A Plan So Cunning You Could Put a Tail on It and Call It Weasel

Get in. We're messing up Melania's Amazon search results
byu/mulcahey inesist

The Pitch

The Cover Art

The blurb.

Over on Reddit, someone has made a wonderful suggestion, that we all go to Amazon, and that we all, "Amplify the paranormal erotic thriller novel Melania: Devourer of Men so it ranks higher than her movie," on Amazon.

The eBook is free on kindle, so you can download it, and boost the algorithm, so that when someone searches for, Melania the documentary, they get this book instead.

This act is generally called, "Google Bombing," though in this case, it would be Amazon bombing.

Classic examples of Google bombing, are sucessful efforts to make the search for "Miserable failure," giving the result of George W. Bush, and the word, "Santorum," giving the result, "The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex." 

Surely we can do the same to Melania. 

If There Were a Gold Medal for Tiny Dick Energy

Remember when I suggested that Elon Musk's firing of an engineer for his own falling engagement numbers on Twitter? Well, it gets better. He has now ordered Twitter to change its algorithms to make sure that everyone sees his tweets, whether you are following him or not.  (As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.")

Seriously, how did anything think that this guy was a visionary?

At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.

“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”

When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.

Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.

In the wake of those losses — the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs, and Musk to the president of the United States — Twitter’s CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.

Within a day, the consequences of that meeting would reverberate around the world, as Twitter users opened the app to find that Musk’s posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline. This was no accident, Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.

………

By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his tweets will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.

Seriously, someone needs to stage an intervention, and maybe get him into a conservatorship, and then they should make a biopic about him starring Nicholas Cage.

This man is crazier than a bedbug.

This is My Shocked Face

Color me unsurprised that YouTube algorithms deliver conservative content.

This is not a surprise.  Misery, resentment, and rage boost engagement, and conservatism is built on misery, resentment, and rage:

YouTube's recommendation algorithm not only gently traps viewers in mild echo chambers, it is more likely to suggest conservative-leaning videos regardless of your political alignment.

That's according to a study out of New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMP) that was highlighted this month by Brookings.

Social networks live and die by their recommendation algorithms: they're designed to keep visitors on the sites and apps by feeding them content that keeps them hooked, and if that drives up engagement – sharing links with others, commenting, subscribing, upvoting, etc – all the better. Controversial or mind-blowing material is perfect for this, as it's likely to spark more shares and comments, and thus keep more people addicted.

These feeds are thus personalized to each netizen based on their interests; that's essential to drawing and locking them in. Echo chambers form where people post and share stuff they have a common interest in, and ignore anything contrary to those principles and attitudes. This leads to a positive feedback loop of engagement within the group, reinforcing beliefs and increase time – and ad views – within the app or website.

The algorithms used by social media is extremely, and deliberately, harmful.  It's like Love Canal, with cat pix.

Where's the Money in That?

Over at The Washington Post, I saw an article referring to a paper on, "Bridging Systems," an algorithm which would promote unity rather than division.

From the abstract:

Divisiveness appears to be increasing in much of the world, leading to concern about political violence and a decreasing capacity to collaboratively address large-scale societal challenges. In this working paper we aim to articulate an interdisciplinary research and practice area focused around what we call bridging systems: systems which increase mutual understanding and trust across divides, creating space for productive conflict, deliberation, or cooperation. We give examples of bridging systems across three domains: recommender systems on social media, software for conducting civic forums, and human-facilitated group deliberation. We argue that these examples can be more meaningfully understood as processes for attention-allocation (as opposed to “content distribution” or “amplification”), and develop a corresponding framework to explore similarities — and opportunities for bridging — across these seemingly disparate domains. We focus particularly on the potential of bridging-based ranking to bring the benefits of offline bridging into spaces which are already governed by algorithms. Throughout, we suggest research directions that could improve our capacity to incorporate bridging into a world increasingly mediated by algorithms and artificial intelligence.

This is all well and good, but the economic model of all of the social media sites is to encourage outrage, because outrage = engagement = profit.

This is why Instagram turned a new father's baby pictures into a horror show, bombarding his timeline with sick and injured infants, because that encouraged engagement.

When my son was born last year, friends from all over wanted to share in my joy. So I decided to post a photo of him every day on Instagram.

Within weeks, Instagram began showing images of babies with severe and uncommon health conditions, preying on my new-parent vulnerability to the suffering of children. My baby album was becoming a nightmare machine.

This was not a bug, I have learned. This is how the software driving Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and lots of other apps has been designed to work. Their algorithms optimize for eliciting a reaction from us, ignoring the fact that often the shortest path to a click is fear, anger or sadness.

This is not a lack of the appropriate technology, this is a deliberate policy of hurting their customers (really their product to advertisers) to keep them on the site clicking on ads.

Designing a more humane algorithm is easy.  Absent government action, it will never be used. 

Doing so would involve leaving money on the table, and the principle of shareholder value demands it.

The for-profit publicly held corporation is a monster by design.

This is a Pattern

Like 8 months ago I noticed a weird pattern in social media data that @annewhitesell, @LeeHannahWSU and I had collected.

In 2018, local Republican parties on facebook started to receive substantially more attention than local Democratic parties did. https://t.co/CMgHXcb63B pic.twitter.com/dOR9Dp2G6V

— Kevin Reuning (@KevinReuning) June 8, 2022

!

I have noted on a number of occasions that Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire makes its money through behaviors that create fraudulent engagement metrics, and that Facebook allows this, largely at the instigation of Facebook's  head of global public policy, Joel Kaplan, who was part of the Brooks Brothers Riot in 2000 which used the threat of violence to prevent a fair counting of votes in the 2000 Presidential election.  (See here and here)

Favoring right wing politics, even when it violates Facebook's rules, and when it involves defrauding its advertisers, has been standard operating procedure for a very long time, and this clearly comes from the top.

Now we discover that Facebook has tweaked its algorithms to benefit Republicans. 

So not shocked:

Facebook pages run by state and local level Republican Parties appear to have received more exposure and engagement than the same types of pages belonging to the Democratic Party, new research finds.

On Wednesday, June 8, research was made public highlighting an apparent "gap in engagement growth 'unique to Facebook' between the GOP pages and their Democratic counterparts by 2019."

………

“Regardless of Facebook’s motivations, their decision to change the algorithm might have given local Republican parties greater reach to connect with citizens and shape political realities for Americans,” the research authors noted.

"The fact that private companies can so easily control the political information flow for millions of Americans raises clear questions for the state of democracy," they added.

Kevin Reuning, an associate professor at Miami University who also co-authored the study, took to Twitter with visual representations of their findings. With the visual, he tweeted about the "weird patterns" in the data.

"In 2018, local Republican parties on facebook (sic) started to receive substantially more attention than local Democratic parties did," he tweeted.

You can look at the paper here.

This has been documented frequently enough that it is reasonable to conclude that this is not a function of Facebook's desire for user engagement and profit. 

It's clear that Joel Kaplan, with the (at best) tacit support of Mark Zuckerberg has had his thumb on the  scales.

Facebook is not just a venal and corrupt business attempting to maximize profit, it is an entity which favors one political view over another, even when it is to the detriment of its customers (the advertisers) and the shareholders.  (Remember, the users are product, not customers)

Good

Finally, a court has ruled that in order for a DNA test to be admitted as evidence, the source code must be made available to the defense.

To my mind, any software used for prosecutions should be publicly available for review:

A New Jersey appeals court has ruled that a man accused of murder is entitled to review proprietary genetic testing software to challenge evidence presented against him.

Attorneys defending Corey Pickett, on trial for a fatal Jersey City shooting that occurred in 2017, have been trying to examine the source code of a software program called TrueAllele to assess its reliability. The software helped analyze a genetic sample from a weapon that was used to tie the defendant to the crime.

The maker of the software, Cybergenetics, has insisted in lower court proceedings that the program's source code is a trade secret. The co-founder of the company, Mark Perlin, is said to have argued against source code analysis by claiming that the program, consisting of 170,000 lines of MATLAB code, is so dense it would take eight and a half years to review at a rate of ten lines an hour.

MATLAB is a pretty high level language, so if you have 170,000 lines of code in it, you are writing bloated code. 

Also, if you have 170,000 lines of code in it, I guarantee that there are bugs, and likely substantial ones, because most of those lines of code are there to handle edge (unlikely) cases, where the programmer has to make broad assumptions about the data.

………

On Wednesday, the appellate court sided with the defense [PDF] and sent the case back to a lower court directing the judge to compel Cybergenetics to make the TrueAllele code available to the defense team.

"Without scrutinizing its software's source code – a human-made set of instructions that may contain bugs, glitches, and defects – in the context of an adversarial system, no finding that it properly implements the underlying science could realistically be made," the ruling says.

Kit Walsh, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, hailed the appellate ruling. "No one should be imprisoned or executed based on secret evidence that cannot be fairly evaluated for its reliability, and the ruling in this case will help prevent that injustice," she said in a blog post. If TrueAllele is found wanting, presumably that will not affect the dozen individuals said to have been exonerated by the software.

It should be noted that the studies "validating" TrueAllele have been conducted by Mark Perlin, and as such are suspect.

Also, though these are slightly different application, we already know that algorithms used for health care software, Zoom face detection, educational evaluations, and criminal sentencing are all explicitly racist.

It is no stretch to assume that an algorithm explicitly developed for police and prosecutors would be biased in their favor.

That is how you make sales.

A Feature, Not a Bug

Admission to university in the UK is driven by the "A-Level" exams, which have been canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Boris Johnson government came up with an algorithm driven alternative, which turned out to be so biased against students from poorer publicly funded schools that they had to withdraw it following massive protests.

This article details all of the problems with the process that was developed, but ignores the underlying issue, that it was not a good faith effort.

The Tories were explicitly looking at finding a way of favoring the inbred elites of British society while depriving less affluent, and less-white students fair access to the the UK's elite educational institutions:

When the UK first set out to find an alternative to school leaving qualifications, the premise seemed perfectly reasonable. Covid-19 had derailed any opportunity for students to take the exams in person, but the government still wanted a way to assess them for university admission decisions.

Chief among its concerns was an issue of fairness. Teachers had already made predictions of their students’ exam scores, but previous studies had shown that these could be biased on the basis of age, gender, and ethnicity. After a series of expert panels and consultations, Ofqual, the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation, turned to an algorithm. From there, things went horribly wrong.

Nearly 40% of students ended up receiving exam scores downgraded from their teachers’ predictions, threatening to cost them their university spots. Analysis of the algorithm also revealed that it had disproportionately hurt students from working-class and disadvantaged communities and inflated the scores of students from private schools. On August 16, hundreds chanted “F%$# the algorithm” in front of the UK's Department of Education building in London to protest the results. By the next day, Ofqual had reversed its decision. Students will now be awarded either their teacher’s predicted scores or the algorithm’s—whichever is higher.

(%$# mine)

The problem was not that education authorities failed, but that they over-succeeded.

If they had hit 10% or 20%, they would have gotten away with making higher education in the UK richer and whiter, and the students complaining would have been dismissed as ungrateful (insert race or class epithets here)s.

How This Works

Someone is Gaming the System

At The Markup, a news org created to do deep dives on technical news story, has found that there are significant differences in the ways that Gmail handles emails from different presidential campaigns.

The Buttigieg andYang campaigns are achieving disproportionate success in getting into the Gmail primary inbox.

The implication of this story is that Google could alter its algorithms to favor one candidate over another.

I do not think that this is a credible concern, at least not yet.

However, it is entirely possible that there are people inside Google who favor one candidate over another who would provide detailed information to the campaigns about how to game the filters.

IMHO, the two campaigns most likely to have a Google insider feeding them information would be those of Buttigieg and Yang, and it is their emails that have achieved the most success in reaching the primary email tab.

It's called a man on the inside attack:

Pete Buttigieg is leading at 63 percent. Andrew Yang came in second at 46 percent. And Elizabeth Warren looks like she’s in trouble with 0 percent.

These aren’t poll numbers for the U.S. 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Instead, they reflect which candidates were able to consistently land in Gmail’s primary inbox in a simple test.

The Markup set up a new Gmail account to find out how the company filters political email from candidates, think tanks, advocacy groups, and nonprofits.

We found that few of the emails we’d signed up to receive —11 percent—made it to the primary inbox, the first one a user sees when opening Gmail and the one the company says is “for the mail you really, really want.”

Half of all emails landed in a tab called “promotions,” which Gmail says is for “deals, offers, and other marketing emails.” Gmail sent another 40 percent to spam.

For political causes and candidates, who get a significant amount of their donations through email, having their messages diverted into less-visible tabs or spam can have profound effects.

“The fact that Gmail has so much control over our democracy and what happens and who raises money is frightening,” said Kenneth Pennington, a consultant who worked on Beto O’Rourke’s digital campaign.

………

It’s well known that Facebook and Twitter curate which posts people see through the news feed, highlighting some while others are scarcely shown. What’s received less attention is how email has also become an algorithmically curated and monetized platform—essentially another feed—and the effect that can have. Some nonprofits and political causes said inbox curation is reducing donations and petition signatures.

Google communications manager Katie Wattie said in an email that the categories “help users organize their email.”

………

Google communications manager Katie Wattie said in an email that the categories “help users organize their email.” 

………

The tabs also serve another purpose: ad inventory. While Gmail does not sell ads in the primary inbox, advertisers can pay for top placement in the social and promotions tabs in free accounts.