MSP54 [] How Tech Works [Social Media Smear Campaigns]

Recorded the day before the Facebook and Soros smear story broke, this Explainer shows how easy it is to build a smear campaign. About donuts.

Episode Excerpt:
Frequent friend of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg apologist, also known as Kulturpop’s Matt Armitage, is back on his Fake News mission this week. We’re never entirely sure whether he wants to stop it or spread. So, we’d better give him the chance to explain.
•It’s a bit unfair to say I’m a Facebook apologist.
•I’m more of a Facebook realist.
•We talk about accountability a lot. So today I want to ask what should Facebook or any other technology company be responsible for?
•Restocking our fridge? Well, Amazon seems to be on its way to that one.
•Driving us to work? Uber and Google are working on those.
•Looking after kids or elderly relatives? Companies like Samsung and Hitachi are building robots that should be able to take care of the unwanted.
•Still there? Hello Yahoo.
•Massive over-pricing and glitchy software? Apple’s got that one covered.

Well, that’s that topic resolved. What should we do for the next twenty minutes?
•I always find that badminton works very well on the radio.
•YouTube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV7TJEBEkAw (play a few secs)

I think that might be all the listeners can take.
•It was a good game though.
•I think you beat me 40 love in that first game.

That’s a different game. Let’s go back to your friend Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe we can pad the show out a bit.
•Regular listeners know that Mark and I have this weird relationship where I call him Zucky-baby and he acts as though he has no idea who I am.
•In effect, that relationship allows me to be absolutely honest about what I think of his company and its policies and he continues to act as though he has no idea who I am.
•You may have heard on the media – perhaps on BFM itself – that various governments have called for Mark Zuckerberg to appear at some kind of world congress of fake news.
•To answer the questions that various world leaders and politicians have about the fake news epidemic.
•And, I’m guessing, about how to reset their router when the bandwidth drops out on a Sunday morning.

You’re still on the politicians don’t know enough about technology trip?
•Well, that’s why I made the joke about resetting the router.
•Which I know is a cheap jibe and the pols are getting better at this but it’s not good enough that they’re playing catch up.
•Mark Zuckerberg is the boss of one of the world’s largest companies, not the tech support guy from the basement of your office.

That’s not an excuse for him not to be held accountable.
•Absolutely not. He should be brought to task.
•But it’s pointless unless we have the infrastructure and knowledge to hold him to account.
•Right now he could say pretty much anything.
•For example, he could say that fake news was made possible because of a vulnerability in the root servers that govern DNS addresses, and that that exploit prevented Pearl programmed servers from correctly identifying the geo-locations that his company’s ads stream to and from.
•He could easily say that even though I just made that up.
•It’s nonsense. In the sense that none of it makes sense. It’s just random Internet stuff I threw into a sentence.
•But our general lack of knowledge about the technology we rely on, leaves us in the position that anyone who trots out a bunch of plausible sounding terms is taken seriously.

Produced by Richard Bradbury for BFM89.9.