There were those who believed that the creator of the "Should Obama Be Killed?" Facebook poll might be a sinister white supremacist out to cause world disruption.
Some were less convinced, as all the four potential answers to the poll--"Yes", "no", "Maybe" and "if he cuts my health care"--were spelled correctly.
Now, according to the Associated Press, the Secret Service, which quickly went into action to pay the poll's author a social call, has announced that no action will be taken against the creator. (A separate person, a poll software developer, came forward earlier this week and had what he described as a "friendly" talk with the Service.)
"Case closed," Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan told the AP. "I guess you could characterize it as a mistake."
It was mistake that appears to have been perpetrated by a juvenile who, presumably, thought it was, um, funny. The Service met with both the juvenile and his or her parents (no details about the person's identity are being revealed) and decided, perhaps, that a little grounding might be sufficient.
Still, it is worth considering just what developers and Facebook itself might do to get a slightly firmer grasp on alleged amusements posted on the social-networking site.
(Credit:
The Huffington Post)
A very swift wander around Facebook revealed to me a 145-member group entitled "All Traffic Wardens Should be Killed."
Another 34-member group is dubbed "Perez Hilton Should be Killed."
Other personalities who seem to be the object of Facebook death threats include soccer player Didier Drogba, as well as British pop group Take That.
"Twilight" star Robert Pattinson is the subject of a Facebook group called "Who Thinks Robert Pattinson Should be Killed?"
There is a 32-person group that should concern many readers--it certainly concerns me greatly--called "All Ex-boyfriends should be Killed."
And two groups, called "Everyone Should be Killed," seem to walk a tender line between equanimity and insanity.
In fact, if you perform the Facebook search for "should be killed," you get no less that 500 cheery, little groups.
So is this the time to mention Facebook's own terms of service reject all content that is "hateful" or "threatening"?
Updated 2.37pm PST with comments from the developer
The first step in discerning the source of the "Should Obama be Killed?" Facebook poll has been taken.
Jesse Farmer, of Bumbalabs in Palo Alto, Calif., has given permission for Facebook to reveal that he was the developer, but, significantly, not the author behind the poll that nauseated many Monday.
The poll, which was removed by Facebook when it was brought to the site's attention, offered those who wished to enjoy such an exercise four potential answers (see screen grab by The Huffington Post). More than 730 people participated before it was removed.
On Farmer's Twitter feed, Twitter.com/jessefarmer he describes himself as "Entrepreneur living in Palo Alto, Calif. I grew up in the Midwest and think everyone is awesome." Which will naturally be a relief to many.
(Credit:
The Huffington Post)
On his site 20bits.com, which I am fairly sure stands for one more than 19 bits, rather than two obituaries, Farmer seems a genial and sociable type, saying: "If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, drop me a line and let's meet up!" He may be getting one or two requests.
Farmer describes himself as "a bit obsessed with data and using it to build better products and companies."
On his Twitter feed, he declares that he has already talked with the Secret Service, who he endearingly abbreviates to "SS." Farmer posted: "The conversation with the SS was fine. If the goal was to resolve the issue + inform the SS, the way it went down was suboptimal."
A reading of a rather fractious Twitter exchange with Bababoosh, an Oklahoma City programmer, suggests that Farmer was unhappy that a third party had informed the Secret Service rather than leaving him to do so.
Farmer accuses Bababoosh of assuming he had "the worst motives."
In an e-mail to Technically Incorrect, Farmer says he first saw the offending and offensive poll Monday morning.
"I have a system in place to flag potentially offensive polls that I check once per day; I checked it Monday morning, saw the poll, and deleted it," he said.
Which might make some wonder what other potentially risque polling might have slipped onto Facebook's pristine pages.
He says that he knows the Facebook identity of the poll's author and one presumes that this author might have received a social call from the Secret Service.
Farmer's own chat with the service he describes as lasting 15 minutes and being "friendly," although he won't comment on specifics.
Perhaps it might amuse some and appall others to discover that he is an Obama supporter.
He told me: "I went to school at the University of Chicago (SB Mathematics, '06), where he was my state senator. I volunteered for him in the primaries, worked with the California data team, and canvassed in N. Michigan during the general."
All human life is to be seen on Facebook. Which, for some, is not necessarily a good thing.
Facebook has removed a poll asking "Should Obama be killed?" But not before at least 730 people took part in the poll. The poll offered four potential answers to the question: "Yes", "No", "Maybe," and "If he cuts my health care."
The Plum Line, a Washington Post site, reports that the Secret Service has begun an investigation into who might have been behind such an imaginative exercise. It appears that a blog called the Political Carnival first noticed the poll and alerted the Secret Service over the weekend.
(Credit:
The Huffington Post)
Facebook is increasingly becoming a popular forum for all kinds of hateful speech--from Holocaust Denial Groups to anti-Muslim organizations. Groups purporting to hate specific individuals have also found a home on Facebook, and the company has not found it easy to keep up with the amount of policing that is required to cover more than 300 million members.
However, this poll will represent for many an entirely new dimension in human dementia. It will be interesting to see how quickly the source is located and who that source might turn out to be.
Facebook's Barry Schnitt told me in an e-mail that while the site doesn't comment on actions against individual users, "penalties for posting content in violation of our policies range from warnings to temporarily or permanently disabling accounts." He also confirmed that the site is working with the Secret Service but couldn't provide any details of their investigation.
As to the source of the poll, he said: "The third-party application that enabled an individual user to create the offensive poll was brought to our attention this morning (Monday). It was immediately suspended while the inappropriate content could be removed by the developer and until such time as the developer institutes better procedures to monitor their user-generated content."
While it stopped short of changing its stance with respect to Holocaust-denial groups on its Web site, Facebook has confirmed that it has disabled a group I brought attention to on Saturday, called "I Hate Muslims in Oz."
"We disabled the 'I Hate Muslims in Oz' group a day or so ago because it contained an explicit statement of hate. Where Holocaust-denial groups have done this and been reported, we've taken the same action," Facebook's Barry Schnitt said in an e-mail Wednesday.
Given President Obama's clear statement that Holocaust denial is "hateful," I asked Schnitt whether the company might be changing its stance on such groups. Previously, Facebook had said that Holocaust denial is not hateful per se and does not therefore contravene the company's terms of service.
"We're always discussing and evaluating our policies on reported content, but have no plans to change this policy at this time. In addition to discussing it internally, we continue to engage with third-party experts on the issue," he said.
Schnitt continued by outlining the parameters of Facebook's third-party content on the site: "Over the next couple of weeks, our chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, will be engaging with experts at an event on cyberhate at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and at the UN Cyber Hate Seminar in New York.
Because the topic of Holocaust denial is such an emotive one, I also asked Schnitt a question that had initially been raised by Brian Cuban, and attorney and brother of Broadcast.com founder and billionaire Mark, on his blog the Cuban Revolution. I asked him: "Would involvement in a Holocaust-denial group affect a candidate's chances of getting a job, or, indeed, keeping a job, at Facebook?"
Schnitt replied: "There are a whole host of ignorant ideas that Facebook, as a communication platform, allows, even though they might hurt a candidate's chances of getting a job here or at any number of other companies."
He then went on to characterize the Facebook product as neutral: "Deciding what type of discussion should be allowed through a neutral tool for sharing, and what type of person would make an ideal employee at a company, are very different things, and we don't think our standards for the two should be the same."
Neutrality is a very, very difficult act to pull off. Currently, it balances on Facebook's own running definition of what is hateful and what isn't. It is a definition that clearly doesn't satisfy everyone. Indeed, it will be interesting to see what discussions Chris Kelly has with cyberhate experts in the coming weeks.
When President Obama talks about employing technology to improve the health care system, perhaps he's talking about something like the kidney donation software developed by Silverstone Solutions.
Designed by software engineer David Jacobs--whose own brother died of kidney failure--Silverstone's Kidney Paired Donation technology is built around the idea of radically improving the process through which those in need of kidney transplants must go to get what they need. If they are able to at all.
Today, Jacobs said, there are 83,000 Americans waiting for kidney transplants, each of whom has to wait between seven and eleven years for a new organ, much or all of that on dialysis. Many of those people don't survive the wait. Silverstone's technology (listen to a podcast about the software) aims to capitalize on a concept that has existed since the 1990s in which multiple pairs of incompatible donors and recipients are mined to uncover a suitable pair.
Silverstone Solutions' software is designed to find suitable matches between kidney donors and those suffering from kidney disease. Already, the software has been used by a San Francisco hospital to save nearly two dozen lives, the company said.
(Credit: Silverstone Solutions)Silverstone is one of 39 companies presenting at Demo in Palm Springs, Calif., this week.
While the concept has been around for some time, Jacobs said, the technology didn't exist to deal with the complexities of finding the needle in the haystack: the pair that does work out of many which, for one genetic reason or another, don't.
After his brother died, and his own kidney failure led to two years on dialysis waiting for a transplant, Jacobs said that he realized he could apply his software skills to solving the problem faced by thousands of people across the United States--that of the frustration and frequently deadly consequences of having someone who is a willing kidney donor whose organ is incompatible.
In general, Jacobs said, making appropriate matches often wasn't possible in these circumstances because of a multitude of factors, including the difficulties of sharing patient information among multiple clinics, and the inability of those clinics and hospitals to apply sophisticated enough software to identifying the right matches.
Now, however, Jacobs said, his software--which in general will be licensed by medical institutions--will make it possible to quickly and efficiently find appropriate matches among even thousands of otherwise incompatible pairs. By evaluating the genetic data among the many potential pairings, the software can find the right recipients for the kidneys of willing--and importantly, living--donors.
What used to take months, or more, Jacobs said, can now take minutes, potentially saving the lives of many victims of kidney disease.
Already, San Francisco's California Pacific Medical Center is using Silverstone's software, and has so far saved nearly two dozen lives, Jacobs said.
The heart of Silverstone's software, he suggested, are algorithms that can find the right matches out of what might millions of possible combinations. What's key, he said, is that the software works with potential matches involving living donors, whereas the national list of 83,000 people needing transplants relies on finding matches for the organs of those who have just died. By working on potential pairings involving living donors, there is more flexibility in matching up the donors and the recipients, and, perhaps just as important, more time available for getting the donated organ to the patient.
For now, Silverstone's software is dedicated to kidney transplants. And while its algorithms revolve around genetic analysis specific to kidney disease, it seems logical that the software could also be used for finding appropriate matches for other organs.
A Googlebomb returned President Barack Obama's official Web site as the top Google search result for 'cheerful achievement.'
(Credit: Google)One administration after George Bush became the top result for a Google search for "miserable failure," new President Barack Obama has his own such artificially engineered result for the query "cheerful achievement."
Earlier Thursday morning, a search for the relatively unusual term returned Obama's whitehouse.gov site as the top link, the result of a bit of work called a Googlebomb . However, perhaps illustrating the frailty of this particular effort, the result had been bumped to second place behind news of the Obama Googlebomb published by the Google Blogoscoped blog. See the more recent view in the screenshot below.
Google uses an algorithm called PageRank to help choose what sites get top rankings in search results; a site's PageRank score is higher when many other sites link to it. A Googlebomb can exploit this algorithm when many people create Web pages and appropriate links.
Eric Baillargeon of Montreal initiated this particular Googlebomb and claimed a victory at 10:45 a.m. PST.
It didn't affect search sites of either Yahoo or Microsoft on Thursday morning.
Update 10:13 a.m. PST January 23: Google didn't have anything new to share about this particular Googlebomb, instead reiterating a two-year-old blog post about the subject.
"By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead," Ryan Moulton and Kendra Carattini said in the post.
Google tries to address the issue in part because "over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries," which isn't true.
After about an hour, news of the Googlebomb effort derailed the Googlebomb itself.
(Credit: Google)
Caption: The most prominent feature of President Obama's new Whitehouse.gov site: a promise that change has come to America, and an oversize photo of Obama. On left, the outgoing Bush administration's site as of Tuesday morning.
As President-elect Barack Obama began his inaugural address at noon on Tuesday, his aides were busy switching over Whitehouse.gov.
Until 11:59 am EST, the Web site featured a photograph of former president George W. Bush leaving the White House for the last time. The relaunched site's most prominent feature is an oversize photo of the new president next to the slogan: "Change has come to America."
Because the presidential Web site launched under Bill Clinton's tenure, this is only the second time that Whitehouse.gov has changed hands. The Clinton-Bush handover was not without problems: The site on January 20, 2001, briefly sported the line "Insert Something Meaningful Here," and suffered from some broken links and 404 errors.
Obama's new site, too, has its bugs. The site administrators posted an entry saying Obama "was sworn in" before that happened; another post titled "Read the Inaugural Address" was blank an hour after Obama finished giving it; some photo captions were incorrect; and the search option didn't work reliably.
If you're interested in reading the inaugural address, our CBSNews.com sister site has posted the full text.
The White House also now has what it calls a blog, something that Bush didn't have, except for occasional features like his "Trip Notes" during an overseas visit. Macon Phillips, the White House's director of new media and one of the blog contributors, said in a post that "Whitehouse.gov is just the beginning of the new administration's efforts to expand and deepen this online engagement" in making this the most "open and transparent" administration in history. Phillips also asks for comments from the public through a Web form.
At least in its initial incarnation, the White House blog seems to be more a collection of press releases (a proclamation of a day of reconciliation) and Obama statements (remarks at a speech on Monday, and Tuesday's inaugural address). There is no opportunity to comment, the person posting the item is not automatically identified, and it doesn't include "trackbacks," meaning ways to identify who else is talking about the entry.
On technology policy, the new administration promises to support Net neutrality, encourage the development of Internet-filtering technologies for parents "while preserving the First Amendment," and "strengthen privacy protections for the Digital Age." In an echo of Obama's campaign Web site, it says intellectual-property owners should be "fairly treated," while copyright and patent laws should be updated.
The White House lists names of appointees for Cabinet positions, including well-known ones like Hillary Clinton for secretary of state and lesser-known ones like Robert Nabors for deputy budget director. But it missed the opportunity to post photos and even brief biographies of each of the nominees.
It does feature a reasonably flattering official biography of the outgoing President Bush, saying he worked "to create an ownership society and build a future of security, prosperity, and opportunity for all Americans. He signed into law tax relief that helped workers keep more of their hard-earned money" and took steps "to protect our homeland and create a world free from terror."
Elsewhere, though, another Web page lambastes Bush's "unconscionable ineptitude" in responding to Hurricane Katrina and promises that such a "catastrophic failure" will never happen again.
Just as President-elect Barack Obama has been busy assembling his Cabinet, the Presidential Inaugural Committee has been busy selecting providers of tech services for this week's inaugural festivities.
The PIC has already made arrangements with YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr. The latest appointee? Microsoft's Silverlight Media Player, which has been tapped to enable live and on-demand video streaming of Tuesday's ceremony on the PIC Web site.
The PIC will also stream video of a Baltimore event on the Whistle Stop Tour that will take the President-elect and Vice President-elect Joe Biden to Washington, D.C., from Philadelphia.
This is not Silverlight's first major foray into politics. In August of last year, the Democratic National Convention Committee used Silverlight to stream convention proceedings, including President-elect Obama's acceptance speech.
Silverlight's participation in the inauguration could help Microsoft boost the momentum it gained from its work with NBC streaming live coverage for last summer's Olympics in Beijing. Over a 17-day period, Microsoft said NBCOlympics.com had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video watched.
After initial sluggish demand for the browser plug-in, the software maker said the Olympics helped boost Silverlight's U.S. penetration by 30 percent.
Silverlight, a competitor to Flash, debuted in 2007, and the final version of the Silverlight 2 media player came out in October. Among the new features are support for digital rights management technology, improved cross-platform support and deep zoom technology.
Amateur photographers are being offered a chance to get their work published in an official presidential inaugural photography book.
Publisher Epicenter Communications announced Friday that for the first time it will allow anyone to submit photos to be considered for the large-format book it produces for each new president. The photos will appear alongside those from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and professional photographers of past presidents.
Photos can be submitted to the Web site of The Official Barack Obama Inaugural Book, hosted by Photobucket, or directly on the Photobucket site. Photos can be uploaded from a computer or cell phone. The book will be available in April.
Meanwhile, Obama has become the first U.S. president to have his official presidential portrait taken with a digital camera.
(Credit:
Epicenter Communications)
Yesterday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a post suggesting that president-elect Obama needs to do more than throw money at ailing industries, but actually needs to "reboot" America by investing in infrastructure and education. In Newsweek, law professor and intellectual property thinker Lawrence Lessig argued for a more narrowly focused reboot of the FCC, which should be encouraging technical innovation but instead tends to favor big incumbents.
But what about the music industry? Yes, the big labels have earned a lot of scorn for their technophobia and suing their customers--a practice which finally ended last week--but music is a multibillion-dollar industry, responsible for employing hundreds of thousands of people, and in the midst of several years of steep sales declines. If we can bail out the U.S. auto industry, and spend at least a trillion dollars saving the global financial system and reinvesting in infrastructure, surely we could spare a dime for the music biz.
Serious economic thinkers might scoff at the comparisons--finance touches everybody, and our entire infrastructure has been designed around the automobile--but music's more than a lark or a luxury. It's a core part of the entertainment industry, which is one of the few areas in which the United States is still an exporter and world leader rather than an importer. Even The Economist has acknowledged the deep biological importance of music, leading off its annual double Christmas issue with an investigation of why we love music.
As with Friedman's proposal to save America, my proposal to save music would start at the bottom--it's not enough to give the big labels and radio stations a few hundred million dollars to stem their losses and encourage re-investment. Instead, we need to create a culture of music appreciation and nurture the talent that will lead to the next generation of musicians. Here's my dream list:
Music education and training. In the U.S. education system, music and art are the last classes to be funded and the first to face cuts. Yet, we always seem to be able to spend another few million on sports fields and equipment. The U.S. government should mandate funding for music education beginning in fourth grade, when most kids develop the attention span and coordination necessary to learn an instrument, all the way through high school. This will not only contribute to a strong base of musical performers, but the kids who lack the talent or drive to pursue music as a lifelong hobby will at least learn to appreciate the skill it takes for others to pursue it--just like youth sports creates lifelong sports fans. And professional musicians should be able to take classes in new areas--theory, audio production--without having to pay the entire tuition out of their own pockets.
Tax breaks. Bars, restaurants, and nightclubs under a certain capacity should be given tax incentives to hire musicians. (I'm not so sure about big promoters like Live Nation or stadium-type venues.) Same with radio stations that play a certain percentage of music from local or unsigned musicians. (Big corporate radio with its narrow audience-tested playlists has done far more to devalue music--and harm sales--than the Internet.) Cities should be encouraged to create music-nightlife zones with less-stringent noise restrictions and the appropriate level of police protection.
Stipends for musicians. As romantic as punk-squatters might seem, being a musician doesn't have to mean a life of poverty. Canada offers grants to non-classical musicians, including emerging artists with "self-training" (read: rock musicians). Yes, they must have shown a viable career for at least two years, but a one-year grant could be the perfect bridge between promising local band and national club tour. If we can give the U.S. auto industry $17 billion, surely we can spare a few hundred thousand a year to give promising musicians a chance to postpone their day jobs while they try and find a bigger audience.
Infrastructure. It doesn't have to be all about roads, bridges, and high-speed data networks. Cities with decrepit or nonexistent classical venues should be given federal dollars for construction. National Public Radio should receive increased federal budget--with a requirement to devote a certain number of hours a day to music, particularly types of music and artists who don't get played on commercial radio.
I'm sure you can think of other examples. My point: we've treated music as a luxury--almost as a joke--for too long. I'm not asking for a national Minister of Rock (although Jack Black might be good), but as long as we're opening the federal floodgates to revitalize the economy, why not invest in something that people naturally love and that does no harm to anybody?
Happy holidays.
