social media

Tuesday March 27, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday March 27, 2018

Experts call for transparency over political parties and data mining

For years, Megan Boler’s research focused on the power of social media as a democratizing force, giving voice to the voiceless and empowering everyday people to come together and participate more meaningfully in how they are governed.

March 21, 2018

But the University of Toronto social justice professor said that even in the heady days of the Arab Spring and Obama’s social media-aided ascendancy to the White House, there were slivers of concern about how the technology might be abused.

“I would have conversations with colleagues who would say things like, ‘These are the halcyon days of the internet and we’re going to look back and wish we had those days back.’”

That future appears to have arrived, as reports swirl about foreign interference in U.S. elections, the micro-targeting of social media users to sow division and mistrust and, most recently, a data-mining firm facing allegations it scraped private information from tens of millions of Facebook users’ profiles for political gain.

“It’s a very sobering moment,” Boler said.

At the heart of the most recent fallout around Cambridge Analytica, the voter-profiling firm at the heart of the Facebook controversy, is a story about the increasing sophistication and secrecy of the techniques political actors and parties have developed to harvest voters’ information in the quest for power and influence.

While some experts describe Cambridge Analytica as “a bad apple” in how it gathered its data, they say the predictive analytics the company employs are industry standard in politics.

Some experts single out political parties, saying more transparency and oversight is needed to get a better understanding of their data practices, which remain closely guarded secrets. (Source: Toronto Star) 

 

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Wednesday March 21, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday March 21, 2018

‘Utterly horrifying’: ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica, according to a new whistleblower.

September 17, 2015

Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, told the Guardian he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach.

Where’s Zuck? Facebook CEO silent as data harvesting scandal unfolds

“My concerns were that all of the data that left Facebook servers to developers could not be monitored by Facebook, so we had no idea what developers were doing with the data,” he said.

Parakilas said Facebook had terms of service and settings that “people didn’t read or understand” and the company did not use its enforcement mechanisms, including audits of external developers, to ensure data was not being misused.

Parakilas, whose job was to investigate data breaches by developers similar to the one later suspected of Global Science Research, which harvested tens of millions of Facebook profiles and provided the data to Cambridge Analytica, said the slew of recent disclosures had left him disappointed with his superiors for not heeding his warnings.

“It has been painful watching,” he said, “because I know that they could have prevented it.” (Source: The Guardian) 

 

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New Social Media Jackass Recipient

Congratulations, Ontario Liberal Press Secretary’s Office

Social media is a wonderful platform for editorial cartoonists to share their daily goods. Not only does it allow artists to avoid lag time between completion and public display, the results look way better on a screen than printed on newsprint. Best of all, instantaneous reaction from your following lets a cartoonist know how well one did on their cartoon. We cartoonists love it when people like, share, or retweet cartoons over the expanse of all social media – but we absolutely despise it when people mess with our work.  

The biggest pitfall of social media is that it has spawned an empire of Bush Leaguers – huge swaths of online amateurs with little or no training displacing professionals, be they musicians, writers, photographers, and … editorial cartoonists. Anyone with a computer can bluff their way into coming up with content by repurposing stuff found on the Internet, cutting out monikers, and posting stuff as if it was their own.

Take, for example, the above monstrosity, a piece of partisan propaganda using the works of unknowing artists, slapped together in an attempt to simulate a genuine work of satire, and shared on Twitter. Someone, using chop shop graphic software, thought the above piece was worthy enough to share – something better than from where the extracted element originated. Here’s where the caricatures actually came from:

February 15, 2018

That’s right, my depiction of Ontario PC leaders was clumsily added to a landscape possibly belonging to another unknowing artist.

A carefully crafted work of satire that took thought and effort to come up with, whose message is no different than something a writer or columnist might have composed. Would a member of the Ontario Liberal Press Secretary’s office willingly extract a paragraph from a newspaper columnist’s piece and not credit the author if the extract was used in, say, a press release? They would get holy hell if caught. So why would the Ontario Liberal Press Secretary’s Office feel it’s okay to steal the work of artists? Leave cartoons alone!

Three years ago Premier Kathleen Wynne addressed a gathering of the Canadian Association of Cartoonists at a reception in Toronto. She declared her support for the satire that we deliver in our political cartoons as an essential form of expression in a thriving democracy. The leader of the Liberal Party affirmed respect for the integrity of satire, whereas her party’s press secretary’s office demonstrates the complete opposite, and that is why they are bestowed the indignity of a Social Media Jackass Award.

There are more examples through @LibPressSec‘s Twitter account posting other unsourced works from unknowing cartoonists. Have a look, and maybe send them a note. Given that they’re posting fresh stuff to their account, and haven’t deleted the offending material, reworking cartoons for partisan purposes is okay in the Liberal Party Press Secretary’s eyes.

This one belongs to U.S. cartoonist Dave Granlund

Past Recipients of the Social Media Jackass Award. Each winner eventually removed stolen items from their feeds but it always took persistence:

Canadian Pride

“Teflon Jim” Stewart

HarpersGotaGo

UPDATE (March 3, 2018): The offending photoshopped cartoon involving my work was deleted, but noticeable were other repurposed cartoons belonging to other artists. The account holder @LibPressSec made no attempt to make contact with an assurance that they’ll stop doing this. With a provincial election fast approaching it’s expected they will.  Let’s keep an eye of them.

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Tuesday February 13, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday February 13, 2018

Conservatives accuse Trudeau of ‘political interference’ for comments on Stanley acquittal

The federal Conservatives are accusing Justin Trudeau of “political interference” after the prime minister responded to the acquittal of a white farmer in the death of a young Indigenous man by saying the criminal justice system has to “do better.”

Trudeau made the comments after a jury in Battleford, Sask., Friday found Gerald Stanley not guilty  of second-degree murder in the 2016 death of 22-year-old Colten Boushie, a resident of the Red Pheasant First Nation.

“I’m not going to comment on the process that led to this point today, but I am going to say we have come to this point as a country far too many times,” Trudeau said in California, where he was wrapping up a four-day trip to the U.S. “I know Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians alike know that we have to do better.”

Trudeau’s comments appeared to reflect concerns expressed by hundreds of Indigenous people who took to different sites across Canada on Saturday to protest what they described as injustice and a lack of fairness within the court system.

Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould and Indigenous Services Minister Jane Philpott, meanwhile, took to Twitter to express their support for Boushie’s family and assert the need for improvements.

“My thoughts are with the family of Colten Boushie tonight,” Wilson-Raybould wrote Friday. “I truly feel your pain and I hear all of your voices. As a country we can and must do better — I am committed to working every day to ensure justice for all Canadians.”

Many concerns have been raised about discrimination toward Indigenous People in the criminal justice system; retired Supreme Court judge Frank Iacobucci, for example, raised flags about a lack of Indigenous representation on juries in Ontario in 2013.

Iacobucci’s probe was launched after an inquest into the 2007 drowning death of a high school student in Thunder Bay, Ont., was stopped because of a lack of Indigenous people on the jury. (Source: Toronto Star)