Diary of Anne Frank

When it comes to writing and higher education (college, university, especially name-brand USA / UK, where extremely complicated systems of economic conditions, social connections, and military-like conformity are used to screen people from having that extremely established brand stamped on their diploma) ... competition drives people.

It takes very little effort to read a few hundred opinions in an online book club / public mailing list or Usenet group or subreddit, to witness how people dismiss entire authors for not fitting style and fashion that they desire.

You see the same with films and television. People who dislike all science fiction, people who dislike anything to do with sports, people who dislike anything labeled "romantic comedy".

And then you see what Marshall McLuhan emphasized about books long long ago: once the Xerox machine came around, books became information services. You could copy pages instead of having to carry the entire book. And now we have quotes websites like WikiQuotes.

The same thing became possible with films and television content. When I was in high school in 1985 ( [email protected] ) - if you wanted to discuss the film you saw that weekend at school, you had no way to show a clip or even show the trailer to a fellow student. There was just no way a person could access commercial film content while it was "new release" that they could share with peer consumers.

Of course, like McLuhan emphasized (yes, I repeat myself, see Mastodon hashtag # Repeating Repeater ) with Xerox and printed paper books... that all changed and now movie clips and TV clips people can easily access on the Internet.

Alas, you start to notice something. For me, as a daily reader on Reddit, the transition from "old reddit" to "new reddit" in 2018. (April 2018. Huffman said new users were turned off from Reddit because it had looked like a "dystopian Craigslist")... and Reddit previously had no on-site image or video hosting. Previously that was done by third-party providers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imgur

Alas, you start to notice something.

Reaction images, reaction film clips, reaction movie clips. Nobody quotes books. And with spam filtering, linking to a page on a book or an article discussing a specific topic in a book gets blocked in the comment conversations. And you also notice that nobody discusses the spam filters preventing off-site links even to Wikipedia and WikiQuotes... and do people even know they were spam filtered and that is why they get no replies to their comment?

And you start to notice.... And did Russia weaponize the spam filters by training them to block specific authors, specific topics, during the pandemic? Certain 2018 links that social media spam filter systems were manipulated into not allowing in year 2020 and 2021? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45294192

Now people do regularly mention that "nobody reads the articles and only react-comment to the clickbait headline"... and you witness inline bots that bring in off-site content as comments so people don't have to actually go to another website. But then you notice that when you quote a passage from a book, say 3 paragraphs, the spam filters always catch it and don't publish it (nor do they notify you, you have to off-axis check)

And you start to notice and ponder: little short Twitter-length messages have less words in them, and are often very repetitive (you see dozens of the same comments using similar word choices and cliche patterns in reaction to clickbait headlines) and that automated spam filter systems are trained to allow these frequent junk words. And your multi-paragraph quote from a well edited author triggers the spam filters almost every time, no matter if the topic is media ecology itself or science about climate change.

And you start to ponder why nobody else notices this.

And then you realize that the spam filtering can't "deep read" the content of images, film clips, television clips. And the reason they are now dominating all the social media platforms is because it's very very resource intensive to match up the meaning of a video clip or image... where quoting a book or magazine or science journal is all Unicode text and spam filtering can target it all so much easier. So the LOL LOL clips dominate everything... because the spam filters don't screen them at all, and comments get screed with decades of social media experience (email and spam lead to the rise of gmail, I was building gmail competitors back in 2002 for a client of my company, and I ran messaging systems for Paul Allen Group in the 1990's, one of my published works is on Microsoft Exchange Server when I lived in Dallas).

Spam filtering is a nightmare. And all the social media sites just silently remove it and audience / consumers / comment creators rarely notice. Did Russia manipulate all the spam filters? No need to have a money trail, just have Russians sit on computers in Russia and send patterns of messages in ways to "train" the social media systems to disallow certain content.

Not a soul noticed this going on... well, very very very few people noticed. In 2014 it was all being noticed, but 2014 got drowned in constant endless never-ending discussion of Donald Trump in 2015 onward. 2014 it was noticed: Russia-watcher Catherine Fitzpatrick, who documents Kremlin disinformation for InterpreterMag . com, says just as Moscow uses vague Internet laws to encourage self-censorship, trolls inhibit informed debate by using crude dialogue to change "the climate of discussion." "If you show up at The Washington Post or New Republic sites, where there's an article that's critical of Russia, and you see that there are 200 comments that sound like they were written by 12-year-olds, then you just don't bother to comment," she says. "You don't participate. It's a way of just driving discussion away completely," she adds. "Those kinds of tactics are meant to stop democratic debate, and they work."

But she doesn't have my social media experience from when I created ZBBS back in 1984 and all the spam filtering troubles in the 1990's. The TRAINING of social media spam filters. What is the effect of these Russian comments, and what about those spam-filtered and UNPUBLISHED that you can not see on all these websites?

You can weaponize spam filters. The outcome of exploiting spam filters on messaging systems is that you end up with banal repetitive noise and TV and film clips and nobody quoting book passages.