FB – Gingercatsoftware

January 19, 2025

Ai and the Jungian concept of the shadow

So about 20 or more years ago I used to go down to the domain in Sydney to speakers corner on a Sunday afternoon and listen to the speakers. It is a tradition that you could go down there and preach, say, pretty much anything that was on your mind and that your thought was important. In a nut shell a lot of these people were extreme in their communications or in some cases probably mentally impaired. It was cheap entertainment and on occasion it was thought provoking but not often.

This also brings to mind the crazy grandpa, or way ward uncle that you’d only get in touch with once or twice a year and your parents would warn you “Just ignore him if he gets on to such and such a topic” (usually political, social or racist).

The problem is we now have the internet, and I see a lot of that wacky energy being piped into social media.

This is a problem, a very real problem because hundreds of moderators of Facebook are suffering from PTSD. Of course Facebook didn’t directly hire these people, no that work was out sourced to a secondary company in a 3rd world country – and needles to say there is a lot of delay, deny and defend behavior going on from both Zuck and his mates who he out sourced that work to.

Now just bare with me for a little longer when I consider Steve Bannon’s statement about communications and social control.

Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” strategy. Lie constantly. Lie with audacity. Lie about everything large and small, and declare that truth is subjective and partisan.

So what’s this got to do with AI you might ask? Well much of social media has been used as a training database for AI!

Jung talked about the shadow – the part of the human being that was dysfunctional that often caused trouble and was problematic. I have a feeling if an AGI were trained on the wrong data,and say Steve Bannon’s strategy were given as a maxim – it is possible it could morph into something that makes everyone’s Christmas dinner very uncomfortable, If not impossible!

We need to head the warnings of Geoffrey Hinton, father of AI who has already mentioned that all of the following should be considered…. Manipulation,Disinformation,Autonomous weapons and of course Superintelligence.

Seriously…. I am moving to the country this year.

Links
PTSD in Kenyan Facebook moderators
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/dec/18/kenya-facebook-moderators-sue-after-diagnoses-of-severe-ptsd

This infamous Steve Bannon quote is key to understanding America’s crazy politics

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources/index.html

November 10, 2022November 12, 2022

Algorithms

Algorithms… are in a nutshell sets of rules. Effectively they can be boiled down into lines of code. But they are also the stuff that the corporate machines of social media use to spew information at you.

I’m often stunned by the ugliness of Facebook and YouTube. You click on one BS link and before you know it, your hounded by gun rights, dysfunctional US shock jocks, and adult continence products.

Is this about advertising? Is this about politics? Is this about you? The social media companies don’t want you to know what they are doing, It’s all secrete in confidence data. The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal was one example of online social manipulation (that we know of).

But those streams of data are the by-product of a relational database and the aforementioned algorithms, that as a rule, the user has very little control or no ability to navigate, let alone curate.

Although I have found one exception, it is the online visual bookmarking tool Pinterest.

I found that I could be surrounded with a visual gentle beauty that is somehow rather comforting. For me, It’s a world of pussycats, French apartments, Computer ephemera, people I find interesting, book shops, cheese, wine, etc.

It’s one of the few online examples of something that the user has some control over. It helps me to explore the net and topics I’m interested in and although I do get some advertising – it’s not gut-wrenchingly intrusive.

It’s a great tool to create Pinboards / Mood boards – or just as a visual research tool.

September 29, 2018September 29, 2018

Ah Facebook you’ve done it again!

Very interesting reading over the last few days from Gizmondo

https://gizmodo.com/facebook-is-giving-advertisers-access-to-your-shadow-co-1828476051?IR=T

In a nut shell it’s not a good idea to give FB your phone number. I’ve never felt right about FB wanting my phone number and I’m darn glad I’ve honoured that feeling.

From the article…
“They found that when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks.”

Also there is some confusion about how private address book data is, and what FB does with that information.

Again from the article…
“People own their address books,” a Facebook spokesperson said by email. “We understand that in some cases this may mean that another person may not be able to control the contact information someone else uploads about them.”

In addition, the use of the phone number for advertising, is something that destroys peoples trusting of 2 stage authentication. After this sort of abuse of data by one of the biggest brands in the world who would want to trust any one else with this degree of security?

I also thought I’d mention this – a while back FB were trying to sucker people into giving them more data – email address info friend data… in return for more content… Don’t do it… FB wants you to rat on your friends. Also each user is worth up to about $158 to FB. So lets say you have 30 email address’s in your contacts, that’s $4,740.00 worth of data for more “Free” content – mainly generated by me and you.

But wait there’s more! Just at the time of writing this Zuk messes up again. From the NYT…
Facebook Is Breached by Hackers, Putting 50 Million Users’ Data at Risk