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Down the rabbit hole: how QAnon conspiracies thrive on Facebook | Technology | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo June 25, 2020

June 25, 2020

<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/25/qanon-facebook-conspirac…> n early May, QAnon braced for a purge. Facebook had removed a small subset – five pages, six groups and 20 profiles – of the community on the social network, and as word of the bans spread, followers of Q began preparing for a broader sweep. Some groups changed their names, substituting “17” for “Q” (the 17th letter of the alphabet); others shared links to back-up accounts on alternative social media platforms with looser rules. More than just another internet conspiracy theory, QAnon is a movement of people who interpret as a kind of gospel the online messages of an anonymous figure – “Q” – who claims knowledge of a secret cabal of powerful pedophiles and sex traffickers. Within the constructed reality of QAnon, Donald Trump is secretly waging a patriotic crusade against these “deep state” child abusers, and a “Great Awakening” that will reveal the truth is on the horizon. Why we are addicted to conspiracy theories Read more QAnon evolved out of the baseless Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which posited that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of a Washington DC pizza restaurant, and has come to incorporate numerous strands of rightwing conspiracy mongering. Dedicated followers interpret Q’s cryptic messages in a kind of digital scavenger hunt. Despite the fact that Q’s prognostications have reliably failed to come true, followers rationalize the inaccuracies as part of a larger plan. Q’s initial commentary on the Facebook bans was concise: “Information Warfare,” Q posted on the website 8kun. Two days later, in a post that included a collage of dozens of news headlines about the takedowns, Q went further, speculating that there had been a “coordinated media roll-out designed to instill ‘fear’” in believers and dissuade them from discussing QAnon on social media. “When do you expend ammunition?” Q wrote. “For what purpose?” The anticipated purge never came. Instead, QAnon groups on Facebook have continued to grow at a considerable pace in the weeks following the takedown, with several adding more than 10,000 members over 30 days. A Guardian investigation has documented: More than 100 Facebook pages, profiles, groups, and Instagram accounts with at least 1,000 followers or members each dedicated to QAnon. The largest of these have more than 150,000 followers or members. In total, the documented pages, groups and accounts count more than 3m aggregate followers and members, though there is likely significant overlap among these groups and accounts. These groups and pages play a critical role in disseminating Q’s messages to a broader audience and in recruiting more believers to the cult-like belief system, researchers say. “Facebook is a unique platform for recruitment and amplification,” said Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project who has been studying QAnon for years. “I really do not think that QAnon as we know it today would have been able to happen without the affordances of Facebook.” More than 100 Facebook pages, profiles, groups, and Instagram accounts with at least 1,000 followers or members each dedicated to QAnon. Suggested QAnon groups on Facebook. Composite: Eric Pratt/The Guardian Moreover, Facebook is not merely providing a platform to QAnon groups. Its powerful algorithms are actively recommending them to users who may not otherwise have been exposed to them. The Guardian did not initially go looking for QAnon content on Facebook. Instead, Facebook’s algorithms recommended a QAnon group to a Guardian reporter’s account after it had joined pro-Trump, anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown Facebook groups. The list of more than 100 QAnon groups and accounts was then generated by following Facebook’s recommendation algorithms and using simple keyword searches. The Instagram accounts were discovered by searching for “QAnon” in the app’s discovery page and then following Instagram’s algorithmic recommendations. Receiving QAnon recommendations from Facebook does not appear to be that uncommon. “Once I started liking those pages and joining those groups, Facebook just started recommending more and more and more and more, to the point where I was afraid to like them all in case Facebook would flag me as a bot,” said Friedberg. Erin Gallagher, a researcher who studies social media extremism, said she was also encouraged to join a QAnon group by Facebook, soon after joining an anti-lockdown group. [...]

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Boston votes to ban government use of facial recognition - CNET
by J.C. DE MARTIN June 25, 2020

June 25, 2020

https://www.cnet.com/news/boston-votes-to-ban-government-use-of-facial-reco… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Facebook loses ground in German legal battle over user data
by Enrico Nardelli June 24, 2020

June 24, 2020

https://www.valleynewslive.com/content/news/Facebook-loses-Germany-court-ba… CBS NEWS - ZDNET Facebook has lost a court case in Germany over its terms of use and default privacy settings but has already filed an appeal. The case was brought about by a longstanding Facebook nemesis, the Federation of German Consumer Organisations, Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband, or VZBV. Over the years, the VZBV has targeted Facebook's Friend Finder tool and its deployment of users' photos in ads, and its data-sharing between WhatsApp and the parent social network. This time round, the Berlin regional court agreed with the VZBV that Facebook is breaking German data-protection law by collecting users' data without giving them the information they need to make informed choices. The court said Facebook's default settings break the law: its mobile app automatically has users sharing their location, and users' profiles are by default findable through search engines. The judges also agreed that eight of the clauses in Facebook's terms and conditions don't meet the legal standards needed to get users' effective consent, because they are too broadly phrased. ..... -- EN ===================================================================== Prof. Enrico Nardelli Dipartimento di Matematica - Universita' di Roma "Tor Vergata" Via della Ricerca Scientifica snc - 00133 Roma tel: +39 06 7259.4204 fax: +39 06 7259.4699 mobile: +39 335 590.2331 e-mail: nardelli(a)mat.uniroma2.it home page: http://www.mat.uniroma2.it/~nardelli blog: http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/blog/enardelli/ http://link-and-think.blogspot.it/ ===================================================================== --

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rete nazionale della teledidattica
by Angelo Raffaele Meo June 24, 2020

June 24, 2020

carissimi, ad integrazione della notizia di JC sulla lettera che ho inviato alla ministra Azzolina, aggiungo un'informazione. Il nostro sogno è la realizzazione di una rete nazionale libera per l'attuazione della teledidattica di tutte le scuole di ogni ordine e grado. A riempirci di entusiasmo è la collaborazione con GARR, una delle più belle realtà del mondo scientifico italiano. Come Politecnico di Torino abbiamo presentato domanda al programma FISR del MIUR pochi minuti fa, a poche ora dalla scadenza. In allegato trovate il programma scientifico del progetto. Vogliamo che sia un progetto pubblico, aperto alla collaborazione di tutti gli interessati. Scivetemi o cercatemi al 3476337788. Raf

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Red Mirror: il nostro futuro si scrive in Cina
by de petra giulio June 24, 2020

June 24, 2020

Vi segnalo, sperando che sia di vostro interesse, il prossimo incontro organizzato dalla Scuola critica del digitale del CRS dedicato alla presentazione di *"Red Mirror: il nostro futuro si scrive in Cina"* scritto da Simone Pieranni. Ne discutono con l'autore Alessandro Aresu, Fabrizio Barca, Francesca Congiu, Beppe Rao, Giorgio Resta. *https://www.centroriformastato.it/red-mirror-il-nostro-futuro-si-scrive-in-cina-1/* <https://www.centroriformastato.it/red-mirror-il-nostro-futuro-si-scrive-in-…> L'incontro si svolgerà da remoto lunedì 29 giugno alle 17. Per partecipare occorre inviare tempestivamente una email a *"scuolacriticadigitale(a)gmail.com <scuolacriticadigitale(a)gmail.com>"*

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Why are Google and Apple dictating how European democracies fight coronavirus? | Ieva Ilves | Opinion | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo June 23, 2020

June 23, 2020

<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/google-apple-dictatin…> The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a rush by governments, private companies and digital startups to harness and develop the latest technologies in the fight against the spread of the virus. To best meet public health needs, digital technology should be able to trace the spread of the virus, identify dangerous Covid-19 clusters and limit further transmission. The essential goal is to register contacts between potential carriers and those who might be infected. This has led to tech solutions using smartphones to perform the otherwise arduous and labour-intensive task of “contact tracing” – determining who has come into contact with a disease carrier and what should be done when a person has had that contact Latvia has some of the lowest Covid-19 infection and mortality rates in the EU, thanks to aggressive and intensive manual contact tracing. Latvia ranks high for smartphone use, so it was natural that we would leap at the opportunity to reduce the manual workload with the help of a smartphone app. Yet when it came to transferring our successful manual tracing methods to the digital realm, we ran into a brick wall. As a member of the team that built our contact-tracing app, I represent the Latvian government in discussions with Apple and Google, whose technology the app uses. In negotiations I have come to realise that much of the public discussion on contact tracing has been oversimplified, with major implications for our health and for health institutions fighting the virus. A debate has been raging as to where the data from contacts is stored – either on the user’s phone, presumably guaranteeing privacy, or with the national health authority once a user tests positive for coronavirus and might have exposed others to it. This distinction has been labelled a conflict between centralised versus decentralised storage of contact information. This is the wrong debate. The misconception comes with the term centralised, as if all interactions and contacts between app users were going to be stored in a government-associated server. This has never been the case. What governments need an app to do is to mirror what public health authorities do anyway in the analogue world: manually trace contacts between infected individuals and people with whom they come into contact. In the manual version authorities do not reveal the identity of the infected person, be they a bus driver or a secret lover, nor do they explore the nature of the contact. The same approach ensuring privacy and data security can be achieved in the digital world. It does not have to be a binary choice. The data collected and used for a limited time by the national disease-control body in a democratic country does not have to be shared with law enforcement or sold to a third-party advertiser – as is true for all data gathered manually. The two real issues with contact-tracing apps are whether a digital app can be used to do what many governments do in the real world and, even more important, who decides what public health experts can do with an app. Governments in Europe currently have no say if they wish to access top-notch technology or ensure its best interoperability. Google and Apple, two US companies headquartered 10 miles apart in Silicon Valley have designed a well-intentioned framework – an application programming interface (API). This ensures the exchange of a Bluetooth signal and records the contacts that can later be translated into Covid-19 exposure notifications, should a carrier test positive. Acknowledging the intrusive power of the tool, and the potential for malicious abuse of it, Apple and Google have set preconditions for accessing its contact-tracing framework. The companies will allow only one app per country, approved by its government or its national health authority, but they will not allow a country’s disease-control authority to connect the dots that are critical for analysing data. Manually Latvia’s disease-control authority will call a coronavirus-positive patient, query their contacts to determine the potential exposure, inform those people of a risk, follow up on further developments and build “the tree” of virus spread. The Google-Apple approach will not allow the sole and official “national app” to establish the connection between contacts and carrier. Do Google or Apple get to tell a democratically elected government or its public health institutions what they may or may not have on an app? This becomes a serious issue in two respects – one epidemiological, the other financial and political. Epidemiologically, without knowing the nature of the contact it is not possible to build a model of contacts, whether they are serious spreaders or those who have tested positive yet are asymptomatic. The absence of transmission data limits the scope of analysis, which might, in the future, give freedom to people who can work, travel and socialise, while more precisely targeting others who risk spreading the virus. The economic and political issue has to do with the real situation on the ground when an app notifies the user of a potential contact. Should that person quarantine themselves for two weeks and bear the financial consequences of not going to work? Should someone potentially exposed to the virus be directed to immediate and government paid-for testing or be asked just to monitor symptoms? Without knowing the nature of the contact, an automatic quarantine becomes an enormous financial burden on social security agencies and ultimately on the government that has approved the app. Had Google and Apple aimed merely to provide an information tool that anyone could develop for their safety, rather then asking governments or health authorities to validate and own one app per country, there would be no expectation about making the tool conform to national health requirements. [...]

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Il Senato della Repubblica ha scelto Zoom come piattaforma di videoconferenza
by Stefano Campus June 23, 2020

June 23, 2020

segnalo questa notizia, nel caso non l'abbiate vista. https://www.key4biz.it/perche-zoom-il-senato-risponde-a-key4biz-intanto-la-… stefano campus

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How Fair Is Zoom Justice?
by don Luca Peyron June 23, 2020

June 23, 2020

Interessante inchiesta USA Buona lettura dl https://themarkup.org/coronavirus/2020/06/09/how-fair-is-zoom-justice _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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Mappa avanzamento lavori piano Banda Ultra Larga
by Antonio Vetro' June 23, 2020

June 23, 2020

Mappa interattiva e grafici di sintesi: https://bandaultralarga.italia.it/ av

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Il primo videogame a essere adottato come "libro di testo" scolastico
by don Luca Peyron June 23, 2020

June 23, 2020

This War of Mine entra nelle scuole polacche come libro di testo consigliato. La prima volta per un videogioco Buona lettura dl https://www.wired.it/gadget/videogiochi/2020/06/23/il-primo-videogame-a-ess… _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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