- Branded Twitter pages are here! But only, apparently, if you’re a progressive news outlet. Seriously, Al Jazeera? What’s next, RT/ Russia Today / Komrade Kommuniqué? Rhetorical question.
President Obama grants many more media interviews than his predecessors, but holds far fewer impromptu question-and-answer sessions, according to data compiled by a professor who studies presidential interactions with the press.
By doing so, Mr. Obama and his administration have more control over who asks questions and where they are answered …
… However, Mr. Obama has comparatively avoided Q.&A.s with scrums of reporters, according to Ms. Kumar, answering questions at 94 photo opportunities and other such sessions in his first three years. Mr. Bush had spoken at 307 such sessions after three years in office, and Mr. Clinton, 493.
Of course. Interviewers submit questions to the President and his team, who then choose what they want to answer. If the questions go unvetted, they don’t get asked. This is why he avoids those impromptu Q and As — and interesting how his predecessors welcomed them.
But now there’s new criticism coming from the left: Christopher Calabrese of the The American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Legislative Office posted a blog on January 13th stressing their concerns:
Most troubling is Facebook’s willingness to search and collect users’ private political preferences and thoughts, preferences they may have shared only with their closest friend in a private email.
This raises at least three concerns. The first is that many users may not want to be part of any “sentiment analysis” or poll. For example, they may be a firm supporter of Mitt Romney but find Ron Paul’s ideas interesting. Are they now going to feel hesitant to talk about Paul’s ideas out of awareness that it might be registered as support or boost a candidate they don’t like? Second, we don’t see any mention of user consent anywhere in Facebook’s announcement. How has Facebook decided that users agreed that their personal communications can and should be used in this way?
Finally, what other uses might this information be put to in the future? Will it be used to serve users ads from politicians or manipulate voting preferences in some way? We can see the marketing materials from Facebook now: “Candidates, serve ads to secret supporters! No one knows about their preferences except their closest friends and us.”
The real question here is what are Facebook’s motives? In the wake of its first public offering of an IPO at $5 billion, analysts are saying that the social utility is worth a total of $85 to $100 billion–the biggest Silicon Valley IPO ever. Last year Facebook earned a revenue of $3.71 billion up 88 percent from 2010.
With such stunning financial success, why is such an invasive measure necessary?
Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere were on fire yesterday, with the news that Homeland Security Is Monitoring The Drudge Report, The New York Times, and other various websites. The headline sparked burning blog posts all across the web, some bordering on hysterics. Type “Homeland Security” and “Drudge” into Google and perform a search within the last twenty four hours, and you’ll find 56,700 results at this writing.
The story was borne out of an upcoming privacy compliance review from the Department of Homeland Security regarding one of the agency’s initiatives that entails monitoring “publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards.” There’s just one important detail missing here: the program was actually implemented in January of 2010.
The Volokh Conspiracy, a well-known group blog of law professors, puts the hype in check:
Matt Drudge and The Atlantic are hyperventilating, and Mark Hosenball of Reuters is bragging, about what The Atlantic calls an “exclusive” report that DHS “routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report.”
There are just two problems with this exclusive news report.
It isn’t news and it isn’t exclusive.
Readers of this blog could have learned exactly the same thing in one of my posts from, uh, February of 2010.
Here’s what I said two years ago:
With his usual nudge-and-wink, Matt Drudge invites us to be dismayed that “BIG SIS” — his moniker for Janet Napolitano — is “Monitoring Web Sites for Terror and Disaster Info.” Drudge links to a story saying that DHS will be monitoring social media like Twitter, as well as websites like Drudge, to keep abreast of events during the Winter Olympics. The source of the story is a twelve-page “Privacy Impact Assessment” issued by DHS.
This isn’t the first Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) on DHS’s use of social media. A few weeks earlier, DHS wrote a similar assessment of using social media during Haitian rescue operations.
I am indeed dismayed, but not for Drudge’s reasons. True, it’s disappointing that neither the Volokh Conspiracy nor www.skatingonstilts.com is deemed worthy of government monitoring. But what’s really dismaying is that DHS and its Privacy Office felt obliged to labor over two separate and painfully obvious privacy assessments just to do things that you and I would do by simply firing up our browsers.
That’s it. The story is that people at DHS are, gasp, browsing the Internet. As I said then, there’s no scandal, other than the electrons wasted by DHS agonizing over the privacy implications of browsing public Internet sources to find out what’s happening in the world.
Some seem especially concerned about the portion of the initiative that pertains to actually retaining personally identifiable information.
The DHS Privacy Office (PRIV) and OPS/NOC decided to further broaden the program’s capability to collect additional information, including limited instances of personally identifiable information (PII). As such, a Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) Update5 and new DHS/OPS-004 – Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative System of Records Notice (SORN)6 were issued on January 6, 2011 and February 1, 2011 respectively and are the basis for this Privacy Compliance Review (PCR).
But upon close inspection of “personally identifiable information,” the activity is really no different from what you or I might do to gather our own news interests.
- Debunking the latest PPP poll. Only 32% of its sample didn’t caucus with any party in 2008, so how does this make them “likely” to caucus with any party this go around?
The killing of Osama bin Laden during a raid by Navy SEALs on his hideout in Pakistan was the top news story of 2011, followed by Japan’s earthquake/tsunami/meltdown disaster, according to The Associated Press’ annual poll of U.S. editors and news directors.
Don’t click that BuzzFeed link and laugh, though. What looks like a goofy pop culture site won’t be one for much longer. The idea is for Smith to hire a dozen or so political reporters and (in his own words):
…to help build the first true social news organization – that is, an outfit built on the understanding that readers increasingly get and share their news on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms.
This is a natural evolution for the left’s number one New Media hitman. The only thing Smith and I might have in common is an understanding of the awesome power of social media to undermine and make irrelevant the MSM — not when it comes to information gathering and news reporting, but most definitely when it comes to narrative building. In a recent interview, Smith didn’t express it exactly like that, but the subtext is pretty obvious:
Twitter, Smith says, is “sort of draining the life from the blog.”
“Where people were hitting refresh on my blog because they wanted to see what my latest newsbreak was, now they’ll just be on Twitter, and I’ll tweet it out and they’ll see it there,” he says. “What I’m doing right now is just incredibly old school. I might as well have ink all over my fingers and be setting type.” …
The idea that Twitter could be a promotional tool, driving traffic back to his blog and to Politico, doesn’t reassure him. “I now have as many followers—40,000—as the number of unique visits I get on a slowish, average day on the blog,” he says. “At what point do I have more people reading my tweets than reading my blog? I don’t know.” (He actually has almost 50,000 Twitter followers, which may answer the question.)
What has to be galling to Smith and others like him is that social media allows anyone with a popular Twitter or Facebook account to not only have as much impact as a blog at, say, Politico, but also a faster impact. Moreover, one smart, well-written tweet or Facebook post can undermine and deconstruct a news article or blog post before it has a chance to go viral and enter the national narrative. This new reality drives the corrupt MSM crazy. The last thing these people want is to be wallflowers when it comes to what Americans are talking about.
This is why, for over a year now, I’ve written and marveled at the power of social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, to go around the toxic filter of the MSM. More than once I’ve witnessed national narrative changes occur on Twitter that took blogs a full day to catch up on and the MSM two or three. What’s happening is that through these extraordinary social media platforms, the American people are are having a conversation amongst themselves. We’re educating each other, learning from one another, sharing information, and exchanging ideas — and the MSM has zero say in any of it.
In May, FoxNews.com wrote about a quirky page on the Centers for Disease Control’s website that advises viewers how to deal with a potential zombie apocalypse (strange but true). That story received 38,649 Facebook shares — well within the boundaries of the two New York Times stories, but not included in the list.
Tebow is free to give “mad respect” to his lord, but I’d rather he do it on his own time. A number of players cross themselves on every play, but they do it discreetly — and expeditiously. Tebow’s prayer timeouts, by contrast, are as gratuitously in-your-face as the most flagrant end zone dance. And they last as long. Yet, according to his supporters, all of footballdom is supposed to give him a pass because his purpose is holy. Isn’t that what churches are for?
Christians aren’t supposed to hide their religion and in an era where one of the most recognized images in football is Janet Jackson’s nip slip. It’s refreshing to see someone out and loud about their faith. You can always change the channel.
Guild launches online forum for journalists covering protests
09 Nov 2011
Covering the Occupation Movement can be hazardous.
A growing number of reporters and photographers have been tear-gassed, threatened with arrest or otherwise bullied by police. And while overzealous authorities appear to be the worst offenders, protesters also have been known to turn on anyone who seems to represent “corporate media” — most likely a media worker, sometimes a union member, trying to do a job.
In response, the Newspaper Guild has launched a Facebook page, called “Occupied Journalists,” to serve as an online forum for media workers to share survival strategies and anecdotes from the streets. Sara Steffens, a staff organizer in Oakland for the Guild and its parent union, the Communications Workers of America, said the online forum began when “we started hearing a lot of reports from all over the country from journalists running into trouble covering the protests.”
Police can tell the difference between a journalist simply covering what’s happening and a journalist who’s forgotten their objectivity and has joined in the protests.
I don’t recall them doing anything like this with the tea party, do you? Of course, the tea party didn’t have altercations with the law and respected our men and women in uniform. [via]
An individual, via those in attendance, hollered at the health care story and the audience rebuked them. Two men booed the gotcha question posed by a gay soldier and they were so strongly rebuked for booing that the audience’s hisses and shushes overpowered the volume of the rude men’s outburst.
I’d say that the President “grossly misstated” the true nature of these incidents, but that would be inaccurate. It was a lie to willfully misstate that the actions of a couple of individuals were instead from the entire audience.
He’s not so funny anymore, and it’s not only because he’s come to take himself seriously. It’s because in the Obama era, we’re starting to see the price of refusing to stand for anything.
As the Weinergate story leaves behind many unanswered questions, the Twitterverse is not likely to get many truthful answers – not as long as Joan Walsh has anything to do about it. The Salon.com editor had some harsh words for reporters who tried to cover the story from an angle that didn’t suit her own anti-Breitbart bias.
Over Memorial Day weekend, the Weinergate story developed in the wee hours of the night on Friday evening and early Saturday morning, when a lewd photo purported to be from Congressman Weiner’s yfrog account surfaced on Twitter. Given that the story was literally unfolding on Twitter, where thousands of other users were witnessing the now infamous tweet in real time, it wasn’t exactly a “sit and wait” situation. In the age of social media, stories make themselves – good or bad, one tweet can erupt into a firestorm in the blink of instant. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity. On one hand, media can wait and verify every fact, but at Twitter speed, the story will move far more quickly than standard fact finding and requests for comments can possibly occur. On the other hand, new media journalism can fill that void and get ahead of such a story before the firestorm gets out of hand.
And this is exactly what the Big sites did when Weinergate erupted. BigGovernment.com ran with a post just before 12:30am on Saturday, headlined “Weinergate: Congressman Claims ‘Facebook Hacked’ as Lewd Photo Hits Twitter.” Given that the story was in its infancy but was moving so quickly online, editors merely presented the facts as they were known at the time, indicating that it was a developing story. They also decided to publish the tweet and photo, but took caution by redacting all of the personal information of the young woman for whom the tweet was supposedly intended. (more…)
The tech-savvy congressman saw the picture almost immediately. He had been tweeting about a hockey game just a few minutes earlier.
An analysis of Rep. Anthony Weiner’s Twitter timeline has already been done here at Big Government that clearly shows Weiner’s Twitter account had been publicly silent for 3 hrs. and 24 mins. prior to the Tweeting of the inappropriate image. Consequently, there was no Tweet about a hockey game “just a few minutes earlier.” Therefore, that statement simply isn’t true.
Rep. Weiner’s spokesman then falsely claims that after removing the image in question, Weiner joked about the incident a mere 15 minutes later. Again, from the Post:
Weiner pulled the shot himself, but not before it had been retweeted and screen-grabbed by several followers. Weiner, a voracious user of Twitter, wrote a humorous response about 15 minutes later.
Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Andrew Breitbart’s Big sites (ahem, like the one you’re reading right now) have replaced the average news junky’s old school fixes of newsprint and the 5 o’clock news.
Why not? It’s a fast, easy, and mostly free way to communicate and share information. Anyone can contribute, and everyone else can choose to listen, watch, or read at will. It’s a beautiful free market system – anyone can try and anyone can buy.
The mainstream media has paid attention, and bloggers like Erick Erickson, Dana Loesch, and Andrew Breitbart himself are now regular media fixtures. They are informed, they have opinions, they share share them, and have gained a following. Media outlets saw the demand for their insight, and offered them CNN commentary jobs, radio hosting opportunities, and book deals.
The mainstream entertainment industry is paying attention too.
One of my favorite channels for both informative and entertainment purposes is the Food Network. Come on, who doesn’t love the fierce competition of Chopped, or Alton Brown’s scientific explanations of why yeast rises using sock puppets? Pure enjoyment, my friends! (more…)
The hip, transparent and social media-loving Obama administration is showing its analog roots. And maybe even some hypocrisy highlights.
White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news.
The Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci – who, like many contemporary reporters, has a phone with video capabilities on her at all times – pulled out a small video camera last week and shot some protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser at the St. Regis Hotel.
She was part of a “print pool” – a limited number of journalists at an event who represent their bigger hoard colleagues – which White House press officials still refer to quaintly as “pen and pad” reporting.
But that’s a pretty Flintstones concept of journalism for an administration that presents itself as the Jetsons. Video is every bit a part of any journalist’s tool kit these days as a functioning pen that doesn’t leak through your pocket. (more…)
Just so you know …
The “I hate when I wake up and Sarah Palin is still alive” page is still up and running on Facebook.
The page is the creation of some far left kid in Denver. Counter Contempt reported:
Earlier this year, during that brief period following the Tucson shooting in which every single person in Washington D.C. lied through their teeth about ushering in a “new era of civility” in American politics, I wrote about a Facebook page dedicated to killing Sarah Palin. That page, created and administered by a 17-year-old male in Denver who describes himself as a “Satan worshipper and a sodomite” (he runs the page anonymously; CounterContempt is aware of his identity, but we have not released his name because of his age), is a gathering place for people to call for the assassination of Ms. Palin (here is the page in question. Warning: very foul language, and some graphic imagery).
There is an attack against Israeli Jews happening on Facebook but the social media site refuses to shut the incitement down. Its called the Third Palestinian Intifada, and the site is almost totally in Arabic. The ‘Third Palestinian Intifada’, urges its readers to copy the link, place it in their profiles and publish it on all pictures, videos and pages – everywhere they can. An alert announces that a march to “Palestine” will begin from neighboring countries on May 15 and soon after, “Palestine will be liberated and we will be freed. Our goal now is to reach millions of subscribers on this page before May.”
The page also includes hateful language calling for its supporters supporters to build on the previous two murderous previous intifadas in which Arab terrorists murdered and wounded thousands of Israeli civilians and caused the death and injury of thousands of innocent Palestinians.
The second intifada is also called the Oslo War as it took place after the Oslo process broke down and Yasser Arafat walked a way from a peace deal which would have given him a Palestinian State and 98% of his demands.
The Facebook page directs readers to supplementary content on other sites such as Twitter and You Tube. And ends with a warning to Facebook. “If Facebook Blocks this page..All Muslims Will Boycott Facebook Forever.”
In one of the rare cases of his caring about Jewish Issues instead of the progressive agenda, the ADL’s Abe Foxman blasted the Third Intifada site and Facebook:
“This Facebook page constitutes an appalling abuse of technology to promote terrorist violence,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “Although the managers of this group claim to be calling for peaceful demonstrations, the Third Intifada pages include calls for followers to build on the previous two intifadas. We should not be so naïve to believe that a campaign for a ‘Third Intifada’ does not portend renewed violence, especially in the current climate that has seen a dramatic increase in rocket attacks from Gaza, the brutal murder of the Fogel family in the West Bank, and a terrorist bombing in Jerusalem.”
…..”We are disappointed that Facebook has rejected our request to remove this site, which is in clear violation of their terms of service,” said Mr. Foxman. “We are especially disappointed in this case because in the past there has often been understanding and sensitivity from Facebook when we have brought violations of its own rules to its attention. We urge Facebook to reconsider its decision and remove this site, which by its very title incites violence.”
An email campaign to pressure the popular social networking site into removing the page has been mounted by pro-Israel groups as well as private individuals. All have expressed increasing concern over the potential danger to Israeli citizens that may result from the page, which clearly promotes violence against Jews in Israel. As of tonight the site has revived almost 348,000 “likes”
Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein wrote in a letter e- mailed to media yesterday. “As Facebook’s CEO and founder you are obviously aware of the site’s great potential to rally the masses around good causes, and we are all thankful for that,” Edelstein said. “However, such potential comes hand in hand with the ability to cause great harm such as in the case of the wild incitement displayed on the above-mentioned page.”
There are other sites Facebook should look at also as The Third Intifada site is not the only Anti-Semitic or Israel directed hate site on Facebook as shown by this video from my former writing home Aish HaTorah.
The social media site answered NO:
“While some kinds of comments and content may be upsetting for someone - criticism of a certain culture, country, religion, lifestyle, or political ideology, for example — that alone is not a reason to remove the discussion,” Debbie Frost, a spokeswoman for Facebook, said in an e-mailed statement.
“We strongly believe that Facebook users have the ability to express their opinions, and we don’t typically take down content, groups or Pages that speak out against countries, religions, political entities, or ideas,” she said.
Facebook is being disingenuous, This is not a site which disagrees with Israel’s positions. It is a site that calls for the destruction of Israel,and the murder of Jewish Israelis.
The internet is all about “freedom of ideas” I get that. And in most cases I agree. But there is also a built in responsibility for sites to guard themselves from becoming purveyors of hate. It is the reason why I do not allow comments to be published on The Lid until they are reviewed. Sadly Facebook does not believe it has this responsibility, and they cannot differentiate between opinion and incitement.
UPDATE:
The controversial Facebook group calling for a Third Intifada was taken down early Tuesday morning, however it was reposted sometime early Wednesday. It is not known whether Tuesday’s interruption of service was due to Facebook (as they made no statement) a hack attack, or the subterfuge by those involved with the intifada page. Big Journalism will keep and eye on it and report back to you.
Democrats are hoping they’ve found a secret weapon for winning back the House in 2012: Twitter.
House Democrats say that while they may be outnumbered, they stand to come out ahead by becoming more savvy to social media to stay more directly connected to the public.
Exit polling from November 2nd showed that the top concern for voters was the economy. A recent ABC poll shows that confidence in government has hit a 30-year low while 55% are unhappy with how Obama is handling the economy. Democrats are making a politically deadly assumption that any loss for GOP in terms of public perception is due to Republicans grossly watering down the red mandate they were handed on November 2nd — not because voters suddenly favor the very Democratic policies which caused them to vote red last year.
It’s not that Democrats aren’t already connected to the public; the public just doesn’t like what it sees.
The California Democrat pointed to the roles that Twitter and Facebook have played in affecting political climates, most recently in the context of the government upheaval in Egypt and labor disputes in Wisconsin. Democrats should harness that same potential when it comes to developing an effective messaging strategy this cycle, Honda said.
“I think when we have more air time and utilize technology … we can focus on getting control back of Congress in 2012,” he said.
A gross misunderstanding of new media and its role in grassroots. Social media served to organize and spread information about counter demonstrations in Iran and Egypt — just as it was used (and still is) with the tea party movement and before that, #dontgo. Social media won’t help Democrats sell a rejected platform. Revising the platform and then attempting to spread awareness of the changes will work, but House Democrats believe that voters just don’t get it. You’re stupid, apparently, and need the benefit of the big govocrats’ “effective messaging.”
NEW YORK (AP) – Online company AOL Inc. is buying highly-trafficked website Huffington Post in a $315 million deal that represents a big bet on the future of online news.
The acquisition, which will put Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington in charge of all AOL content, brings AOL an additional 25 million unique visitors a day.
That could help AOL begin to turn around its display advertising business, which has struggled to grow as the company tries to turn itself into a content provider and moves farther away from its roots providing dial-up Internet.
The deal “will create a next-generation American media company with global reach that combines content, community, and social experiences for consumers,” AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said in a statement announcing the deal early Monday.
Founded in 2005, Huffington Post is owned by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and a group of other investors. AOL will pay $300 million of the purchase price in cash. (more…)
During the rise of the tea party Anderson Cooper called conservatives "tea baggers" on CNN and remarked about "teabagging." The network featured a multitude of guests and contributors who likened tea partiers to nazis, bigots, pick your poison. No pressure was ever brought about to censor the speech of those...
Follow Us on Twitter
Subscribe via RSS
Got a Tip?