We Are All Algorithms Now - Is that what's really destroying the legitimacy of our democracy?

I’ve never felt this way about an election before. For my entire adult life, campaigns could be exhilarating, tedious, crowded with incident or laden with foreboding, but you always felt that, at some point, there would be a resolution. The votes would be counted; the exit polls parsed; a decision made; and both sides would respect it. The one time that didn’t happen — in 2000 — I felt for the first time an inkling of what I feel in every part of my psyche now: a sense that the system itself was buckling.

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And the reason this dystopian scenario is so credible is not just the fault of these political actors. It’s ours too — thanks to the impact of social media. I think we’ve under-estimated just how deep the psychological damage has been in the Trump era — rewiring the minds of everyone, including your faithful correspondent, in ways that make democratic discourse harder and harder and harder to model. The new Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, is, for that reason, a true must-watch. It doesn’t say anything shockingly new, but it persuasively weaves together a whole bunch of points to reveal just how deeply and thoroughly fucked we are. Seriously, take a look.

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For #Facebook and #Google and #Instagram and #Twitter, the business goal quickly became maximizing and monetizing human attention via #addictive #dopamine hits. Attention, they meticulously found, is correlated with emotional intensity, outrage, shock and provocation. Give artificial intelligence this simple knowledge about what distracts and compels humans, let the algorithms do their work, and the profits snowball. The cumulative effect — and it’s always in the same incendiary direction — is mass detachment from reality, and immersion in tribal fever.

👀 👉🏼 https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/we-are-all-algorithms-now

👀👇🏼 "Dopamine": Miniseries about the addiction mechanisms of Tinder, Facebook and Co. 👇🏼

"They'll do anything to make you an addict," they say about #Tinder, #Facebook, #CandyCrush, #Instagram, #YouTube, #Snapchat, #Uber and #Twitter in the miniseries of #Arte. Eight episodes explain in detail which mechanisms are triggered in our brain to keep us engaged

📺 👉🏼 https://t.me/BlackBox_Archiv/833 👈🏼 📺

#surveillance #capitalism #SocialDilemma #dystopian #democracy #thinkabout #why
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

A tip from a kid helps detect iOS and Android scam apps’ 2.4 million downloads

Smartphone apps raked in ~$500,000, in part thanks to shilling on TikTok and Instagram

Researchers said that a tip from a child led them to discover aggressive adware and exorbitant prices lurking in iOS and Android smartphone apps with a combined 2.4 million downloads from the App Store and Google Play.

Posing as apps for entertainment, wallpaper images, or music downloads, some of the titles served intrusive ads even when an app wasn’t active. To prevent users from uninstalling them, the apps hid their icon, making it hard to identify where the ads were coming from. Other apps charged from $2 to $10 and generated revenue of more than $500,000, according to estimates from SensorTower, a smartphone-app intelligence service

The apps came to light after a girl found a profile on TikTok that was promoting what appeared to be an abusive app and reported it to Be Safe Online, a project in the Czech Republic that educates children about online safety. Acting on the tip, researchers from security firm Avast found 11 apps, for devices running both iOS and Android, that were engaged in similar scams.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/scam-apps-with-2-4-million-downloads-found-on-apple-and-google-shelves/

#scam #kids #adware #Playstore #android #AppStore #iOS #tiktok #instagram