{"id":2415,"date":"2021-04-12T11:42:56","date_gmt":"2021-04-12T10:42:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/12\/popular-opinion\/"},"modified":"2021-04-12T11:49:21","modified_gmt":"2021-04-12T10:49:21","slug":"popular-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/12\/popular-opinion\/","title":{"rendered":"Popular Opinion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"405\" src=\"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/img_0778-1024x405.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2413\" srcset=\"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/img_0778-1024x405.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/img_0778-300x119.jpg 300w, https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/img_0778-768x304.jpg 768w, https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/img_0778-330x130.jpg 330w, https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/img_0778-690x273.jpg 690w, https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/img_0778.jpg 1050w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Frightening &#8211; and yet unsurprising &#8211; report explaining how Facebook is used by politicians to unduly influence public opinion through the creation of incredible numbers of fake comments and likes from a tiny number of users. The report is based around an interview with Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook who worked within the company\u2019s \u201cintegrity\u201d organization. Zhang details the ways that Facebook is manipulated &#8211; particularly by politicians of smaller countries &#8211; and how the company does little to prevent it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201c\u201cSuppose that the punishment when you have successfully robbed a bank is that your bank robbery tools are confiscated and there is a public notice in a newspaper that says, \u2018We caught this person robbing a bank. They shouldn\u2019t do that,\u2019\u201d Zhang says. \u201cThat\u2019s essentially what\u2019s going on at Facebook. And so what\u2019s happened is that multiple national presidents have made the decision that this risk is enough for them to engage in it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here: <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2021\/apr\/12\/facebook-loophole-state-backed-manipulation\" target=\"_blank\">Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Frightening &#8211; and yet unsurprising &#8211; report explaining how Facebook is used by politicians to unduly influence public opinion through the creation of incredible numbers of fake comments and likes from a tiny number of users. The report is based around an interview with Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook who worked within [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2414,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-on-the-net"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2415"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2416,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2415\/revisions\/2416"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyhollingsbee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}