California people

    Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is set to speak Monday night in Glendale at what is billed as an organizing event for her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

    Doors will open at the Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., at 6 p.m., with the event beginning at 7 p.m.

    Admission is free. Tickets aren’t required, but an RSVP to http://www.facebook.com/events/2264881000236841/ is strongly encouraged. Admission will be first-come, first-served. Capacity at the Alex Theatre is 1,413.

    I might try to go.

  98. 98.

    Brachiator

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Hold FB liable for the stuff published on their platforms. There have been deaths due to rumors spread on Whatsapp in Burma, in India etc.

    How can we do more to identify and prosecute the people who spread the rumors?

    What do we do about the people eager to believe and act on rumors?

    BTW, WhatsApp is trying to find ways to deal with this. Some of this involves trying to educate people, and also to try to somehow limit how often some messages can be propagated.

  100. 100.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    YouTube’s recommendation algorithm steers viewers from fact-based medical information toward anti-vaccine misinformation.

    it’s not just that – for example search for Ancient history and You Tube will try and force Atlantis and Ancient UFO videos on you.

  102. 102.

    WereBear

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I started with cat pictures, and now I add to the pics with a tidbit about cat care, training, trivia, affection tips, and the like. Sort of a mini blog post.

    I don’t know how illustrated your books are, or what picture angles you might employ, but you can have a piece of clothing or jewelry for a heroine, explaining why she likes it, and so forth.

    It’s about intriguing people, and as a writer, I know you can do that :)

  105. 105.

    Barney

    And:

    Study blames YouTube for rise in number of Flat Earthers

    Researchers believe they have identified the prime driver for a startling rise in the number of people who think the Earth is flat: Google’s video-sharing site, YouTube.

    Their suspicion was raised when they attended the world’s largest gatherings of Flat Earthers at the movement’s annual conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2017, and then in Denver, Colorado, last year.
    …
    Of the 30, all but one said they had not considered the Earth to be flat two years ago but changed their minds after watching videos promoting conspiracy theories on YouTube. “The only person who didn’t say this was there with his daughter and his son-in-law and they had seen it on YouTube and told him about it,” said Asheley Landrum, who led the research at Texas Tech University.

    The interviews revealed that most had been watching videos about other conspiracies, with alternative takes on 9/11, the Sandy Hook school shooting and whether Nasa really went to the moon, when YouTube offered up Flat Earth videos for them to watch next.

    https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/feb/17/study-blames-youtube-for-rise-in-number-of-flat-earthers

  106. 106.

    tobie

    @J R in WV: Are you an asshole in real life or do you just play one in the blogosphere? I’d hate to be your employee or co-worker. You sound like the colleague from hell.

  108. 108.

    Brachiator

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    it’s not just that – for example search for Ancient history and You Tube will try and force Atlantis and Ancient UFO videos on you.

    Force? Are you saying that only fake history shows up? How would you distinguish between a video debunking Atlantis and one championing it.

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