10 Compelling Reasons Why the Vegas Shooting Has Disappeared from Headlines

Amidst numerous unanswered question, the Las Vegas mass-shooting has curiously faded from the headlines. Is this a deliberate silence?

Facebook's Advertising Algorithms Targeted "Jew Haters"

Facebook is having a rough couple of weeks...

Last week, Democrats and progressives who had once praised the company for promising to eradicate “fake news” on its platform were outraged by revelations that it had sold at least $100,000 in advertising to a Russian troll farm – an allegation that Facebook had initially denied when it first surfaced in the spring. Lawmakers, including Democratic Senator Mark Warner demanded more information from the company, even speculating that Congress may need to pass legislation to “protect Americans” from malicious foreigners dedicated to subverting the American Democratic process by…purchasing targeted ads.

Now, ProPublica is reporting that Facebook"s advertising algorithms inadvertently created a series of targeted-ad categories directed at anti-semites and racists. To test if these ad categories were real, ProPublica paid $30 to target those groups with three “promoted posts” — in which a ProPublica article or post was displayed in their news feeds. Facebook approved all three ads within 15 minutes.

“Last week, acting on a tip, we logged into Facebook’s automated ad system to see if “Jew hater” was really an ad category. We found it, but discovered that the category — with only 2,274 people in it — was too small for Facebook to allow us to buy an ad pegged only to Jew haters.

Facebook’s automated system suggested “Second Amendment” as an additional category that would boost our audience size to 119,000 people, presumably because its system had correlated gun enthusiasts with anti-Semites.

Instead, we chose additional categories that popped up when we typed in “jew h”: “How to burn Jews,” and “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’” Then we added a category that Facebook suggested when we typed in “Hitler”: a category called “Hitler did nothing wrong.” All were described as “fields of study.”

Now, the company’s advertising business is facing another scandal. According to ProPublica, the world’s largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’”

The company had continued with the targeted pitches until earlier this week, when ProPublica reporters shared their findings with Facebook’s communications team.  

“Until this week, when we asked Facebook about it, the world’s largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’”

Unsurprisingly, the company blamed the anti-Semitic ads on one of its algorithms and promised to fix the problem and make sure it never happens again.

“There are times where content is surfaced on our platform that violates our standards,” said Rob Leathern, product management director at Facebook. “In this case, we’ve removed the associated targeting fields in question. We know we have more work to do, so we’re also building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future.”

Most internet users prefer to conveniently ignore how platforms like Facebook and Google can afford to provide so many free services while still operating profitable businesses.

Of course, they’ve managed to do this by dominating the global market for advertising. Facebook and Google essentially hoover up user data and feed it through to their algorithms, which perform complicated analyses to help develop a users’ demographic profile. The company’s platform then uses this information to target advertisements that might be more relevant to their interests. The purported efficacy of these tactics has allowed Facebook to muscle out traditional purveyors of advertising – like media companies – with whom it is now attempting to formulate an uneasy partnership.

Following the attack in Charlottesville, Va. last month, when a young woman was killed and dozens were injured after an Ohio man who had attended a White Nationalist rally on the campus of the University of Virginia rammed his car onto a crowd of counter-protesters.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote at the time that “there is no place for hate in our community” and promised to purge such speech from Facebook.

“It’s a disgrace that we still need to say that neo-Nazis and white supremacists are wrong - as if this is somehow not obvious,” he wrote.

But, as ProPublica points out, the company, while it may have deleted a some questionable posts, it didn’t apply any scrutiny to its ad-buying platform. The ad categories that ProPublica spotted were likely generated after scraping data from profiles featuring anti-Semitic themes - either as an interest, an employer or a “field of study.” Facebook’s algorithm automatically transforms people’s declared interests into advertising categories.

ProPublica has been scrutinizing Facebook’s advertising business for years. Last year, it collected a list of 29,000 ad categories from Facebook’s ad system — and found categories ranging from an interest in “Hungarian sausages” to “People in households that have an estimated household income of between $100K and $125K.”

The report didn"t appear to have much of an impact on the company"s share price, which was flat in early trading.

Tech companies’ advertising businesses are generating billions of dollars in revenue, and yet – as the ProPublica investigation demonstrates – there’s little transparency surrounding how the Facebooks, Amazons and Googles of the world repurpose user data for commercial purposes.

Perhaps when he is done cracking just how an (allegedly) Russian $100,000 ad campaign changed the course of US election history. Mark Warner can look into this.

Seymour Hersh: "RussiaGate Is A CIA-Planted Lie, Revenge Against Trump"

During the latter portion of a phone-call by investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, Hersh has now presented “a narrative [from his investigation] of how that whole fucking thing began,” including who actually is behind the ‘RussiaGate’ lies, and why they are spreading these lies.

In a youtube video upload-dated August 1st, he reveals from his inside FBI and Washington DC Police Department sources — now, long before the Justice Department’s Special Counsel Robert Mueller will be presenting his official ‘findings’ to the nation — that the charges that Russia had anything to do with the leaks from the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to Wikileaks, that those charges spread by the press, were a CIA-planted lie, and that what Wikileaks had gotten was only leaks (including at least from the murdered DNC-staffer Seth Rich), and were not from any outsider (including ’the Russians’), but that Rich didn’t get killed for that, but was instead shot in the back during a brutal robbery, which occurred in the high-crime DC neighborhood where he lived. Here is the video... 

... and here is the transcript :

About the kid, I’ll tell you what I know. What I know comes off an FBI report. Don’t ask me how. You can figure it out, I’ve been around a long time. The kid, just, I don’t think he was murdered, I, I don’t think he was murdered because of what he knew. The kids a nice boy, 27, he was not IT expert, but he learned stuff. He was a data programmer, but he learned stuff. And so he’s living on one street, someone, in my eyes,- he’s living in a ruff neighborhood and in the exact where he’d been living, as I’m sure you know, there have been about 8 or 9 or 10 violent, uh not robberies, most of them with somebody brandishing a gun and it’s the kids hands, I’m telling you look, I’m sure you know what, his hands are marked up, the cops concluded he fought off the people, tried to run they shot him twice in the back with a 22 small caliper. And then, they, the kids that did it ran, they got scared, they didn’t take his wallet.

Ok. So what the cops do is this: And this is where nobody knows, what I’m telling you, and maybe you know something about it. When you have a death like that DC cops, if you’re dead, you don’t just generally go yep I know (unintelligible) you have to get in to the kids apartment and see what you can find. If he’s dead you don’t need a warrant but most cops get a warrant because they don’t know if they’ve guys has, has a, a roommate. You need a warrant. So they get a warrant. I’m just telling you, there is such a thing. They go in the house and they can’t do much with this computer. It’s (unintelligible) the cops don’t know much about it. So the DC cops they have a cyber unit in DC and they’re more sophisticated. They come and look at it. The idea is maybe he’s a series of exchanges with somebody who says I’m going to kill you motherfucker over a girl or… and they can’t get in. The cyber guys do a little better but they can’t make sense of it so they call the, they call the FBI cyber unit, the DC unit.

The Washington field office is a hot shit unit. The guy running the Washington field office he’s like, he’s like, you know, he’s like a three star at an army base he’s already looking for four, you know what I mean? He’s gonna go in a top job. There’s a cyber unit there that’s excellent, given. What you get in a warrant is, the public information you get in a warrant doesn’t include, uh, it does not include the affidavit underlying what, why you are you going in, what the reasons are that.. That’s almost never available, um, I, I can tell you that the existence of a warrant is a public document 99% of the time. So, um, on the same warrant, they call in the feds. The feds get through, and this is what they find. This is according to the FBI report. What they find is he makes cont- first of all this is what you have to know, you have to know some basic facts, one of the basic factors, in that there’s no DNC or Podesta emails that exist beyond May 22nd. May 21st, May 22nd is the last email from either one of those groups. And so what the reports says is that sometime in late spring, we’re talking June you know summers in June 21st, late spring would be after, I presume, I don’t know, I’d just say late spring, early summer and he makes contact with Wikileaks. That’s in his computer and he makes contact.

Now, I have to be careful because I, I’ve know, I, met Julian 10 or 12 years (ago?) I stay the fuck away from people like that, you know. He’s invited me, and when I’m in London I always get a message “Come see me at the Ecuadorian” but I say fuck no I’m not going there I’ve got enough trouble without getting photographed. And he’s under total surveillance by everybody but anyways. So, they found what he’d done. He had submitted a series of documents, of emails. Some juicy emails from the DNC, and you know, by the way all this shit about the DNC, um, you know, whether it was hacked or wasn’t hacked, whatever happened, the democrats themselves wrote this shit, you know what I mean? All I know is that he (Seth) offered a sample, an extensive sample, you know I’m sure dozens of email and said “I want money”. Then later Wikileaks did get the password, he had a Dropbox, a protected Dropbox, which isn’t hard to do, I mean you don’t have to be a wizard IT, you know, he was certainly not a dumb kid. They got access to the Dropbox. He also, and this is also in the FBI report, he also let people know, with whom he was dealing, and I don’t know how he dealt, I’ll tell you about Wikileaks in a second. I don’t know how he dealt with the Wikileaks and the mechanism but he also, the word was passed according to the NSA report, “I’ve also shared this box with a couple of friends so if anything happens to me it’s not going to solve your problem”. Ok. I don’t know what that means.

I don’t know whether you- Anyways, Wikileaks got access, and before he was killed- I can tell you right now Brennan is an asshole. Uh, I’ve known all these people for years. Clapper is sort of a better guy but not rocket scientist, the NSA guy’s a fucking moron, and they don’t- you know the trouble with all of those guys is that the only way they’re going to make it to a board or two and get hired by (?) and get some fat cat contracts is if Hillary stayed in. With Trump they’re gone, they’re done, they’re going to live on their pension, they’re not going to make it. And I gotta tell you guys, they don’t want to live on their pension, they want to be on boards.

I have somebody on the inside, you know I’ve been around a long time, and I write a lot of stuff. I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. This person is unbelievably accurate and careful, he’s a very high-level guy and he’ll do a favor. You’re just going to have to trust me. I have what they call in my business a long-form journalism, I have a narrative of how that whole fucking thing began, it’s a Brennan operation, it was an American disinformation and fucking the fucking President, at one point when they, they even started telling the press, they were back briefing the press, the head of the NSA was going and telling the press, fucking cock-sucker Rogers, was telling the press that we even know who in the GRU, the Russian Military Intelligence Service, who leaked it. I mean all bullshit. They were telling the studp- I worked at the New York Times for fucking years, and the trouble with the fucking New York Times is they have smart guys, but they’re totally beholden on sources. If the president or the head of the (???) to actually believe it. I was actually hired at the time to write, to go after the war in Vietnam War in 72 because they were just locked in. So that’s what the Times did. These guys run the fucking Times, and Trump’s not wrong. But I mean I wish he would calm down and had a better a better press secretary, I mean you don’t have to be so. Trump’s not wrong to think they all fucking lie about him.

The media-coverage of this matter is focusing on allegations that Seth Rich was murdered in order to silence him. All such media-coverage ignores much of what Hersh said on the phone (where Hersh makes clear that Rich was, indeed, murdered in a regular robbery), and therefore should be viewed as an example of what the Washington Post and others in the mainstream press call ‘fake news’, but which actually applies to themselves, on both the left and right, above all. 

The purpose of those distorting ‘news’ stories might be a desire, on the part of both the Democratic Party aristocrats and the Republican Party aristocrats, to distract the public’s attention away from the far deeper understanding that drives the “narrative” that Hersh, in that clip, is describing: rot by the U.S. aristocracy, which controls both of America’s political Parties, to deceive the American public. The objective is to protect the aristocracy. That’s not publishable; it is American samizdat. Corruption rules America. The public do not. This fact is what Hersh is describing in his “narrative.”