All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Political ads are all over Facebook. But voters are in the dark about where they come from | Martin Moore

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If there is an autumn election, voters will be bombarded by a wave of unregulated ‘news’

On the day Boris Johnson took over as prime minister, hundreds of Facebook ads dropped like confetti into thousands of UK voters’ news feeds. Many were virtually identical, featuring a black-and-white photograph of Johnson gazing towards an unseen audience. “These are my priorities,” one version of the ad read. “What are yours?”

Quickly, the ads were interpreted as the start of Johnson’s election campaign and the splurge drew immediate parallels with the Facebook-driven 2016 Vote Leave campaign, especially since the director of that campaign – the Svengali-like Dominic Cummings – walked into 10 Downing Street as Johnson’s most senior adviser on the same day. Then on Friday we learned, through reports in the Guardian, that the political campaigning firm CTF Partners, one of whose heads ran Johnson’s leadership campaign, was running a network of unbranded “news” pages on Facebook on behalf of its clients.

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bellingcat – The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror – bellingcat

The most important takeaways from the El Paso shooting are twofold: 8chan’s /pol board continues to deliberately radicalize mass shooters. The act of massacring innocents has been gamified.

Source: bellingcat – The El Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror – bellingcat

El Paso shooting: Police say multiple people dead, suspect in custody after mall attack – Los Angeles Times – “Texas Governor spouts denial and self-delusion instead of action to address to racist terrorists!”

Abbott, in his remarks, focused on the issue of mental illness, noting that after a shooting last year in which 10 people died at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, one of the biggest lessons for avoiding mass shootings is to address mental illness. “Mental health is a large contributor to any kind of violence or shooting violence,” he said.

Source: El Paso shooting: Police say multiple people dead, suspect in custody after mall attack – Los Angeles Times