-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paolo Cirio Sent: Monday, November 19, 2012 1:43 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [SPAM] <nettime> One million American Twitter users exposed to political judgment. PERSECUTING.US
One million U.S. citizens are sorted by political affiliation and exposed to public persecution in the aftermath of the 2012 presidential election. http://PERSECUTING.US For months, Paolo Cirio secretly stole data from Twitter.com on over one million Americans. Using a sophisticated sifting process, he determined the political affiliation of those people and scored their public statements and social connections in terms of the likelihood that they aligned with a political position. http://persecuting.us/_index.php?about=how Persecuting.us offers a platform where everyone can take part in a participatory model pushed to extremes, engaging people in surveying and persecuting each other in a form of info-civil-war of political polarization, which can potentially erupt into defamation, intimidation and oppression of domestic enemies. This art project is a massive citizen-sorting database organized along political lines, much like the private holdings that have amassed databases of voters in order to influence and monitor the electorate. http://persecuting.us/_index.php?about=socialsorting During the last election, Twitter was used to track down peoples opinion, promote candidates by buying trending topics in public debates and invite citizen participation through tweeting their political statements. However, Twitter is a private company which monitors, manipulates and sells data on personal and public trends. http://persecuting.us/_index.php?about=antisocialmedia This project breaks boundaries in art transgression with a Social Sculptural Performance made by a mass of people arranged and involved in an artwork without their permission. The accidental participants become part of a transformative spectacle with an unsettling narrative. http://persecuting.us/_index.php?about=socialsculpturalperformance The offline art installation evokes the activity of wiretapping the Internet to identify political activities. Through an audio installation the audience at the exhibition space can listen to an over-two thousand hour-long track of robotic voices reading selected statements of US citizens sorted by their political involvement. Persecuting US is the third project by Paolo commenting on contemporary privacy issues. Just a month ago, Street Ghosts, a project about Google Street View, generated media attention and concern worldwide. In 2011, Face to Facebook hit over one thousand worldwide media outlets just one week after its publication. Paolo is currently busy with a new project about global offshore finance that will be published shortly. Paolo Cirio. - http://paolocirio.net Social Sorting: Political parties have begun to equip themselves with databases of millions of potential voters personal details to target them with individualized messages and monitor trends in opinion which they can then manipulate. An entire new industry of political technology is growing with big, centralized databases of voters information created for profit and political control. These databases gather massive amounts of information on voters from several sources and from trawling their traces left on online platforms like Twitter, which still have poor privacy protections. George W. Bush won two presidential elections by targeting voters with a database called VoterVault, a model later copied by the Democratic party with their database, Catalist, helping Barack Obama to win the elections in 2008 [[1]]. In 2011 the Republican party secretly created a new database [[2]], Themis, with the aim of significantly impacting the 2012 elections. Huge investments in advertising on traditional media platforms are shifting to sophisticated digital tools to create persuasive personalized messages. This shift keeps those with the economic means [[3]] in control of the political process, while moving their hegemony to the most influential contemporary media space. These voters never gave permission to log their data like this, but thats not the only concern. The main threat is to the democratic process itself and malicious use of this data could even lead to future anti-democratic politics. Profiling citizens politically means exploiting peoples opinions for political gain; it allows new forms of effective political manipulation and starts a process of monitoring every aspect of each persons life to collect material for political sorting. Persecute.US is an artwork that will show people the extent to which their political privacy has been compromised for political gain. The artwork raises concern through press and personal reactions to an artificial scenario with hundreds and thousands experiencing the purgatory of being exposed by social profiling. Social media tool for social change. Communication tools can amplify social movements, if not outright revolutions. However, both authorities and fanatics can use the same tools to crack down on dissidents and opponents. A persons political affiliation can be monitored and targeted, not just by the authorities, but also by any political opponent. The secret ballot is jeopardized by abuse of the data amassed by these new technologies and by encouraging people to express their political position on social media. Consequentially, new frontiers in voter intimidation and influence are opened. Everything said publically over social media can be taken as evidence of a political leaning one way or the other. Mechanized political judgment is constantly operating through algorithms that score people and officials looking for opponents. Language and use of words is monitored through trivial interpretations, subject to mistakes, yet it can still be incriminatory. Meanwhile, real-time manipulation of peoples opinion is sold off through constructed trends like promoted tweets or multimillion dollar promoted hashtags, a sophisticated and devious utilization of language and public debate. In addition to these new propaganda techniques, censorship over social media is sold off to authorities as well. For instance, Twitter now unveils details of dissidents and censors messages on a country-by-country basis [[4]], following the instructions of the local despot. This results in real political persecution, especially in those countries where Twitter collaborates with oppressive authorities. Centralization of the digital information flow expands surveillance capacity. These are the consequences that everyone has to face when social media platforms sell out their users and hand over their data to the authorities, since social communication data isnt independent but embedded within privately owned environments. Private social media platforms expose personal data rather than protect it, in order to generate more traffic and users so that the platform itself grows in value. But the larger the platform, the greater the political risk to each user and therefore, to politics itself. Social media platforms should be constantly under public scrutiny to maintain independent, protected and fair communications. Media as tools that help to build social relations and enhance general knowledge shouldnt be left in private hands for commercial and political exploitation. Rather, it should be in the public domain and kept autonomous for the sake of all humanity. Anti-social media. Social media platforms are proud to claim that they allow social relations to grow, but they can destroy just as many, or ghettoize people in the same self-referential networks they were already in. Without interaction with others, no pacification or constructive debate can ever take place. Political fractions become fully isolated groups unable to communicate to anyone outside themselves. Politics becomes even more polarized as a result of miscommunication and isolation in a multiplication of micro-communities. And the isolation facilitates social sorting and subsequent manipulation of the micro-targets thereby generated. In social media people mirror the flowing void of present political discourse. They reproduce the rhetorical language of their political masters in a sort of auto-demagogy. Lately, internalized political rhetoric has been driving political subjectivization, and users influence themselves in a self-defensive manner, forgetting the discursive aspect of negotiation between opinions that makes up politics. Encounters with the Other happen only through conflict, because of restricted social connections dictated by the platform itself and a general low quality of communication mediated by these digital platforms. We dont confront others anymore, so we arent able to understand other opinions or ourselves in relation to them. Social media are often being used to be hateful, and Twitter in particular can be easily used to publically defame people, since there are no protections against direct harassment. Hostility is frequently generated as well because of misunderstandings and generalizations that easily happen when the medium restrains communication, in this case restricting each utterance to 140 characters. The limits and potentials of social interactions on social media are all about the design of the interface and the social algorithm applied to them. For this reason democratizing the design of the instruments can be beneficial for everyone, rather than leaving ownership of the infrastructure in private hands that can plan social control by constraining access to and use of information. Social Sculptural Performance. Persecuting.US is a deliberate and explicit exploitation of individuals as material for an artistic social experiment. Its a Social Sculptural Performance of people potentially involved in producing new anti-social networks through active and passive participation in an artificial environment designed for a sensational spectacle. The stage of the performance is delineated inside the website of the Social Sculpture with individuals becoming participants of a show for spectators watching from outside in the theatre of popular media. This sociological exhibition through a coercive approach to forms of participation simultaneously involves hundreds of thousands of people in an artistic performance without their authorization [[5]]. It is the latter transgressive artistic practice that new media provides to the artist. The notion of spectatorship in art and performance is pushed through new frontiers with the potential of artworks made of people using social media. These sculptures of people have transformative capacity for the viewers through cathartic performances generated by the social interactions inside the artful arrangement of people. These sculptures remind us of the possibilities in constructing new social realities by reconfiguring the arrangement of information flow. Designing new social algorithms is a form of sculptural activity, shaping new social networks that interact and participate in lively performances. These sculptural performances of informational power aim to unsettle contemporary social conventions to raise awareness about problematic situations by engaging randomly-selected crowds in a work of art, reaching people who usually are excluded by art discourses and breaking the boredom and passivity of media consumption. The hell created by this Social Sculptural Performance is a reenactment of todays social reality: participatory surveillance, isolated and manipulated public debate, manufactured voters through manipulation of people as micro-targets, public disclosure of their affinities and commercial exploitation of personal information by private companies. The artist can play with this general power of sorting and arranging huge amounts of personal data and in doing so artistically reprogram social forms. The social realities generated by web platforms that collect personal information from people are a set of utilitarian structures ready for artistic creation. Today artists can model massive amounts of ready-made informational material and recontextualize it in new speculative scenarios that comment on the social condition of the society. The Time: The 2012 race for the White House was the most interactive election yet. The 2012 was the first year in which both political parties heavily used media such as Twitter to conduct their campaigns, and filled databases of people by aggregating large amounts of personal information. The Hashtag Election of 2012 represents a new brand of hyperconnected electioneering, or the major use of Twitter to generate polls or statistics which influence political strategy. Voters were targeted to vote for a particular party in a form of direct manipulative language, bordering on intimidation. They were further encouraged to participate by expressing their political opinion on social media, while political leaders attempted to target them with their message, engage with key demographics, and stumble on a genuine political moment on the same platforms, fueled by the same networks. Some numbers about the 2012 presidential election on Twitter: - During the conventions, Twitter users generated 14,289 tweets per minute in the wake of Republican nominee Mitt Romney's speech. When Michelle Obama finished speaking at the Democratic convention, the tweets were flying at a rate of 28,000 per minute. After President Obama's speech, Twitter reported a 52,757 tweet-per-minute pace. http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/selling-the-hashtag-election-20120911 - The first Presidential TV Debate generated 11.2M related tweets, the second generated 12.2M and the third debate 7.8M. http://wordpress.bluefinlabs.com/blog/2012/10/23/presidential-debate-3-not-a s-social-as-the-first-two/ - During the vice presidential debate, women drove the social conversation by generating 55 percent of the tweets. There were 72,000 tweets (32 percent of the overall Twitter volume) about the economy. Next came Medicare and entitlements, at 45,000 tweets (20 percent), and Afghanistan, at 25,000 (11 percent). http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=2444&doc_id=252331 - The Obama Administration purchased Twitter terms trending during the debate, including Jack Kennedy, Malarkey, Afghanistan in 2014 and VPDebate. http://mashable.com/2012/10/11/obama-campaign-twitter-ad-malarkey/ - The Republican National Committee, and the Republican-leaning super PAC Americans for Prosperity shelled out an estimated $120,000 each for a Promoted Trend - a phrase or slogan like RomneyRyan2012, FailingAgenda and 16TrillionFail. http://www.nationaljournal.com/2012-election/obama-romney-in-hashtag-battle- on-twitter-20120906 - In 2010, The Washington Post purchased the hashtag #election http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/11/washington-post-buys-e lection-hashtag/65552/ - In 2012 the presidential campaign set the record for highest spending ever, with a total of $2 billion. http://nationaljournal.com/hotline/ad-spending-in-presidential-battleground- states-20120620 [1] Democrats Take Republican Database Model to Target Swing Voters http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aIxU19LXZBa4 [2] Koch-backed activists use power of data in bid to oust Obama from White House http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/18/koch-backed-activists-americans- for-prosperity [3] Why we must 'follow the money' of 2012's political ad spend http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/03/follow-politi cal-ad-spend-money [4] Twitter able to censor tweets in individual countries. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/27/twitter-censor-tweets-by-co untry [5] The data on the website is not indexed by search engines, keeping private (which was publically available) information protected inside an artistic context, in a way only simulating public exposure. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] !DSPAM:2676,50aaf7f225481094061956! _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
