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Post by anansi on Feb 15, 2019 7:29:43 GMT -5
Assessing the Merits of the ADOS Movement. [ The American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) movement has been gaining some mainstream attention of late. Joy Reid recently caused some controversy on her show by alleging that Russian bots are behind the ADOS movement. And recently Ann Coulter has expressed her support for the ADOS movement. It is very clear that certain people in the media are beginning to pay attention to this movement. I’ve been following the ADOS movement for some time and, as a Pan-Africanist, it’s a movement that I’ve always pushed back against since I became aware of it.] [ At its core the ADOS movement is a movement which seeks to address the fact that African Americans have been neglected by America. The supporters of this movement are demanding redress in the form of reparations and tangible political policies which will benefit African Americans. Why the movement has garnered so much attention and has become very controversial is not because the movement seeks to address the historical injustices which have been and continue to be inflicted on African Americans. The controversy comes from the fact that the ADOS movement seeks to draw a line between ADOS and immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. The term ADOS refers very specifically to the descendants of those who were enslaved in the United States, not the descendants of Caribbean slaves nor people from the African continent. This is what Antonio Moore explains in his article “African Americans Are More Than Just Africans in America.” Part of the reason for drawing this line between ADOS and black immigrants is the perception that immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa have very negative views of African Americans. I know that there are Caribbean people who have expressed condescending views of African Americans. Chalkdust, one of my favorite artists, is a Trinidadian who recorded a song titled “That Ain’t We” in which he seeks to distinguish Caribbean immigrants from American blacks or ADOS. Needless to say, the image that Chalkdust presents of African Americans isn’t a very flattering one, although he does note that Caribbean people and African Americans can learn much from each other.] medium.com/@dwomowale/assessing-the-merits-of-the-ados-movement-e6394d5db208Klik for more incl vids This is something that have been popping up on my feed of late, now these guys are not exactly your nativist or BHI types, but still I feel a sense of sadness, like what are we doing?? I understand the need to feel special about the unique Africa American culture, but I find their beliefs a bit short sighted ignoring the perpetual intermixing of immigrant Blacks Blacks from the Caribbean and Africa before a state called America ever came into being till this day, I look at my own extended family of old line and newly arrived Blacks and think how separated are we, we gained from each other, younger members of this family are virtually indistinguishable from any other blacks in the continental U.S..yes I know tension can arrive and we can get on each others last nerve. Euro Americans, largely fused themselves into one despite coming from diverse cultural and religious background and was met with high tensions that resulted in lynchings and rank discrimination, we have no such history. But like them it only temporary IMO. |
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Post by anansi on Feb 15, 2019 8:07:07 GMT -5
BTW I find the support of that racist Ann Coulter for the ADOS cause as a blaring red siren and possibly divide and conquer tactics coming from outside the community.. Playing on whatever division we actually have.
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Post by Tukuler al~Takruri on Feb 15, 2019 17:40:46 GMT -5
BTW I find the support of that racist Ann Coulter for the ADOS cause as a blaring red siren and possibly divide and conquer tactics coming from outside the community.. Playing on whatever division we actually have. Nearly all New World blacks in the Americas and Caribbean are 'descends of slaves'. Ships just dropped certain Africans on certain shores per certain market demand. I know Sepharade connections yielded a somewhat common ID from Suriname to Rhode Island. Cod fish & Cou cou is a NYC Israelite staple Shabbat dish, for instance. Non-Israelite blacks would be outside any that but surely the waves of Caribbean blacks to the USA hasn't become Black History Lost Stolen or Strayed, has it? m.youtube.com/watch?v=QXn-Fm6cn9sthe beginnings of BHM but now outmoded for Black Awareness Month. Still, Black Americans are indeed a distinctive nationality and set of ethnic groups. However tied Barbados is to New York City since the 18th century CropOver isn't a Black American cultural heritage. Is it even part of Black Brit culture? But where else in the world do Caribes & West Indians come together like they do on Eastern Parkway on American Labor Day. No AfrAm rep at that gathering of the tribes. AfrAms are unique sets of slave descendants just like the Islanders are unique sets of slave decendants My conscience sees us all as Afrikans. That's our key to harmony. But we each have our own house and bed. Imo, only blacks who undergo their hardship in the USA since old slavery days should reap the benefits they earned the hard way. Strange Fruit etc. at the hands of USA Ytes on USA lands is what exclusively entitles them. Don't know nada about ADOS except they seem as nativist and nationalist as EuropeanDOSMasters. Their narrative is between USA DOS & USA DOSM more than any black to blacks mvmnt imo. It's well known the DOSM funneled DOS gains into benefitting EDOSM females and immigrant Euros. I can feel ADOS anger of black immigrants if now advancing due to ADOS fought for and won rights and privileges. I'd sure like to hear Black American voices the Black Americans who can claim no other than a Black American identity born from at least 3 BA grandparents. |
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Post by zarahan on Feb 15, 2019 23:46:41 GMT -5
Good points. How do you react to the argument that:
Peoples of Caribbean descent/background have been well represented in US freedom
struggles- Stokley, Malcolm, Marcus, Chisholm, Belafonte and so on- a huge list- and on top of that
shared the same hardships and discrimination as US blacks in places where they resided. They thus
should be in the reparations loop.
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Post by zarahan on Feb 16, 2019 0:00:37 GMT -5
BTW I find the support of that racist Ann Coulter for the ADOS cause as a blaring red siren and possibly divide and conquer tactics coming from outside the community.. Playing on whatever division we actually have. Yes. Its a cynical ploy to mobilize the right wing "base" against "the culluds" as well as gin up resentment by even your liberal white folks. And yes- we can already see the cynical posturing as Trumpy boy weighs in to denounce "the liberals" and their "theft" from "hard working white Amurricans.." The ploy is so transparent, yet how many are going to get played.. as more time is wasted on phony, bullshiit political theater.. Realistically, the reparations thing is a very long shot, but in the short term, it is a real gift, a massive resentment mobilizer that the white right will cash in on. But aside from the political non-starter, are the technical details. Who handles the money? SOme speak of central leaders& bureaucracies, but if so, how much money will actually reach the man on the street, as compared to those who "administer" the funds? Who's really getting paid? |
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Post by anansi on Feb 16, 2019 3:29:45 GMT -5
I'm with Al-takuri on this, especially if it work to lessen tensions with old line AAs, as far as reparations goes,let old line AAs have it, Caribbean based ppl can or should get theirs from the Brits, Spanish, French and even the broke-assed Portuguese,who are just about being owned or colonized by rich Angolans..yeah the Dutch too can't forget them, but like you I won't hold my breath on any of that being fruitful.
Again this seems a lil suspect, a newly formed movement just took off ,who is the hand behind it, the Ann Coulters of the world have never given two shts about anything Black, isn't this a setup to mass removal of the immigrant community with the potential approval of the newly coined ADOS?? 🤔
BTW this is the year of return, when we have the highlight to engage Africa, creating business, cultural and familial ties, enriching all of us, while EDOSM ,Asians basically everybody and their mothers are encouraged to goto Africa ..but us!!
Smell a rat??
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Post by Tukuler al~Takruri on Feb 16, 2019 15:28:03 GMT -5
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Post by Tukuler al~Takruri on Feb 16, 2019 15:42:52 GMT -5
There's plenty more on native Caribbe blacks and reparations from who actually owes descendants of enslaved West Indies Africans.
Maybe this can continue in a new thread.
I'll return to the OP issues after this old follow up.
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Post by Tukuler al~Takruri on Feb 16, 2019 16:07:22 GMT -5
Of course if you can't physically fight no one will respect you. Y ppl not giving up no nothing till gunboats and fighter aircraft force them to.
That they understand. That's how Their Will Be Done. Begging won't cut it. They aren't going to lose in their own courtrooms. "In a court of fowls, the cockroach never wins a case." - old African (Great Lakes) proverb - If you can't fight for it, forget it. - Malcolm X - ( on negotiating freedom) link |
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Post by zarahan on Feb 17, 2019 0:33:40 GMT -5
I would have to agree when you give the courtroom metaphor. I don't think the reparations
movement will accomplish anything substantial- symbolic yes, but substantial is questionable.
There may also be some success in very specific cases, such as compensation where specific
victims from a specific incident can be identified. But overall, white folk ain't giving up much,
and they aint opening up the massive can of worms reparations opens up. As informed people
know, and clear scholarship documents, the North was a massive beneficiary of slavery. It
was never only the south. Why should they share the massive profits and benefits gleaned thereby?
There are a lot of people in line for reparations, including Native Americans, who were never
really compensated fr loss of their lands, despite solemn promises and treaties (mostly broken)
by white governments on state, local and federal levels. They don;t want to open up the can
of worms.
What is likely is symbolic action- an "education center" here, some "diversity coordinators" there..
Or an expanded foreign aid package in between.. nothing major, just augmenting what is already in place
and while much fanfare will be made of negotiations or settlements, those getting any money will likely
be obligated to buy goods and services from the donor country- the old strings attached control.
Or money to countries may be in the form of "easy credit" loans which gets the donors paid via
the interest they earn, or payments may be spread out for so long that they are of limited impact,
or rendered meaningless by currency manipulations, inflation etc. In other words there are dozens of
ways the whole thing can be co-opted.
Furthermore white people have a long history of giving with one hand and taking back with the other.
They "gave us" the protections of the 14th Amendment, but then green-lighted "separate but equal" for
over half a century. Same with voting rights on paper, while poll taxes, and mysteriously disappearing
registration offices and officers ensured that the paper rights were limited. Finally school
desegregation? Yes with some success and benefit, but over 30,000 black teachers, administrators
and coaches fired in the aftermath of Brown vs Board.
Enforcement teeth for civil rights laws? Sure, but then starve and gut the agencies tasked with enforcement
as happened with the EEOC under the Reagan regime. Noble sounding laws via the 1968 Housing Act?
YEs, but then make enforcement a matter of snail-like litigation of each case individually. Finally forced
to hire blacks in better jobs? Okay, but then manipulate "job qualifications" including grandfathering
in whites while forcing blacks to meet the suddenly appearing "higher standards" - an old
white union dodge- see landmark case Griggs vs Duke. Affirmative action for the bleks? Oh let's limit
that right off the bat with grinding legal attrition, or weak enforcement. One study I read a while back
said it would take 38 YEARS to do one compliance audit on fed contractors- that is the major ones.
Oh and while we at it, make sure white women are the primary beneficiaries of AA.
New federal money coming down the pike to build more schools with better facilities that blacks will
attend? Sounds great, but hey, the money has to go thru the hands of the same racist authorities,
who a scant few years earlier were opposed to significant aid to black education. And whos gonna
build all those shiny new facilities? White unions that relegate black workers to chump change.
Who's gonna get most of the good jobs and benefits in the years to come- you know the deal-
if you black- get back.
Welcome mat thrown out to our minority neighbors in our cool and diverse hood? Yeah, cool. Oh, by the
way our zoning admin has manipulated lot size and building regulations to ensure than there is
less affordable housing to go around. You say this means less minorities who can afford the steeper
prices? Hey just an unintended consequence.. but we do note that less minoritees in the hood
means less in our schools as well.. Just a coincidence, we are all cool and diverse up in heah...
Time after time, what white people oh so nobly proffered with one hand, they have taken back openly or
covertly with the other in some way. Native Americans can tell a tale or too along those lines. Great White
Father in Washington say Indian have this permanent tract of land for "as long as the grass green and waters flow"?
Sounds good .. Oh we need right-of-way through said lands for settlers "just passing through." OOpsie..
so the settlers are killing all y'all buffalo? Hey its a free country! Oh and by the way we will need the military
to "protect" said settlers. Y'all don't mind if we build a fort or two here do you? OOps looks like hostile
redskins need some chastisement. Well, well, well another treaty signed, yielding even more Indian land?
Hey, just a coincidence.. we need another round of concessions from the natives, modifying yet again, the
alleged "permanent" guarantees given by the Great Father, or lesser lights at the state level..
The reparations movement one suspects will find the same pattern of deception and manipulation being deployed..
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Post by zarahan on Feb 17, 2019 12:57:18 GMT -5
Here'sj ust one example below of give with one hand, take with the other. On the surface, SOME AA to remedy past discrimination seems reasonable- such as remedies for specific black workers held back for years and denied promotion. But while giving with one hand, enforcement is made deliberately weak, on the other.  QUOTE: "virtually all affirmative action [in employment] is voluntary since the government resources to enforce requirements or monitor further compliance have always been limited and are shrinking further. She estimates that currently there are only enough resources for each employer to be investigated only every thirty-eighty years."(Hartmann 1996 Who has benefited from Affirmative Action in Employment" in Curry ed 1996, The Affirmative Action Debate.)
"By 1968, its [the EEOC's] complaint backlog exceeded 30,000. A decade later that number had grown to 150,000. In recent years, the EEOC received about 63,000 complaints annually, and has been able to bring suit in no more than 500 a year. Moreover, when suit is brought, cases, as a rule, take the better part of a decade or more to reach a legal resolution."
"Nevertheless, visitors to government contractors in 1995-94 who inquired about their compliance with affirmative action requirements found that 75 percent were in substantial noncompliance. In fact, since 1972 only 41 contractors have been debarred from the list of approved federal contractors out of the thousands whose performance was judged satisfactory. In addition, only four of those who have been debarred were larger corporations, and in these four cases, the debarment lasted less than three months. One study found that most agencies responsible for non-construction contractors reviewed less than 20 percent of all federal contracts. One local office had two people monitoring 29,000 contracts." --Cohen and Sterba (2003) Affirmative action and racial preference: a debate, pp190-207 "Between 1981 and 1983, the budgets of the EEOC and the OFCCP (the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Program) were respectively cut by 10 and 24 percent, their staffs by 12 and 34 percent, and travel funds for EEOC investigations were eliminated. During the Reagan era, affirmative action under the federal government's contract compliance program virtually ceased to exist."--Cohen and Sterba (2003) Affirmative action and racial preference: a debate, pp190-207 "the EEOC’s backlog increased 35% from 54,970 in 2007 to 73,951 in 2008; the number of complaints increased nearly 20% from 79,896 in 2007 to 95,402 in 2008; nearly two-thirds of all complaints filed alleged gender or racial discrimination."--National Law Journal, 12/14/2009, "EEOC will get $23 million to reduce 70,000-case backlog" |
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Post by zarahan on Feb 17, 2019 12:57:47 GMT -5
I'm with Al-takuri on this, especially if it work to lessen tensions with old line AAs, as far as reparations goes,let old line AAs have it, Caribbean based ppl can or should get theirs from the Brits, Spanish, French and even the broke-assed Portuguese,who are just about being owned or colonized by rich Angolans..yeah the Dutch too can't forget them, but like you I won't hold my breath on any of that being fruitful. Again this seems a lil suspect, a newly formed movement just took off ,who is the hand behind it, the Ann Coulters of the world have never given two shts about anything Black, isn't this a setup to mass removal of the immigrant community with the potential approval of the newly coined ADOS?? 🤔 BTW this is the year of return, when we have the highlight to engage Africa, creating business, cultural and familial ties, enriching all of us, while EDOSM ,Asians basically everybody and their mothers are encouraged to goto Africa ..but us!! Smell a rat?? LOL, yeah its a rat all right, a fat, cunning rat. Like you say, they can use it as a wedge issue to get the bleks and the migrants squabbling, with black support for assorted get tough deportation/exclusion measures. But at the same time it helps gin up angry mobilization of the white right wing base. Hey! Here's all those lazy reparations negroes taking our money Dey getting "free money" from "hard working white Amurricans.." LOL we can already see the ads: Cut to automated meme generators and bots spamming the web, Facebook, Twitter etc.. CUE OMINOUS VOICE-OVER:"There is only one way frens, to stop "the liberals" (and the negroes) from taking our money.
You know what to do.. You know who to vote for.. " Its a perfect two-fer setup! Sweet! |
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Post by Tukuler al~Takruri on Feb 17, 2019 14:35:28 GMT -5
Me? I got no problem with #ADOS that I don't have with some other Black Americans.
Me? I don't want a penny of the monies due to 'native' African Americans.
African immigrants naturalized in the USA after the time of old slavery days aren't African American.
They are Mauritanian American, Senegalese American, Ghanaian American, Nigerian American, Congolese American, baTswana American, Kenyan American, Somali American, Sudanese American, Egyptian American (that last one to seal the point).
ADOS/AADOS?
This ethny of African Americans defined itself and articulates itself clearly enough.
The amorphous and clueless Black American ethnic groups should follow, afaic.
The more 'native' American blacks who solidify identity on something other than simple color the better, imo.
So few here are willing to post and get up a conversation on anything.
I mean a real conversation vs I'm right and you're wrong debating.
I want to hear actual descendants of the Maafa (transAtlantic triangular trade - Middle Passage - the HellAcross) whose generations all were enslaved in the borders of the USA have to say.
(The subject of USA Atlantic and Caribbean islanders vs Euro colony islanders could be a nother good topic.)
Asante's been silent. His postings are clear as far as identifying factual black identities in the USA.
African American doesn't mean any relatively recent immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean/West Indies, or Europe.
Each of those people have their own languages, culture (musics & cuisines in particular), faiths, and histories.
So OK let's hear from some of you lurking Black Americans and African Americans, P L E A S E !!!
PLEASE, nobody faking a BA/AA identity should claim to be an authentic BA/AA in regards to my wonderings.
And, of course, anyone can post anything they want anyway.
I'm not trying to limit anything.
It's just I'm not hearing from the nationality #AADOS comes from and I want to.
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Post by zarahan on Feb 17, 2019 17:28:14 GMT -5
Anansi said: Joy Reid recently caused some controversy on her show by alleging that Russian bots are behind the ADOS movement May not have been Reid but activist Shireen Mitchell appearing on Reid's show that made initial allegation it appears. But anyway, she seems correct in the sense that while the Russian bots did not START the reparations movement which has been around a while, they are piggybacking on it for expoloitation purposes. Mitchell did point out that the ADOS hashtag is new (Min 4:02). She did not say, as some critics allege, that the reparations movement itself is bot based. www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/how-to-spot-a-russian-bot-on-twitter-1436501059933But its a good topic and for what its worth, here are some tips to help spot SOME of the deception tactics: -Generic icon coupled with tweet flurry on particular political topics -Very attractive avatar or icon -A lot of numbers after Twitter handle -FLood of old accounts that now become "followers" at particular moments -Suspicious gaps between "tweets" ("awakening" of old accounts) -Accounts pretending to be black people, particularly black women -Suddenly appearing accounts using "ebonic" dialog at certain movements (like Kamala Harris announcing candidacy) -Nultiple languages -URL Shorteners and use of URL shortener services -Hyperactivity at certain political intervals then sudden disappearance or fade off -Unlikely popularity (100 followers but posts wth 5,000 likes or retweets?) -Abnormally large number of posts ot tweets (suggesting automation) www.motherjones.com/media/2018/08/how-to-identify-russian-bots-twitter/ |
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Post by zarahan on Feb 17, 2019 18:01:31 GMT -5
Twitter says it is cleaning up its act but notice how vague they are in the letter to users below. They offer no advice on how these accounts operate. Of course. They like the traffic the troll accounts bring. So they will go through the motions. Notice also how the bots work both sides of an issue to gin up traffic, a standard Russian propaganda tactic. Also note the manufactured outrage as audiences were manipulated. ----------------------------------------------------------- www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/russian-trolls-hyped-anger-over-black-lives-matter-more-than-previously-known/ Russian Trolls Stoked Anger Over Black Lives Matter More Than Was Previously Known As Trump and Clinton battled, Kremlin operatives duped the left, the right—and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Even @jack got duped by them. Shortly after a Kremlin-run troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency was first exposed last October by Russian journalists, the Daily Beast reported that Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, had twice retweeted an account that claimed to be an African-American woman but was in fact operated by the IRA in St. Petersburg, Russia. Dorsey retweeted content in March 2017 from @crystal1johnson that referenced #WomensHistoryMonth and said “Nobody is born a racist.” But @crystal1johnson was also highly active in a heated social-media war over racial justice and police shootings that played out during the 2016 presidential campaign. Now, new research out of the University of Washington shows the troll that duped Dorsey was among 29 known Russian accounts infiltrating both left-leaning and right-leaning sides of a Twitter melee that included shooting-related keywords and the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter, #BlueLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter. “On both sides, we see troll accounts gaining traction in polarized, audience-driven discourse.” As Twitter shares more about the actions of thousands of known Russian accounts – including the company’s recent revelation to Congress that in the two months before the election, Russian-linked bots retweeted @realdonaldtrump 470,000 times vs. retweeting Hillary Clinton’s account fewer than 50,000 times – the UW research sheds further light on a deliberate strategy the Russian government used to play both sides of an emotional American debate. In data collected over a nine-month period ending in October 2016, the UW team found clearly defined left-leaning and right-leaning clusters—about 10,000 accounts in each sphere—tweeting about police shootings and including the three hashtags related to #BlackLivesMatter. Two of the Russian accounts found were among the top 12 most-retweeted accounts overall across all 20,000 accounts. “This suggests that troll content was relatively widely broadcasted in the contexts of this network,” the research team wrote in their findings. “On both sides, we see troll accounts gaining traction in polarized, audience-driven discourse.” “It’s striking how systematic the trolls were,” says Ahmer Arif, one of the researchers on the study. The operation, he says, was sophisticated enough to exploit both sides: “The content they’re sharing is tailored to align to each audience’s preferences.” Orange depicts every time a known Russian troll account in the dataset was retweeted around shootings and #BlackLivesMatter-related hashtags over a nine-month period ending in October 2016. University of Washington Human Centered Design & Engineering Program “It is important that we come to see online disinformation not just as a problem of the other ‘side’ but as something that is targeted at all of us,” UW professor Kate Starbird, who heads the project, told Mother Jones by email. The new research builds on previous work by the UW team to analyze the divisive nature of the Twitter conversations around police-involved shootings. When the initial list of 2,752 Kremlin-linked account names was released last fall, the researchers recognized some of the handles and cross-referenced the list with their data. Among those handles was @bleepthepolice, another highly retweeted troll account on the political left. The researchers say such names reflect the Russian operation’s media savviness and familiarity with U.S. domestic politics. “The trolls could blend in with the crowd fairly well,” says Leo Stewart, another researcher on the team. “You might think you could identify a troll account, but they were able to successfully create these personas.” (Russian accounts are hardly alone in creating the fake personas proliferating on Twitter; a New York Times investigation published Saturday, “The Follower Factory,” showed how an American company, Devumi, created 3.5 million automated bot accounts – with more than 55,000 of those appropriating the identities of real Twitter users – and sold them to customers like celebrities and politicians.) “One of the effects of amplifying this type of content is it can undermine public discourse by constructing outrage.” Twitter recently updated their number of known IRA-linked accounts to 3,814 – plus 50,000 automated bot accounts they say are connected to the Russian government – but the list of additional account names has not been released. The UW team says that if additional names are revealed, they will continue to mine their 2016 data to better understand the trolls’ reach. Twitter also has started informing 677,775 users that they interacted with Russian accounts – but Starbird says the company is missing an opportunity to provide more information about how users were manipulated on its platform. “Instead of sending a vague letter telling us that we interacted with some troll account, they could send personalized letters telling us exactly which accounts we interacted with, when, and how,” Starbird wrote via email. “This would be far more impactful in terms of how we understand propaganda and disinformation, and how we view our own role within the information space.” Reached by Mother Jones, Twitter declined to make Dorsey available for comment and referred questions about its user-notification emails to the company’s recent blog post concerning the 2016 election. That post includes a screenshot of the @crystal1johnson account tweeting about police shootings on Sept. 21, 2016. UW researchers note that while the tweet is on the topic and within the time period they analyzed, it wouldn’t be captured in their data because it doesn’t include a hashtag related to #BlackLivesMatter. “We only have a slice of what’s being shared in this space,” Arif says. Playing both sides of a political issue is a standard Russian propaganda tactic, national security experts say. When Congress released images from the troll factory’s Facebook campaigns last fall, the ads shown clearly targeted Black Lives Matter and LGBT audiences on the left, as well as gun-rights audiences on the right. “This is consistent with the overall goal of creating discord inside the body politic here in the United States, and really across the West,” former CIA officer Steven Hall told CNN at the time. “It shows the level of sophistication of their targeting. They are able to sow discord in a very granular nature, target certain communities and link them up with certain issues.”
In the UW team’s Twitter data from 2016, the researchers are still studying the content of the trolls’ tweets and the links that they included; their preliminary analysis shows the Russian accounts pushing out some of the most extreme content on each side. “There’s this caricaturing going on,” Arif says. “One of the effects of amplifying this type of content is it can undermine public discourse by constructing outrage.” From Congress to the private sector, there is growing pressure on social media companies to take more aggressive actions against fake accounts; following the publication of the Times investigation, celebrity mogul Mark Cuban called on “@twitter to confirm a real name and real person behind every account.” To date, the company has said relatively little about any plans for combatting the problem. It's time for @twitter to confirm a real name and real person behind every account, and for @facebook to to get far more stringent on the same. I don't care what the user name is. But there needs to be a single human behind every individual account . In the meantime, researchers like those at UW are trying to shed more light: “Our goal is to help people understand how they’re being manipulated, but not necessarily give any prescriptive advice on how they should or shouldn’t engage in particular conversations,” Arif says. “It’s just to understand that there might be voices in these spaces who may not be who they seem, and that’s not just on one side of the political spectrum. And in some cases, these voices represent the most extreme.” |
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