Crowd-sourcing Political Persuasion in Social Media

Update: Although this post was written a while back, people are still finding it and reading it. I have updated it here and there to reflect the post-Trump realities.

Right after the 2016 US election, we heard a lot about the "echo chamber" that saw a lot of people talking about issues in social media, but mostly to people of similar beliefs.

Why did neither side have much success persuading people of conflicting beliefs and what should we do differently for the futute?

Crisis Communication in the COVID Era

The president violated every lesson in crisis communication when he downplayed the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic earlier this year.

His claimed intent was to prevent panic, which is a worthy goal, but how he did it is NOT what ANYBODY with experience in crisis communication would do.  What should he have done?

Teachers Have More Impact than they Know

Since I announced my retirement, I have heard from people, particularly former students, who I haven't had contact with for years.  It has caused me to think more generally about the impact teachers have on their students' lives.

Some things I'm thinking about:

1. Years ago, when I was a development officer for the USD Foundation, we had a prominent alum retire.  I won't name him, but he was the chief financial officer for a major corporation that you would all realize. In reflecting on his retirement for the USD alumni newsletter, he named a business faculty member who he said had a profound impact on his career. When the teacher was asked, he didn't recall his former student at all, i.e. the guy hadn't been much of a standout in class, but he had been influenced anyway.

2. I am also reminded of a movie few people will remember from 1980 called The Competition.  In it,  a character played by Lee Remick lists her pedigree as a piano teacher:

"Ludwig Von Beethoven taught Carl Czerny, who taught Leschetizky, who taught Schnabel, who taught Renaldi, who taught me."

What I taught was the product of things that my previous teachers taught to me, as well as meaning I made on my own.  Some of what I learned on my own was after I started teaching, so I could better explain things to students. And there are things nobody could have taught me years ago, because they were brand new. Some of what my own teachers taught me was what their teachers had taught them, and their own teachers before them.  

In the last couple of weeks, since I announced my retirement, I have heard from hundreds of people, many of them former students, many of them saying remarkably nice things.  Some are crystal clear in my memory from their time as students and some are more of a "what class were they in?" kind of memory. I see some often on Facebook, and some I haven't hardly heard from since they graduated.  

It leaves me pondering what people really learned from me, what they have taken farther based on the foundation I helped them develop, and how they are using this ability and knowledge today.  How are they, formally or informally, teaching others? Do they even remember which ideas and skills they first came to understand in my courses, but that they are using today?

Teachers don't pour knowledge into people's heard.  They create environments in which students can connect the dots and create new knowledge for themselves.

Often teachers don't know the true impact we have had on our students.

Is the news media liberal? Yes, but not the way you think.

We've heard accusations for years about the alleged bias of the "liberal news media." Professional journalists are trained to keep their own opinions out of their work, but in the broader (non-political) context of "liberal," having a liberal news media is good for everybody. 

Read to find out why.

All Good Things 2: Accomplishments

On the occasion of my retirement, I have been thinking back over the past 16 years.

I have been the radio station advisor and Radio Workshop teacher for almost a third of the lifetime of KWSC-FM, which begins its 50th year this fall. When I inherited the station, it had a transmitter that was past its design lifetime, aging studio equipment, no AP service, bootlegged software on its production computers, and a programming automation system that somehow kept playing outdated things we tried time after time to remove. The station was also facing a $10,000 fine for FCC violations, committed before my time.  One of the main things I was charged with when hired was to "get things under control."

Today, the station has a new tower and transmitter site, audio consoles with years left in their lifetimes, a constantly updated production music library, a constantly updated on-air music service, and an automation system that works effectively (except for occasional glitch caused by human learning curves). We have recently-purchased BluTooth sports remote equipment, recently-purchased standardized studio microphones, and we are using a podcasting platform that I researched and brought to the table. My partner in all of these technology updates was our engineer, Tom Schmitz.

I have also been a leader for many curriculum updates.  What we now call "Electronic Media" was "Broadcasting' but the industry had moved beyond that "silo."  Collaborating with Maureen Carrigg and Max McElwain, we updated the name of the major and began the ongoing process of converging the student media to make them multi-platform, as the industry expects.  I also like to think that I helped find critical resources and the curriculum structure for the very popular digital film coursework of the "Hot Attic Film School", which is probably leading Mass Communication to a record enrollment, possibly as soon as this fall.

I have had multiple service roles at the school, including serving on the vital Academic Policies committee, the Institutional Review Board, chairing multiple hiring committees (they were all good hires), and some years ago chairing the Technology for Learning and Teaching (TLTC) committee as we revitalized it.  I also served on the WSC Centennial Committee.

There was a time recently, due to unexpected faculty changes, in which I was the ONLY full-time faculty member in mass communication. I do believe that I was an important part of holding things together during that challenging time.

For the record, there are things at WSC that only I know how to do, particularly involving the radio station, and I say that literally.  In anticipation of having Emeritus status, I am fully intending to assist and mentor whoever comes next teaching the classes that have been mine and in operating KWSC-FM.

Facebook and Twitter probably CAN legally censor your posts

A recent Supreme Court ruling may put the damper on efforts by the president and his defenders to stop social media giants from censoring and blocking accounts of people who make abusive, bullying, fascist, or other extreme posts, political and non-political. 

Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, was actually about cable TV public access channels, but the court's ruling sheds light on the right of media companies to censor user-generated content.

Remember that the First Amendment does NOT guarantee free speech in all situations.  What it does is prohibit the Government from taking actions that limit free speech (including all levels of government).

The cable company in this case censured and eventually banned the plaintiffs from providing content for the company's community access channel, as the result of a program they produced that was critical of the cable company itself. The plaintiffs claimed that because the community access channel was set up as a public forum, their rights were violated.

The Supreme Court majority noted that although the cable company had a contract with the city, it was essentially operating as a private company, and not as an agent of the city.  Therefore, the court ruled, the cable company is not bound by the First Amendment.  It returned the case to the federal district court for review, taking into account this guidance.

It seems to me that this is VERY relevant to the question of social media companies removing content or banning users.  Facebook and Twitter are not in any way agents of the government. They are clearly private companies.  Thus they have the right to set rules and boundaries about allowable content, known as the Terms of Service. 

Of course, there are complications, like the false positives resulting from the use of algorithms to try to identify violating content, which implies that the companies need functional appeal processes. 

But when people post in social media, they need to remember that they are still really playing in somebody else's sandbox, and nastiness CAN have consequences.

Time for a Change

I have stepped down from my Civil Air Patrol national staff position (volunteer staff) in the radio communications program.

Many of my social media friends are CAP members, but many around me know little about this part of my life.

General Amy Courter awards my first of two
Distinguished Service Medals for my
CAP Communications leadership

The reasons are complex and do not need to be shared in public, but for the last 15 years I have been part of the policy-setting and leadership of the communications program at the national level of CAP, the official auxiliary of the US Air Force.

My accomplishments (with the collaboration and leadership of many others) have included:

-- Front-line management of the VHF narrowband transition, a $5 million project that replaced over 500 repeaters around the country, often with volunteer installers, and has been called the single biggest CAP project since World War II 

-- Advocating “if the national commander wants radio messages, then let’s SEND messages...” leading to the weekly Intercom messages that began the revitalization of CAP’s HF radio nets, and which in turn has opened up very cool new missions for CAP as a whole  

-- Designing the innovative, multimedia Introductory Communication Users Training (ICUT) course, in an age when most training consisted of “look at these PowerPoint slides” (and too often still does) 

-- Visioning and rewriting the communication management and operational procedure regulations every time since 2004, as well as multiple national communications plans…

Which collectively helped transform the communication system from a legacy relic of the 1980s to a vital 21st century operational mission resource… 

Including, among many other things, bringing the NIMS/ICS “plain language” expectation for inter-agency radio traffic to the CAP voice operations manual, and incorporating after action reporting (AARs) as an expectation of CAP communications exercises.

-- Specialty Training Track test revisions multiple times since 2006, including transformation of the requirements from electronics orientation to management training, and changing the educational theory according to which test questions are structured 

-- Saying “if the wings (states) are required to send in communication plans, we should be READING the plans and giving feedback” 

-- Developing and implementing the 2011 transformation of CAP’s dormant Automatic Link Establishment (ALE) HF network to a nationally-managed vital communication asset 

-- Planning and conducting the first national communications exercise in anyone’s memory a decade ago and three subsequent national exercises, before somebody else took of the exercise function 

-- Oh, and then there was the time I got repeatedly threatened with being called to testify before Congress for an imagined failing of the comm system, which in reality was “a feature, not a bug”

As I said, LOTS of other people were part of these accomplishments, including often taking ideas I voiced first and running with them, to great success.

I will still be around the national comm program, and may work on special projects.  I also have other people in CAP actively recruiting me to work on national-level projects.

Lost in Space; Lost in Science

The new Lost in Space from Netflix is an ambitious project with likable characters, but the show runners could have benefited considerably from a science adviser.

There are a few minor spoilers below about situations, but not about the characters or story line details (unless they have already been shown in trailers).

As in the original 1960s Lost in Space, the Robinson family is on a colonizing expedition to Alpha Centauri.  This time, the Jupiter 2 is a landing craft from a larger vessel, which ends up in the wrong place and runs into trouble, requiring evacuation.

The production, based in Vancouver, uses beautiful locations and elaborate sets to produce an authentic feel.  The characters are generally likable, although they have different and more complex family relationships than in the original Lost in Space.

At face value, it is an enjoyable season with nuanced characters, a complex villain, and good action sequences, partnered with thoughtful character development.

But time and again, I was taken out of the story by having to say "that's not right" or "it doesn't work that way" about things related to science.


Ice doesn't freeze that way

Early in the series, we see a lake freeze solid in an instant, causing problems for the characters.  But water freezes at the surface first.  Yes, the script established that it was really cold, but there is liquid water under the ice on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, not to mention probably at Pluto, which has been very cold for a long, long time.  Ice freezes by forming a thin crust of ice, which slowly gets thicker and thicker.

There are other scenes (hinted at in the trailers) in which the Jupiter 2 is also stuck in ice, and the way the ice works in those scenes doesn't seem right, either.


Forests and critters don't grow that way

Like in the original Lost in Space, the planet the Robinsons are on is in a funny orbit that will cause it to get VERY hot and pretty much kill all life.  At one point, a character notes that the trees only have one growth ring.

The life clearly has ways to recover, but the series was shot in a typical BRitish Columbia forest, with tree trunks several inches in diameter.  You are telling me that the trees get that big in one growing season?

Plus we see several indigenous animals, some of which are very large.  How do they survive the heat?

Oh, and in one scene, we see a fallen tree and stump that was clearly cut by a chainsaw.


Radio doesn't work that way

One of the main points of the overall story line is that part of the colony ship is still in orbit and and the remaining crew there is transmitting, but can not hear the landing craft on the planet, because the colony ship's dish antenna is missing.  But if you know ANYTHING about radio, this breaks down.

A broken dish antenna WOULD prevent one from receiving, but it would also prevent one from transmitting, which they were doing just fine. Plus one would not use a big dish antenna for general coverage of the entire planet, which is what the folks in space wanted.  Dish antennas are directional and the colony ship did not appear to be in a high enough orbit to be able to cover the entire planet with a tight beam dish antenna.

True, they could have been using a different omni-directional antenna to transmit, but such an antenna would also work fine for receiving signals from the surface.  Astronauts on the International Space Station use five watt portable (handheld) radios to talk to ham radio operators on Earth, transmitting through a window and using nothing but the built-in antenna of a few inches long.  Because of the altitude, and nothing in the way, it doesn't take much.

In addition, if the transmit antenna is not working right (or missing) the transmitter in the ship would not work right.  The radio operators would realize immediately that they had an antenna problem.  For purposes of talking to and from the planet, jury-rigging a replacement would not be at all hard.

Without this "the ship can't hear us" plot point, the entire rest of the story breaks down.  It is clear from the dialog that the landing ships don't have the fuel to go back into space, to save themselves from the heat, but that if the colony ship could hear them, it would send down fuel.

So the whole rationale of the ten episode story arc breaks down.


Biofuel production doesn't work that way

At one point, the folks on the planet talk about using the biowaste (manure) from animals on the planet to create fuel to power their ships.  I can't say much more, in order to avoid spoilers, but the plan is to produce huge amounts of fuel in a very short period of time, and I am not convinced that they can produce enough fuel to do what they want, starting from scratch, in the time available.


[Sigh]

I still liked the new Lost in Space and if they make a season 2, I will watch.

It has a rich production design, character-based scripts with lots of interesting character development.  It generally does a nice job of promoting the "willing suspension of disbelief" that is needed in science fiction.....

Except for these troublesome "it doesn't work that way" problems with the science part of the science fiction that significantly undercuts the story arc of the series.

Facebook

There has been a lot of angst recently about how Facebook uses data from user profiles. But pretty much every organization that uses advertising does essentially what Facebook does, i.e. collecting information about customers and using it to target advertising messages to them.  So how do we make sense out of current events in social media?

Yes, Everybody does it

It is a standard postulate of advertising and marketing that we respond most favorably when the messages we receive are relevant to our interests. So ALL advertising companies do research to find out where their preferred customers (and prospects) hang out in the media, and they advertise in those locations.

They also do various kinds of research to understand us better.  For example, the bar code scanning in our favorite supermarket.  Everything goes into a database, and if we pay by credit card for check, they know a lot about us, personally.  Have you ever noticed that the coupons that print out while we're checking out are usually for something we already buy (or a competitor)?

Data collection about customers is not new, by any means.

• For centuries, newspapers and later radio and TV created interesting content in order to get people to also see advertisements.
• Starting in the 1970s there was an explosion of specialty magazines, allowing advertisers to reach audiences they knew was already interested in the specialty products the advertiser sells. 
• The hundreds of cable channels now provide this same pre-selection of specialty interests for advertisers.
• When businesses started using the WEB, the same thing happened -- specialty websites sprang up allowing advertisers to find the audience interested in their particular specialty products.

Modern mobile technology has certainly taken this way of doing business to new heights, like knowing your exact location so they can text you discount coupons when you are near a certain store. But it is more of the same and NOT something unprecedented.


How does Facebook Advertising work?

When you make a post on a Facebook business page, some people see the post "organically" because they already follow the page, or they see a friend comment or like the post.

But as page administrator, you also have the opportunity to pay money to extend the post so more people see it.  You can select friends of your current followers, or use a variety of other criteria, such as geographic area, age, and gender.  Facebook also watches what members post, like, and share, so you can select people based on a variety of interests which Facebook has identified, resulting from your history of posting.

In doing this, Facebook does NOT actually share your data.  The advertiser provides the criteria, and Facebook does the match internally in its system, and "serves" the post (advertisement) to the people who match the criteria.


So how did Cambridge Analytica get the data?

According to this article, the researcher, Dr. Kogan, made an agreement with Facebook which allowed collection of data for research purposes, but forbade transferring the data to third parties.

At face value, this is reasonable.  Academic researchers collect personal data all the time, but ethical research does not allow the identities of the participants to be known by anyone outside the study. Institutions have mechanisms in place to ensure this, called "Human Subjects Institutional Review Boards."  I have served on HSIRB at my school and have written proposals seeking approval for my research plans.

In keeping with this, Facebook prohibits collected data from being sold or transferred “to any ad network, data broker or other advertising or monetization-related service.” Dr. Kogan apparently collected the data, then violated the agreement with Facebook and transferred the data anyway.


What was the real failure here?

One can certainly argue that Facebook needs a stronger way of enforcing it's terms of service policy than simply trusting people to comply.

One can argue that websites and apps on which we post personal data should not be allowed to use that data, but this has been happening for 20 years or more on almost every commercial online platform you visit.  It is the REASON they exist, i.e. to make money (not to "serve the public.")

One can argue that users need more warnings about "the information you are about to post may be used for advertising, and delivered back to you in individually-targeted messages."  Most people will still ignore the messages, as they do the terms of service and other warnings.

One can argue that the people in Congress who are charged with regulating this stuff have no clue about what they are trying to regulate (a fact made clear by the questions from members of Congress to Mark Zuckerberg).

I wish I could boil this all down to a single failure with corresponding solution, but the social media environment is too complex.

The vast majority of these web and app systems are for-profit undertakings, meaning that they either need to charge fees, or depend on advertising.  The tried and true business model is to attract an audience with interesting content, and then expose them to advertising, ideally focused to the interests of the audience because what is advertised aligns with the content.

But most consumers conceptualize these content sources as "services" and do not understand that they, themselves, are an audience being sold to advertisers.  This makes them gullible and prone to impulse when they encounter memes, quizzes, and other means of data collection.

There is no simply way to change this paradigm, but public education is part of it.  Caveat Emptor (let the buyer beware) is critical.  Stop and think what information you are entering into the app or website.

If you don't want the entire world to know something, don't put it on the Internet (including ANY communication transmitted via technology).

Why they had to Redesign the Enterprise...Again

Spoilers below!

Note: This post was written before the reuniting of CBS and Paramount.  This article reflects the considerations in effect when the Discovery version of Enterprise was created.

-------------

The Star Trek Discovery season finale appeared on CBS All Access last night, and the cliffhanger was an unexpected appearance of the original USS Enterprise, NCC-1701 (no bloody A, B, C, D, E, or anything else, as Scotty might say).

Careful examination reveals that this is yet another "re-imagining" of the classic starship.  So why couldn't they just use the design from the "Kelvan Universe" in the most recent movies?  That would be logical, wouldn't it?

The answer is that if they had, they'd probably get sued.

The problem is that movie Star Trek and television Star Trek are no longer controlled by the same corporations.  CBS and Viacom (which owns Paramount) were once part of the same corporation, but over a decade ago they were split into two separate publicly-traded corporations (now there is talk of them recombining).

The result required years of negotiations over who owns Star Trek, which is why we didn't see new Star Trek for years.

Viacom/Paramount controls the rights to the Star Trek movies, whereas CBS controls the rights to television Star Trek.  When to comes to making NEW Star Trek, they're not allowed to draw significant content from each other.  They have to go back to the source material that THEY control.

All previous redesigns of the NCC-1701 Enterprise were in the movies.  The only appearance of a Constitution Class Starship in television Trek since The Original Series was the USS Defiant, seen in Star Trek Enterprise, which was a faithful CGI reproduction of the original design.

So given the decision to redesign the Enterprise, CBS HAD to create an Enterprise that was not directly linked to any of the movie incarnations of the ship. Of course, they COULD have made this Enterprise also a faithful reproduction, but...

My guess is that merchandising considerations led to the redesign.  We now have (or will have next season) yet another version of the Enterprise to make into plastic model kits, Hallmark ornaments, etc. 

Oh by the way, Pocket Books, which publishes all the Star Trek novels, is owned by CBS. Last year they negotiated a deal with Viacom/Paramount to also public Star Trek books based in the J.J. Abrams Kelvan Universe, but I do not know when any actual Kelvan Universe books may be released.

Separating the two companies resulted in Byzantine complications for Star Trek.  Merging them again would probably be highly beneficial for Star Trek, if they could decide which production team takes over.

For the record, what is different in the redesign?

• The struts attaching the nacelles are different.
• The shape of the rear landing bay is changed
• The nacelles, themselves, are different - the original did not have those lighted side panels
• The exterior lighting is different   
• The ship's markings in some areas are different
• The impulse engines at the rear of the saucer are different

There are probably plenty of other things that we will see when we get a plastic model kit or Hallmark ornament...or more video from next season.