Hidden

A low-effort fake profile from LinkedIn.

So I received a connection request on LinkedIn from a person I'd never heard of, and wasn't even a second-level contact. Curious, I looked at their profile. And was greeted by a raft of red flags.

This sort of thing is common with fraudulent LinkedIn profiles: the lack of connections, prior roles without details and only a handful of connection despite a seemingly long career. And all that before I did a reverse image search on the profile picture.

And that commonality can be part of the problem. Because while not all bogus profiles are so obviously bogus, it can be easy to come to the conclusion that they are. And thus, anyone with an ounce of sense should be able to spot them. But someone with a decent amount of time and some resources can avoid many of the obvious pitfalls; existing profiles can be "rented" or compromised, work histories can align with stated timeframes and locations, and a fabricated résumé can be constructed. That may be more effort than a stereotypical third-world fraudster can bring to the project, but not everyone conforms to the stereotype.
 

Numbered

I was watching a video by Hank Green, where he was announcing his new podcast, "Humans," and one of the points he was making was that to people who create media for the internet, whether that's YouTube videos, podcasts or what-have-you, they tend to see their audience in terms of numbers, rather than as individuals. Mr. Green said that he spends time in the comments of his videos specifically to interact with people as, well, people.

After that, I watched a short by a guy named "blumineck," in which he related the story of how he was fooled into making an outraged response video to someone appearing to be unsafe with a heavy bow, and had nearly posted it before he realized he'd fallen for a hoax. His takeaway from that was to always verify things, especially those that make one angry, before responding.

Which it pretty common advice about dealing with things on the Internet. I first encountered it well more than a decade ago.

But it occurs to me that between Mr. Green and blumineck, there may be a more general lesson there. And that is: "To many people on the Internet, you're simply a number."

When I posted a "fraudspotting" post on LinkedIn that gained enough traction to top 50,000 "impressions," LinkedIn didn't congratulate me on informing people, or potentially sparing a person whose profile had been copied from reputational damage. Rather they took note of the numbers, and encouraged me to post more in an attempt to keep those numbers rising.

Hank Green had pointed out in his video that for YouTube creators, their interests are somewhat aligned with those to YouTube (Alphabet) itself. YouTube's goal is to increase the number of people who watch videos on the website, and the amount of time that they watch. And to the degree that YouTube rewards more views with more money, a creator can share that goal.

But the goal of making numbers go up can lead to situations in which someone pretends to injure themselves to drive sharing of their video. It can lead to making inflammatory claims for the sake of responses. Or simply a raft of things that all come across as roughly the same as people copy what they have seen others be successful at, in a hope of driving the same numbers.

It's a different mindset than one would have for dealing with a live audience. And keeping that in mind makes the Internet more intelligible. 

Fanrage

I don't know if people understand how much the fandom of something or someone can come to feel valued and respected by the idea that whatever it is exists for them and them specifically. Telling fans to chill out or calm down in the face of changes to the object of their feelings is to tell them that the needs the fandom fulfills are, in fact, trivial.

And, to be sure, to many people, they are. For me, whether or not a character in a movie adaptation is faithful to some original portrayal of them is completely unimportant. But that can also be said for a lot of things that people find important... Importance is, after all, a subjective determination.

So I think that discounting people's emotional attachments may be something done too often in haste. 

Exceptionality

Anyone can be an exception to a rule. But when a large number of people all claim to be the same exception to the same rule, they have simply defined a new rule.

I find it interesting which supposed "rules" of society are so broadly unpopular that that the appear to exist for no other reason than to allow people to loudly proclaim that they are an, if not the, exception to said rules.

I suppose it's another way of seeking meaning in life by being better in some way than other people, by presuming that the "average person" blindly, or by virtue of their own mediocrity, falls into some or another undesirable category, when living, breathing examples of such people are nearly impossible to actually find.

Degrees of Human

I've seen a number of "The most valuable professionals of the next however many years will be" posts on LinkedIn recently. If you've seen them, you likely know the sort; they generally end in some bland aphorism about "being human."

And I get it; the goal is to affirm that there's a way to dodge the generative automation "jobpocalypse," at least for a time, by presenting some or another skillset as being immune from automation. But also as accessible. I checked the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics' Fastest Growing Occupations data, and according to that, the most valuable professionals of the 2024 to 2034 period all have a "Doctoral or professional degree" which, according to the National Center for Education Statistics will run someone about $20,000 a year (or about $50,000 with living expenses factored in) on average for a 4 to 8 year program. So, it's understandable that telling people that things they can learn during evenings and weekends will move them to the top of the pile is enticing.

But it doesn't speak to how high the pile actually is. "The people who are getting ahead are doing X" does not entail that everyone who does X gets ahead. If the number of people who have skills that combine "business and data" (to use one common formulation that I've seen) is fairly large compared to the actual number of roles that will exist, then people with those skills might be "the most valuable professionals" on a relative basis, but not an absolute one. And honestly, I haven't seen any particularly scarce skills on people's lists.

These sorts of posts strike me as being an outgrowth of American individualism, placing the onus for being in-demand on the individual, rather than seeking to understand what the broader society would need to look like to keep the overall demand for human labor high. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but as a strategy, history tells us that it doesn't work as well as it's often advertised. As individuals, "leaning into our humanity," whatever that means, will not, in and of itself, solve the problems that will arise if ubiquitous automation torpedoes the careers of a significant number of people. It's going to take something somewhat more focused on the broader question of aggregate demand than that.

Here "We" Go Again

Cure cancer... really? That's pretty big news, I wonder why it hasn't gotten out farther.

I think I'd like to nominate the human willingness to pass the buck as the most annoying thing. This is the sort of post that one makes to bask in the likes, upvotes and other forms of Internet applause that come from calling out a problem and laying it squarely at the feet of people who have better things to do than read social media posts by some rando.

"Greed and billionaires" are wonderful targets specifically because most people won't be bothered to stand up for them, and it allows for feel-good slacktivism; the audience can feel good about themselves for being supportive of the stand being taken, but that support comes at absolutely zero cost to themselves. "Billionaires" aren't going around with vacuum cleaners, sucking the money out of everyone's pockets: they're investing in and/or running businesses offering goods and services that everyday people want. Things that people like me (and yeah, I'll own this) would rather have. Would an end to world hunger, global climate change and cancer (I'm still dubious about that last one) be good? Absolutely. Is it worth more to me than the books I just bought the other day? Apparently not.

And I'm not the only one. There are any number of people who would rather spend their money on things that they feel enhance their material well-being than fund capturing human potential. That's how investors and board chairs and chief fill-in-the-blank officers become billionaires in the first place.

There's an idea that a bunch of wealthy people could get together, shell out a bunch of money and make the world a better place overnight, and still remain fabulously wealthy. (Whether or not that would actually be the case, I don't know.) Which is really just another way of minimizing the costs to others of the things that people want.

Presuming that there are cures for cancer that are waiting on nothing more than enough funding to float down from the heavens, it's somewhat within the power of the public at large to solve these problems. Wealthy people became so because the current rules allow for it. So step one is to change those rules.

But that becomes a collective action problem. The legislative majorities needed to enact such policies would require that a pretty good-sized chunk of the populace, at least here in the United States, put aside their differences and work together towards a common goal; and believe that they can reach that goal without inflicting unreasonable amounts of pain on themselves or otherwise doing something unpalatable.

And that's why it becomes easy to blame "billionaires." They could supposedly make all of these problems go away with sweeping acts of charity, and criticizing them for not doing so conveniently does away with all of the arguing and messiness that enduring solutions would entail.

Hot-Button Issue

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

This has been making the rounds of the Internet, and sparking a fair amount of discussion, some controversy and (no surprise) a fair amount of vitriol. Most of the discourse around the question frames it as one of empathy: Pressing the Red button is the self-centered choice, while pressing the Blue button is the caring for others choice.

The seeming alignment of Red and Blue to Conservative and Liberal (Republican and Democrat, more precisely) political ideologies in the United States is fueling the debate, with people who chose the Red button being cast as overly individualistic and unempathetic and people who chose the Blue button being stereotyped as virtue-signalling would-be martyrs.

But thinking about the problem reveals another dividing line: the attribution of responsibility. To illustrate this, lets reduce the number of players from "everyone in the world" to seven people: Jack, Jill, Tom, Dick, Jane, Sally and Harry. I've randomly assigned Jill, Tom and Harry to select the Blue button, and Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally to select the Red button. Since "less than 50% of people" have selected the Blue button, only Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally survive. So the question becomes, who is responsible for Jill's, Tom's and Harry's deaths?

The "easy," but unhelpful answer is: everyone (presuming, of course, that one doesn't simply say "me," given that I'm the person who rolled dice to place the players into their groups). It required both that Jill, Tom and Harry pressed the Blue button and that Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally pressed Red for the game to slay Jill, Tom and Harry. But the discourse around empathy in the choice tends to turn on more specific attributions of fault, so it's worth looking at those.

The "Press Blue" camp tends to lay the responsibility at the feet of those people who vote Red. But for the fact that Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally pressed the Red button, Jill, Tom and Harry would have been safe, regardless of which choice they made. After all, those four are the majority in a group of seven, and if they'd all selected the Blue button, Jill's, Tom's and Harry's would have become irrelevant; they would have lived regardless.

The "Press Red" camp. on the other hand, places the responsibility for Jill's, Tom's and Harry's deaths on, well, Jill, Tom and Harry. But for the fact that Jill, Tom and Harry pressed the Blue button, they would, individually, still be alive, regardless of what Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally chose.

And this brings up one of the primary differences in outlook between the two camps. The "Press Blue" camp is looking at the matter as a collective action problem: anyone dying is the result of the failure of the collective; and the collective failed because a majority went with the Red button. Clearly, the "Press Red" camp doesn't see it this way, I suspect because they don't really judge the optimal choice to be different, regardless of what the players know.

Let's say, for a moment, that Harry is given the choice after the other six players have already made their choices as outlined above. And he's told that four players have already selected the Red button, and two have chosen Blue. While one could make a case that Harry might, for whatever reason, die alongside Jill and Tom, outside of that, it's hard to make the case that selecting the Blue button is the optimal choice here. For Harry to select the Blue button would appear to be actively suicidal. (We would also envisage a altered version of the game, in which Harry is given a choice such that the outcome only bears on himself: if he selects the Blue button he dies, and if he selects the Red button, he lives. Both variations have the same outcome for Harry, personally. This second variation provides even less of a reason to select the Blue button.)

Dealing specifically with Harry, it seems reasonable to place the responsibility for Harry pressing the Blue button with Harry, himself, regardless of which variation on the single-person choice we go with. Harry understands that pressing the Blue button would result in his death; it's possible that stress or carelessness could induce him to press the Blue button, even if he highly desired to live, but those factors aside, the choice is fairly clear.

For people in the "Press Red" camp, the logic, and the responsibility, doesn't change between knowing that there are already some people who have selected the Blue button, and not having any information about other's choices at all. (Or if we go with the altered version of the game, that the Blue button always results in the death of a single player.) If Harry decides to commit suicide, or misclicks due to stress or carelessness, the responsibility still lies with him. Pressing the Red button eliminates the risk of death, and the "Press Red" camp extrapolates that out to the broader game.

For people in the "Press Blue" camp, however, the logic is different, even if they agree that selecting the Blue button in constrained circumstances is a bad choice. Whether someone is being suicidal, or acting in error, enough other people acting together will rescue them from their choice, and failure to rescue a person from a bad choice when the opportunity for rescue is there is no different from deliberately inflicting the consequences of that choice.

If we switch the single player to Sally in our first one-person variation of the game, the fact that she understands that if she selects the Red button means that three people will die means that for the "Press Blue" camp, if she chooses to press the Red button, she has chosen to kill the players who selected Blue; the full responsibility for their deaths lies with her, not with Jill, Tom and Harry, nor with the presumed designer of the choice architecture of the game. Sally owns the outcome, no matter what other people have done.

Importantly, as near as I can tell, each camp tends to understand its own viewpoint as being the self-evidently correct one. This is the reason for the vitriol; it's something you'd expect when people understand one another to be willfully perverse. But it's worth keeping in mind that there are likely real differences in personality and worldview that underlie these viewpoints, just as Conservative and Liberal Americans tend to differ from one another when tested for the Big Five/Five Factor Personality Model.

The other interesting factor in the discussions around this is the fact that it tends to be framed as what one "should" do, even though the original question asks what one would do. In this, it's like Phillipa Foot's Trolley Problem: many people debate it with the goal of arriving at one "correct" answer, even though the problem is likely much more useful as a means to understand how one comes to such determinations. And again here, for many people, there are perceived factions: engaging the switch to divert the Trolley is seen as the Utilitarian choice, while Deontology is said to demand leaving the switch alone, despite the fact that either camp can make a case for either choice.

The Red Button Versus Blue Button "Dilemma" does offer interesting information; just not about empathy. And I think this is why it's perceived to generally align with American politics. The "Press Red" camp doesn't see people as having direct responsibility for a choice that someone else made, whether they made that choice intentionally, or not. The "Press Blue" camp, at least in this circumstance, does. Accordingly, I expect that for many people in the "Press Red" camp, contrivance aside, the scenario as a whole represents personal risks; the sort of thing where being careless has individual consequences. For many people in the "Press Blue" camp, on the other hand, the scenario represents broader risks to people, like climate change, that can be overcome by collective action, but are largely unaffected by individual choices. And that divide, between individual and collective responsibility plays out in a number of different ways across the American political spectrum.

I think that another thing that plays into it is the fact that pressing the Red button results in safety, no matter what happens. If the final tally favors Blue, everyone lives, regardless of the number of people who pressed the Red button, and if it favors Red, it's only those people who pressed Blue who suffer a consequence. Given what I understand of the online discourse, this asymmetry feels a lot like free riding... If collective action vanquishes a threat, those who didn't assist benefit as well. Of course, real-world problems don't normally operate like this; if global warming wreaks havoc on the climate, everyone suffers, but these sorts of disputes are as much emotional as logical.

Fabulous

In the end, LinkedIn is a social media site. And like any social media site, it has its share of people pushing dubious, but popular stories. Like this one, borrowed from X, I believe...

I'm pretty sure this story is bogus, because it doesn't make any sense...

A bot can't simply "hallucinate" a discount code. It has to create the code and the discount amount/percentage, then tell the sales (or whatever) database to allow it. Then it has to be advertised to customers, or simply applied to some or all orders. Any company that's allowing all that to happen in a production environment with no checks whatsoever is already being pretty badly mismanaged.

The development lead shouldn't need the former QA lead to tell him how to fix the problem. They simply go into the database and de-activate the discount code, presuming that this requires direct intervention from the developers at all, which strikes me as unlikely in any mature organization. If the "bot" had rewritten the code that managed discounting so that the code couldn't be turned off in production, the former QA lead isn't the person to describe how one fixes that. The QA lead would tell the development lead how to test for it.

If there's a legitimate use case for a 100%-off discount code, then it's entirely possible that it passed testing. Likewise if there's a legitimate use case for applying a discount code to all orders for a given amount of time (such as a promotion). It's rational to have a policy against applying discount codes of a certain type universally, but unless that policy's been fed into the system somewhere, it's reasonable the system wouldn't test for it. Accordingly, this is one of those things that could conceivably get by human testers, especially if they're using automated test tools, and not doing the testing manually, because it might not occur to anyone to ensure that a universal 100%-off code doesn't work unless there's something specifically in the specifications that demands it.

I get it, though. A lot of people are unhappy about the level of automation being deployed into the software and e-commerce industries, and the jobs being cut as a result. And it's hard to find someone who would never believe that corporate executives are capable of being penny-wise but pound-moronic. But having some limited experience in e-commerce and more experience as a QA manager, this story simply doesn't resonate with what I learned during those parts of my career. It may be framing the guilty, but it's a frame nevertheless, and it doesn't serve anyone to believe false stories of executive perfidy or generative automation malfunction.
 

On the Rails

One of the interesting things about buzzwords is that they acquire widely-understood, yet completely informal, definitions. My favorite recent example is "guardrails," which has become a shorthand for, effectively, building robust harm-prevention measures into new technologies. Which is interesting, because in the everyday world, that's not what guardrails are designed to do. Consider this post I made about a pickup truck going off the road near where I lived at the time.

The problem wasn't that the guardrails didn't work as designed... it was that an airborne pickup truck was not one of the situations that they'd been designed to contend with. But the guardrails were there; anyone happening by would see them. The point could be made that a new design may have been in order, but it was clear that they had been put in place.

And I think that is somewhat lacking in many of today's discussions of technological guardrails; the difference between inadequate and non-existent guardrails is non-obvious. And so for "guardrails" to be evident, they have to be so obvious as to be intrusive.

I have a set of "kitchen knives" that need to be disposed of. I nearly never used them (in part because they were just that bad), and I've finally gotten around to buying a semi-decent quality knife block with semi-decent quality knives. The "easy" way to dispose of the old knives would be to securely cover their blades in duct tape and throw them away, but I figured it was worth asking about online to find out if there were any better ways. No luck... my question was removed; likely before anyone saw it. The "guardrail" visibly did its job, but did so by presuming that my query was too dangerous for public consumption. Doubtless, there are likely people for whom that's the intended outcome, but it strikes me as overzealous.

And while it's clearer that guardrails are working when they're intrusive, that provides an incentive for people to move to where there are no guardrails. Granted, I'm not going to go searching for a free-speech haven just to ask for a good way to ditch some kitchen utensils, but I doubt that everyone finds their questions as trivial as that one.

Grimelight

Perhaps the real problem with the video, shared by President Trump on his Truth Social account, that portrayed Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, is that it triggered calls for its removal, rather than an examination of why it was posted. I don't believe for a moment that President Trump allowed some anonymous staffer to post the video to his account without anyone knowing what was in the entire video. The President's previous comments about Africa and the African diaspora have made no secret of his disdain. Which is nothing new... I suspect it would be silly of me to say that Donald Trump is the only racist to have occupied the White House during my lifetime.

The idea that there are members of the MAGA movement who are simply unreconstructed racists is simply taken as given by many. But, okay... the United States has had its share, if not more of unreconstructed racists for as long as I've been around, too... but the White House giving an implicit stamp of approval to such messaging seems unique to the Trump Administration, at least in modern times.

Even if we accept (and I don't) the idea that the video was posted to the social media account of the President of the United States without anyone vetting it thoroughly for its message, the fact that it originated with a meme account points to it being a form of "red meat" for the President's base of voters. And that raises the question, at least for me, of why memes? Of all of the things that the President's Truth Social account could be sharing, why bother with random stuff like this; especially if it's going to be hand-waved through? One would think the last thing the White House wants is for some random message to be seen coming from the President. Donald Trump has pretty much zero in the way of "regular guy" credentials, so why engage in the bored teenager act?

When I was in high school, I knew a number of people who had no compunctions against calling me "nigger" to my face. Most of them didn't strike me as racists, and I concluded that it wasn't racist, but personal. They were seeking to get a rise out of me. And I suspect that this is what's at work here. The President is like a class clown who craves the spotlight badly enough to do whatever he can to keep it trained on themselves.

The thimble thunderstorm of the video spread internationally pretty quickly, and generated a lot of heat, even if there was little light. I'm not in the camp that says the President is attempting to distract people from other things... the news cycle can present multiple things to the public at once. Donald Trump simply needs for one of those things to be him.

Democrats were, of course, going to take the bait on this one; their political incentives demand that they constantly decry this or that random bit of inanity that the President's engaged in, even if the smart move would be to simply roll their eyes and find something more constructive to do with their time. But enough people demand constant vigilance, and responsiveness, that they're force to play ball, and keep themselves in the spotlight as well. And this time, even a few Republicans felt the need to get in on the act, despite the fact that it has likely earned them the moniker RINO from the MAGA faithful. But it ensured that reporters would be rushing to get comment from the press secretary and the President himself, both of whom said pretty much the same things they say every other time.

The constituency for this is hard to pin down, because it seems that so many people are on the lookout for, and responsive to, signs that President Trump is doing something; even when that something is not governing. Elements of the political Left and Right alike seem to have little better to do than to boo or cheer the President, who responds with a constant stream of random acts for them to respond to. But what I don't understand is why these groups must never be allowed to go hungry. Why does Congress and the news media dutifully play the same tired role, over and over again. What does the outrage machine offer in return, that the rest of the public cannot match? 

Reduction

The problems with the stereotypical reductio ad Holocaust when it comes to making comparisons to current affairs are many and varied. This LinkedIn post, and repost, illustrate a couple of them for me.

Part of the problem comes from the way the Nazi Party and the Third Reich are viewed today. Rather than having embarked on poor policy born of extremism, they're typically seen as irredeemably Evil, and, as such, willfully perverse. And to the degree that this is part and parcel of the Nazi "brand," as it were, it's really hard to convince people that "never again is now," because things are already set for "this time, it's different." If, as I'm guessing (there's something of a lack of context here) that Mr. Latz is referring to the Trump Administration's stepped up (or simply off-the-hook) immigration enforcement, the Administration and it's supporters don't see themselves as anything like the Nazi government of 1930s and 40s Germany. Even if Mr. Latz is referring to conditions in the Gaza strip, the same is true of the Netanyahu Administration. In both cases, the governments involved see themselves as fighting the good, and just, fight against people who are engaged in either direct wrongdoing, or willful support of others who are so engaged.

To stick with the United States for the time being (since, as an American, it's what I have the most experience with), the Trump administration doesn't see itself as perverse. If anything, it sees prior (Democratic) Administrations, and their "lax" enforcement of the United States-Mexico border, as the willfully perverse ones, deliberately swelling the ranks of non-citizens in the country as a means of keeping themselves in power with the support of "undeserving others" who have no legitimate right to reside on American soil.

And this takes me to Ms. Dorsey's repost. The second Trump Administration didn't come into place due to a military, or even civilian coup against the Biden Administration (as much as it appears that the outgoing first Trump Administration may have worked to spark one). Donald Trump was duly elected the President of the United States. And while many supporters of Trumpism may have pooh-poohed his rhetoric on immigrants and immigration out of not wanting to be directly associated with it's overt racialism, now that the Administration's immigration policy, which mainly targets states in which the President lost, mind you, is in place, they see it as being at best of direct benefit to themselves, and at worst, someone else's problem, of no real concern to them.

And even if one considers the roughly third of the American electorate that views itself (accurately or not) as Independent of partisan labels, this just isn't a big deal for them. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the United States Border Patrol aren't coming for them, and they have other problems of their own to manage. Even if the actions of the Trump Administration aren't doing them a lot of good, halting the broad border enforcement and deportation initiatives aren't the solutions that they need.

Democrats and other left-leaning segments of American society, on the other hand, are already "rising up." Their problem is that protest is the last resort of the politically powerless. Republican lawmakers, whether in state capitols, or in Washington D.C., aren't going to stand up for them, or work to advance their interests, because there's nothing in it for them. They're going to face primary challenges from a Right wing that sees them as insufficiently committed to the Cause, and it's not as if Democratic voters are going to back them over one of their own.

So the problem here isn't that people aren't paying attention, or are unwilling to push back; it's that such pushback really only matters come election time, and no-one really concerns themselves with angry partisans otherwise.

There's never any profit in attempting to influence people to change by holding up a mirror and expecting them to see Nazis in it. The people who have come to see themselves as on the wrong side of their own ethics don't need such a heavy-handed reminder that they're not living up to the persons they want to be, and people who are comfortable in themselves tend to respond with anger and resentment. The label of "Evil" is Othering, and its primary point is to cast those so labeled as undeserving of the sorts of obligations that people otherwise have to one another. It's a mantle that few are willing to shoulder voluntarily.

Virtual Camera

Racist AI fakes are now a business — and a political tool. You don't say...

At the end of the article, Axios quotes organizational psychologist Janice Gassam Asare as saying: "I would just encourage people to be a little bit more cautious when they see something on social media, and ask yourself, 'how do I know that this is actually real?'"

I felt that it was missing the "pretty please with sugar on top." This is, after all, an article that notes: "One user ID'd a video they shared as fake, but still encouraged others to share it because it justified their viewpoints about alleged SNAP fraud." If people care more about whether information validates their worldview than whether it's real, what good does it do to "encourage people to be a little bit more cautious?" That lack of "caution" is getting them precisely what they're looking for.

I wonder if Axios had informed Ms. Asare, when they asked her for her comments, that they already believed that people were deliberately sharing fictitious video narratives. Maybe they did, and maybe it wouldn't (or didn't) make any difference, but the general tenor of her comments, and the article as a whole, put the cart in front of the horse, as I see it.

Because the thing about "framing a guilty person," as the saying goes, is that it presupposes that the person is guilty. The only point behind framing them is that there otherwise isn't enough evidence to connect them to the crimes one believes that they're guilty of. When someone fakes and shares a "video [that] shows multiple Black women screaming and pounding on a door with the caption 'store under attack'," they're not doing so out a desire to tar innocent people; they're engaging in using fiction to tell what they understand is a truth, and the people they're likely to share it with already agree with their viewpoint. Because to do otherwise would be to invite pushback.

Racism is a fairly popular pastime in the United States, because at the base of it is a hierarchy of deserving. That existed long before generative automation. Faked video may facilitate its spread, but it was spreading just fine previously.

Watching

Data Protection Commission Ireland has posted a video online, titled "Pause Before You Post." This was brought to my attention on LinkedIn, which noted its use of AI. The implication was that "Pause Before You Post" was created entirely with AI, but I'm not sure.

In any event, "Pause Before You Post" is a stereotypical "stranger danger" public service announcement. It show a young girl, Ava, and her parents in a shopping mall, while random adults make comments that demonstrate they understand some of the details of Ava's life. The soundtrack could have come from a slasher movie, and Ava spends most of the video looking suitably frightened of the people who address her. And, of course, it's hinted that one of those adults might be a pedophile.

The root cause, of course, is shown to be the parents' social media posts. They've been sharing random details online, and creepy strangers have been reading them. And since these strangers are creepy, they've been speaking to Ava with a familiarity reserved for friends and family members.

I get it, but I wonder if there wasn't a better way to go about it. "Pause before you post" is sound advice, but the underlying message seems to be "treat the details of your child's life as state secrets," rather than "understand who you're sharing things with." Of course, almost anything shared online can become public. After all, someone can simply take it and repost it publicly. But while public posting may be the default, for many platforms, it's not a requirement. If a parent wants to share a self-deprecating post about being late to pick their daughter up from soccer practice, they can simply choose to only share it with online "friends"/contacts. But it's easier to get a message that everyone one doesn't know might be dangerous, or have designs on one's children, into a 40-second video spot. Nuance often takes more time than people feel they have to communicate.

As far as the "AI-ness" of it all, the only thing that really stood out for me was the fact that Ava was the only visible child in the spot. Maybe it's just how modern malls are, but the place seemed really sparsely populated in general. There's nothing odd about that, in and of itself; extras can be expensive, too, and the idea that Ava and her parents are alone in this situation adds to the overall sense of creepiness, but it was something of a reminder that generative automation isn't ready to replace people wholesale yet.

I rate it a "C," for being an effective vehicle for a too-simplistic message. I have a dislike for scare tactics, especially when there are better means of reaching the same goals, but perhaps this is why I'm not in advertising.

Trolling for Cash

Almost immediately, “people started noticing that many rage-bait accounts focused on U.S. politics appeared to be based outside of the U.S.,” The Verge said.
X update unveils foreign MAGA boosters

Number of people surprised by this turn of events: Probably zero.

The piece points out that for people in Africa and Southeast Asia, the income provided by winding people up on X can be significant. And when people need income, they're not always going to be picky about how they get it. The modern Internet is awash with people who are pretending to be someone and/or somewhere they are not, because their real identities and locations aren't valuable. After all, no one really cases what a Russian or an Indian thinks of American politics. But this random fellow American that one knows nothing about who just happens to have something to say that aligns with one's preconceptions? They're certainly worth a follow and not all manipulating people.

Because, supposedly, whatever viewpoint or information is on offer helps prove that The Other Side is not only wrong, but deliberately perverse. And that's the important thing. With Americans desperate to score points on one another, and that desperation having advertising dollars attached to it, it's to be expected that people from other countries would want to get in on the act, even if they aren't part of a foreign influence campaign. Income, after all, is income. And the worldwide nature of the attention economy allows people from poor countries around the world to participate in it.

Of course, it's not just the Make America Great Again crowd that's willing to pay attention to anyone willing to provide them with ammunition in the culture wars. The tally may be lopsided, but both sides have their free agents. In part because if the offshore voices were all MAGA, that would have been suspicious, but even in a culture war, there's work for mercenaries on all sides of the conflict.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, I expect that a number of accounts will either suddenly shift to the United States, or disappear, some to quickly reappear with new, "onshore" identities. Those operators who can't afford a VPN that will allow them to pretend to be in the United States will simply go away, as the proof of their locations renders them useless as culture war combatants. So I suspect that the rollout of account locations on X will benefit the formal influence campaigns at the expense of the free agents. Either way, the rage-baiting will continue; there will still be money in it.

Fair or Foul

Who will be moderating TikTok now under these new owners? Who, from this board of Trump allies, will be setting the policies? We can expect a significant portion of TikTok’s users will be unconvinced by Trump’s assertion that “everyone’s going to be treated fairly” on the platform.
The TikTok Signing Was Good Theater But Only the First Act

I don't think that the "significant portion of TikTok’s users" are necessarily wrong in their skepticism of President Trump, mainly because I note that the President said "fairly," and not "equally." President Trump comes across as one of those people for whom "fair" means something along the lines of "in accordance with what they deserve," and it's pretty clear that, as a committed egoist and partisan, that what people deserve is judged in accordance with how he feels they treat him and Trumpism.

In this sense, the President isn't being dishonest. Disingenuous, perhaps, but not dishonest. Because I don't think that I'm the only person who understands what President Trump thinks of as "fair." Even if the President isn't being clear about it in the moment.

Given the way that the President has acted up to this point in his second term, one would be foolish to think that all political perspectives are going to given equal time on a TikTok run by people who support the President or want his support in turn. Because the President, and his supporters, have very clear ideas of which political outlooks are legitimate, and which are not. And so those TikTokkers who are left of center, let alone openly Socialist or Communist, are going to find that a Trumpist-run TikTok actively works against them. And to the President's mind, that will be fair, because they're bad people, and bad people don't deserve a platform for their ideas. And with Trump allies controlling the moderation of TikTok, the political Left in the United States will have less of one.

In this sense, it's worth taking the President at his word, if for no other reason than to understand how he sees the world and the role of social media platforms in it. The problem with TikTok has stopped being that ByteDance is beholden to the government of China, and thus cannot be trusted to push back against requests for data about American citizens that China may want to exert leverage against, and has morphed into TikTok having the potential to be a way for the President to broadcast his message to people who have no real interest in signing up for Truth Social and/or have fled X. And while TikTok, under the control of allies of the President, is less likely to make an effective intelligence platform for the Chinese Communist Party, it's more or less guaranteed to be to pressed into service as a bullhorn for the Republican Party. And I suspect that there's an impression that TikTok's audience is more captive than X's, and therefore more likely to stay awhile, and listen to the President's messaging. Whether or not the bet that there won't be an exodus pays off remains to be seen, but I think that a lot of people regard it as fairly safe.

David Frum once noted the following about the workings of justice in China in The Atlantic: “What’s really going on here is something once explained to me (in a different context) by a China-watcher: ‘They say that an official who has done wrong will lose power. But what really happens is that an official who loses power will be accused of doing wrong’.” And this encapsulates the President's idea of "fairness." Now that the Left is out of power in Washington D.C., it is accused of doing wrong. And the Trump allies who are poised to purchase the American branch of TikTok (if it ever happens) understand this. And as long as Donald Trump is allowed to position himself as the final arbiter of fairness in American society, any media outlet he comes to control will reflect that.

Decreed Quiet

If there is going to be a discussion of the role of social media in spreading violence, with the goal of making the point that it's now reasonable to suppress online speech in the name of a safe society (for some definition of "safe"), I would submit that domestic violence is a much more pressing problem than political violence.

Political violence makes headlines precisely because of its rarity. That, and the fact that it tends to befall people other than the usual victims. Domestic violence, on the other hand, is newsworthy only locally, if at all, specifically because it is so common, even if it's only about 20% of the overall homicides that take place in the United States. Unless it's a wealthy or a celebrity family, it's simply background noise.

Political violence tends to be regarded in the same way as (suburban) school shootings; political figures, like suburban schoolchildren, are presumed to have an entitlement to "safety" that large swathes of the general public (including many married women) are not granted. It's only certain violence that's "not supposed to happen." But if society is going to be okay with the rest of it, the sudden hand-wringing over specific incidents feels like people attempting to make the things that frighten them into public concerns. Which seems a tough sell in a nation that's demonstrated a remarkable ability to ignore the problems of millions of people through judicious application of the Just World Fallacy.

There's no reason why, however, if the propensity for violence is transmitted from one person to another via uncontrolled online forums, that domestic violence wouldn't move from person to person this way. It doesn't take long to find examples of violent sexism online... one doesn't really even have to look for them most of the time. There are any number of male-dominated online spaces where casual, and sometimes unthinking, justifications for violence against girlfriends and wives are nearly guaranteed to pop up. Stopping the spread of such speech, even if it only cut the rates of intimate partner abuse by a quarter would likely do much more than dropping the rate of politically-relevant killings in the United States to zero.

Humanity has managed to be remarkably violent long before the advent of social media. Accordingly, the idea that clamping down on Facebook and the like will make it easier to maintain peace seems to be wishful thinking. And many people suspect that the Trump administration understands as much. While much of the criticism is clearly partisanship talking, the President is open enough in his opinion that his political rivals should lack the equal protection of the law that a suspicion that this is the actual end goal doesn't seem unreasonable.

But it's worth pointing out that there doesn't seem to be a lot of support for the idea that protecting everyday women is a better reason to go after freedom of speech than protecting the Conservative celebrity class among the Republican base. And I think that this is less about overt sexism than it is about partisanship. For many people, the difference between a random crazy person and a "radicalized," politically-motivated assassin is the politics of the target, and therefore the presumed politics of the killer. Politics is something so important that only other people would kill for it. As I noted before, domestic violence is widespread enough that it's everywhere.

And that, I suspect, really makes the difference here. Cracking down on social media companies in order to force them to police the speech of political opponents is just that, a way of going after political opponents, people on the wrong side of a high-stakes debate over the future of the nation. Looking to the social media (and regular media) landscape to protect the public at large tends to implicate the public at large. And it's common for people to avoid mirrors when they think the reflections won't be flattering.

Complaint Department

I spend a good amount of time on LinkedIn. I tend to check it at least once a day, to keep up with friends and former co-workers, and simply to get a sense of what things are like. It's mostly a white-collar platform, and so it's only a slice of the broader picture, but it happens to be the one I spend most of my time in, so it's useful.

There are a lot of posts that are, for lack of a better word, affirmational. They tend to affirm what the author believes their audience, or the greater LinkedIn community, understands to be true about the broader world. This has meant that, for the past couple of years, there has been a steady stream of posts about remote work, and why any business that hasn't fully embraced the work-from-anywhere ethos is run by idiots who are destroying their company.

Today LinkedIn "Suggested" (a.k.a. dumped into my feed) a recruiter telling a story of two engineers who were told by their manager when they started that the roles would be fully remote only for: "Both got yanked back to the office with zero warning." For this recruiter, the problem was the company not keeping it's promises and going back on commitments.

But companies don't make binding promises or commitments to employers by having their managers tell them something. They write them into contracts. Because businesses are like everyone else; sometimes, they have to respond to changing circumstances. And sometimes, those circumstances can be something as trivial as a new executive, with a different outlook on things.

Commitments, promises, vows or what have you, come a few basic varieties, but I'm going to talk about two of them here. On the one hand, we have accountable commitments. These are the ones that come with consequences for violating them; anything from a loss of reputation where it counts, fines or, in serious instances, even people going to jail. And pretty much the one thing that all accountable commitments come with is documentation; somewhere, you can find the terms and conditions, even if they're arcane and hard to parse. (This is, after all, why mankind invented lawyers.)

The other sort of commitment that's relevant here is aspirational. In effect, the party making the commitment hopes they can keep up their end of the bargain, but if they can't, then c'est la vie. They alter the deal, and get on with things. This is not to say that there wasn't a genuine effort made, or that it was all a sham from the beginning, but these are the sorts of things that often come down to verbal agreements, and understandings between people who aren't in a position to agree to accountability measures.

And as far as I'm concerned, a manager telling a candidate "Yes, this is a fully remote role," is fully aspirational. It's the sort of thing that only really remarkable employees are ever going to have formally written into an employment contract, especially as an individual contributor. Because it's the sort of thing that companies don't want to be legally held to when things change. Even if that change is simply a new executive. And employees should understand this. Because it's a common occurrence. There's more labor, especially in the United States at the moment, than there is a need for, and that means that employers don't have to make accountable commitments over things like remote work in order to find people. And that gives them a level of flexibility that they value.

In the end, the recruiter who made the post went on to warn businesses that employees were paying attention to how well they kept their commitments, and would talk to one another. Accordingly, businesses that didn't clean up their act would face reputational damage. Just not in this case. Because, as in most instances of "bad employers who want people in the office," no names were named.

Pithos

There is a quiet conflict taking place on LinkedIn, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it's spilled over onto other social media sites as well. The belligerents are, on the one hand, people claiming that "artificial intelligence" has been added to applicant tracking systems (ATS) in order to speed the rejection of supposedly unsuitable candidates, and on the other, people who work as recruiters, who spend their time debunking such claims and explaining how things actually work.

While I suspect that, from the point of view of the recruitment professionals, their opposite numbers (some of whom claim to be recruiters themselves) are sowing incorrect information, for me as a bystander, I think what they're offering are measures of hope and/or control. LinkedIn is primarily a professional networking site; I know a few people who work blue-collar jobs, but they tend to be former white-collar workers who have made career shifts along the way. And this year has been a rough one for professionals, especially in the technology industry, President Trump may claim that weak hiring numbers for the past two months are falsified, but the long-term unemployed would likely beg to differ.

The contention that "the problem with the job market" lies with poorly-implemented generative automation or some secret ATS programming that a "quick hack" will bypass is designed to tell people that the more likely explanation, namely that Western societies are in a mode where they're better at economizing labor than in finding new, high-value, uses for it, is wrong. And that's why it has such staying power; a message of hope, even if that hope comes with a price tag, tends to win out over a bleak-seeming reality.

And so in this conflict, the recruitment professionals are on the defensive, as they have nothing comparable to offer. While never stated is as many words, their narrative is that there just aren't enough jobs to go around, and in this high-stakes came of musical chairs, some people are going to be left without a place. That's never going to be a welcome message; accordingly, there will always be a strong market for alternatives.

Big Screen

Well, as the kids say these days, that escalated quickly.

One Andy Byron, whom I never heard of before yesterday, was at a Coldplay concert on Wednesday with one Kristin Cabot, who I'd also never heard of. The two were shown on the "Kiss-Cam," displayed on the concert's Jumbotron, well, kissing. Their reactions made it evident that they didn't want to be seen together (which is likely what sealed their fates...), and the internet took it from there.

Mr. Byron, it turned out, was the chief executive officer of a technology company named "Astronomer." And Ms. Cabot was Astronomer's chief people officer. Who Ms. Cabot wasn't, however, was Mrs. Byron.

Mr. Byron tendered his resignation, and the board of directors accepted it, in a statement they noted: "Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met." Which is all fine and good, but the statement lacks one detail that I would like to have known: What standard was breached?

Presumably, Ms. Cabot reported to Mr. Byron, and so I can see the problem there. But in most companies, that's not an issue of standards of conduct and accountability... that's a matter of the actual rules; one does not enter into romantic relationships with subordinates. The power dynamic there is just too freighted, and so it too often results in relationships that are later labelled as sexually abusive.

But if the extent of the problem is that Mr. Byron and Ms. Cabot forgot that big concerts with "Kiss-Cams" are a bad place to carry on a relationship that's meant to be a secret (not that big concerts without a "Kiss-Cam" are all that much better), then the only people who should really care about this are Mrs. Byron and the divorce lawyers who will be tasked with ensuring that when she returns to being a single woman, she's a pretty wealthy woman.

Outside of that, no laws were broken, so what's the big deal? If sleeping with someone other than whichever partner one had committed to were a firing offense, the unemployment rate in the United States would be significantly higher than it is (or the participation rate lower, take your pick). Again, the reason why this would be verboten in most American companies is the reporting relationship, and Astronomer's statement  doesn't speak to that.

Astronomer is throwing Mr. Byron (and Ms. Cabot too, I presume) under the bus to show that they still pay fealty to a standard of marital fidelity that most Americans no longer hold themselves to. And for what? Were their customers really going to go to competitors over this? I get that Mr. Byron and Ms. Cabot's carrying on, and being called out (over, and over, and over again) on social media was embarrassing. I think I saw five different posts related to it on LinkedIn alone yesterday over breakfast. But marriage in the United States isn't what it used to be, and I'm not sure why corporate America is so invested in helping the more Puritanical elements of the general public pretend that it is.

Correction

There is, I am told, a saying in French to the effect of: "Prêcher le faux pour savoir le vrai," or "preach the falsehood to know the truth." Here in the United States, it's known as Cunningham's Law: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." And it's something that I've wondered about: Why are people more likely to ignore requests for information, but rush to correct things they consider wrong. One explanation is that people prefer feeling superior to being helpful. And I wouldn't be surprised to find that it is, at least in part, true.

But I think there is another piece to this particular puzzle. And that is the fact that ignorance lacks the perceived contagion that error carries. When a person who knows a fact encounters someone who doesn't know it, the knower's knowledge is safe; they're highly unlikely to forget what they knew simply from encountering someone who does not know it. Likewise, if a person who doesn't know something encounters someone else who lacks knowledge of the same thing, the status quo reigns. But someone who is wrong (or simply out of step with the mainstream) can convince other people that they are, in fact, correct; and this allows falsehood to displace not only ignorance, but knowledge. And I think that this is part of what motivates people to action when they encounter someone who is "wrong on the Internet;" the perceived threat that the person poses to truth, and perhaps thus to themselves.