Journalists in the west now seem to finally be admitting that our media environment has seen a radical shift towards anti-democratic forces.
Yet. This didn’t come out of nowhere.
Remember those same people posting RT clips daily back in 2015?
As far as my home country goes, we have pretty solid evidence that even if we have only ourselves to blame for supporting these people, #Russia had an #influence and provided a lot of the #disinformation ammo they shot with.
charges are falsifying business records to hide #HushMoney payments in lead up to 2016 election to #influence electorate
just one Trump supporter at the courthouse draped in a Trump flag.
#StormyDaniels's lawyer, #KeithDavidson, to return to stand. He negotiated the hush-money payment at the center of the case, & is expected to lay out details of the deal.
❌ Le trouble business de Sonia Tlev, créatrice du Top Body Challenge
👉 Sur les réseaux sociaux, l’influenceuse distille, depuis Dubaï, ses conseils sportifs et diététiques à plus de trois millions d’abonnés. Un business lucratif… qui intrigue le fisc et laisse un goût amer à d’anciennes collaboratrices.
#Influence#Failures Mere exposure to ideas that are outside of our zone of acceptance can reinforce our existing beliefs. Chris Bail et al ran experiment on twitter, they had hoped to discover that getting people to listen to ideas different from their own would moderate opinions. Result: the opposite. Exposure to ideas from the other caused them to take on more extreme beliefs. https://buff.ly/4aHbbpo
Share examples of where this has undermined your work?
#Russia’s Foreign Ministry has been drawing up plans to try to weaken its Western adversaries, including the #UnitedStates, & leverage the #Ukraine#war to forge a global order free from what it sees as American dominance, acc/to a secret Foreign Ministry document.
#Influence without Authority. To overcome the Endowment effect, it helps to highlight the cost of inaction. In the #Agile world, we often deal with teams that say, we too rushed or busy to improve. Consider showing them cost of not doing anything. Not refactoring and improving engineering practice? Highlight the increase of chaos in their code. Not improving flow? Consider measuring # of days items are stuck waiting to be worked on. Show the failure to act is already harming the team.
#Influence without Authority. We get kicked by the Endowment effect: It is easier to tolerate the status quo than to make change. In the #Agile world this is made worse because of a Cost Benefit Timing Gap. We pay a lot of $$ upfront and the benefit only shows up later. Sometimes much later. This tells us we need to change how we offer Change.
We must speed the time to benefit and reduce the cost/risk. Look for clever ways reduce cost of change and even make it reversible (less risk).
Getting other people to taken on your ideas seriously isn't about authority. At best that will get compliance. Instead it's about #Influence.
There are many paths to influence.
Look for collaborators
Ask open ended questions
Freedom to make their own choices
Reduce risks
Focus on Relationships
How have you succeeded at influencing others?
(Hint although I don't go into geeky detail in the video, everything I share is evidence based) https://youtu.be/mLnx5W8mXIU
#Influence#Failure - We have anti-persuasion radar that can kick in when we feel pushed, even if it's toward something we want. Example - many people want to speak up more in meetings. (Good). Yet when it becomes a corporate thing, now we ask: "Am I choosing to speak up for my own reasons or because it was pushed". Result: We often shutdown.
Who has seen an Agile change go off the rails right here?
"Follower counts matter less than view and like counts”.
Discuss!
(Not only the statement itself, but why the head of Threads would say this, at this moment in particular).
#Influence#Failure - when you try influence people with a push, you take away their autonomy and they will push back.
In the case of Tidepods and the Tidepod madness, Proctor and Gamble produced videos telling people how bad they were. They recruited a football played nicknamed Gronk (What a great nickname), to tell people not to eat Tidepods. They did all the right things. Yet they made the problem worse.
....
The accts signal a potential tactical shift in how #China aims to #influence American #politics, w/more of a willingness to target specific candidates & parties, including Biden.
Moscow has found better ways to conceal #influence ops, by using harder-to-trace tech, to amplify arguments for #isolationism before #UnitedStates elections, acc/to disinfo experts & #intelligence.
#Influence Warnings become recommendations. TidePods are classic example. A warning tweet, helped spark the tidepod challenge. This is true of many health warnings. People feel their Autonomy is taken away and they pushback.
To really influence, start with taking time to understand the other person’s needs.
Is there any better way to celebrate the glory of the Resurrection than by helping a #criminal suspect—indicted on scores of charges—pay off his #legal fees?
Not according to Donald #Trump, who took his broke ass to Truth Social on Tues morning to announce that supporters can purchase copies of the Christian holy book.
Personally, I have nothing against the emergence of new #programming languages. This is cool:
the industry does not stand still;
competition allows existing languages to develop and borrow features from new ones;
developers have the opportunity to learn new things while avoiding #burnout;
there is a choice for beginners;
there is a choice for specific tasks.
But why do most people dislike the :clang: #clang so much? But it remains the fastest among high-level languages. Who benefits from C being suppressed and attempts being made to replace him? I think there is only one answer - companies. Not developers. Developers are already reproducing the opinion imposed on them by the market. Under the #influence of hype and the opinions of others, they form the idea that C is a useless language. And most importantly, oh my god, he's unsafe. Memory usage. But you as a #programmer are (and must be) responsible for the #code you write, not a language. And the one way not to do bugs - not doing them.
Personally, I also like the :hare_lang: #harelang. Its performance is comparable to C, but its syntax and elegance are more modern.
And in general, I’m not against new languages, it’s a matter of taste. But when you learn a language, write in it for a while, and then realize that you are burning out 10 times faster than before, you realize the cost of memory safety.
4 major nonprofits that rose to prominence during the #coronavirus pandemic by capitalizing on the spread of #medical#misinformation collectively gained >$118M between 2020 & 2022, enabling the orgs to deepen their #influence in statehouses, courtrooms & communities across the country, a Washington Post analysis of tax records shows.
#Haaretz reports, “Israel has responded to its “clear loss” to #Hamas on the digital battlefield by making its first-ever purchase of a technological system capable of conducting mass online influence campaigns, according to numerous sources with knowledge of the matter.
The system can, among other things, automatically create content tailored to specific audiences. The technology was purchased as part of a wider attempt by Israeli bodies, both civilian and military, to address what sources termed “Israel's public diplomacy failure” following the Hamas massacre on October 7 and subsequent war.
“A few weeks into the war, Israel set up a "hasbara forum" comprising government agencies, offices and ministries, as well as military, defense and intelligence bodies – including the #IDF, the #ShinBet security service and the National Security Council – alongside tech firms, civilians volunteer initiatives and even Jewish organizations, that meets weekly.
Officials from different bodies, including the Public Diplomacy Directorate and Diaspora Affairs Ministry, charged with countering antisemitism against world Jewry, held talks with different firms and tech providers active in various mass online campaigns. Assets are one thing, an intelligence source explains, but you also want a system for managing them.
“Mass influence systems can often get their operators in trouble, and their public exposure can severely damage their clients' credibility.”
“As a result, Israel decided to purchase an existing technology instead of risk developing one independently. A number of civilian tools and programs developed for business and political campaigns were procured: a system for mapping online audiences; a system capable of automatically creating websites, among other things, as well as content tailored to specific audiences; a system for monitoring social media and messaging platforms, and others. Thus, Israel hoped to launch campaigns that would advance Israel's core message and improve global perception.”
Billions will vote in #elections this year, ~½ the #global pop, in 1 of the largest & most consequential democratic exercises in living memory. The results will affect how the #world is run for decades.