JOUR304.3001--Assignment: The Facebook 10-15 Expose-REAL OR FAKE NEWS?

JOUR304.3001
James L'Angelle
Univ of Nevada. Reno
Dr. Paromita Pain
01 July 2019

     Sweeping across the border earlier today, a breaking story has hit the internet like a dust storm. Based on just one report by AC Thompson, of the independent news agency ProPublica, the story has already been picked up, not completely verified, by most of the major news media and the gossip mongers as well. How accurate is the report?
    There doesn't appear to be any confirmation from Facebook of the secret group, there is yet to be any quantifiable evaluation of just how many CBP personnel are involved, there doesn't seem to be any concern at all for the facts, just take "ProPublica" report at face value. Certainly it's the way journalism is done today and if it will help drive the mindless gossip mongering goons over to the breaking news pages loaded with targeted ads, so much the better.

     It isn't about the story at all any more. It's all about getting eyeballs attached to the page, clickbait, pure and simple, at the expense first of the border agents entrusted to the security of the borders, but also the immigrants who are grossly misaligned by, and for whatever reason, whether the story is newsworthy in the first place. As for any type of verification at all, here is what the Thompson report looks like at Huff Post;
     "ProPublica contacted three spokespeople for CBP in regard to the Facebook group and provided the names of three agents who appear to have participated in the online chats. CBP hasn’t yet responded." (Thompson, HuffPost)
Clearly it was a matter of deadlines that prompted ProPublica to print the story without any verification from either Facebook or the CBP agency. There has yet to be any formal statement released from Facebook regarding the alleged secret group, even though the news has been out for at least 12 hours. As for ProPublica itself, the whois information on the organization is scant  noting only its registrar as register.com. (ip-tracker.org)

    The Customs and Border Protection Agency has made comments about the alleged activity on its Twitter site, apparently without any evidence from a preliminary internal investigation as to the veracity of the claim from the online news publication;
"Today, CBP was made aware of disturbing social media activity hosted on a private Facebook group that may include a number of CBP employees. CBP immediately informed DHS Office of the Inspector General and initiated an investigation. " (CBP, Twitter)
The agency has taken for face value the word of some dubious news site on the internet for some unverified story, not by a reliable, well established news organization such as what is known as "mainstream media" and all but confirmed it. It is exactly this sort of acceptance of information that is at the heart of why the internet has become the scourge of journalism.

Thompson's explanation of how he received information about the secret group is documented in his report;
"ProPublica received images of several recent discussions in the 10-15 Facebook group and was able to link the participants in those online conversations to apparently legitimate Facebook profiles belonging to Border Patrol agents,: (Thompson, ProPublica)
He goes on to say that the link was made to their profiles. Indeed, in a time when everyone and anyone can have their profiles stolen and recreated, Thompson drew an immediate conclusion without contacting those whose profiles are in question and admits he has been unable to reach them. Instead he fluffs up the article by quoting a U of Arizona sociologist completely ignorant of the story.

     ProPublica, a hodgepodge of ex-mainstream journalists and venture capitalist directors, showing little or no scruples at all for publishing the article without at first consulting with the official border patrol agency, has not only undermined trust and security of agency personnel, but has betrayed public trust in media and social media as well. It has no sensitivity at all in the face of such a revealing expose and ought to be shamed itself for its display of no class. One might expect that the usual suspects like HuffPost would immediately grab on to the news, real or false, in order to promote its own feeble online agenda. The rest followed suit as expected.


Works Cited
Thompson, AC, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/inside-the-secret-border-patrol-facebook-group-where-agents-joke-about-migrant-deaths-and-post-sexist-memes_n_5d1a424ee4b082e5536da6bf
CBP-Twitter, https://twitter.com/CBP
Thompson, AC, ProPublica,
ProPublica, https://www.ip-trahttps://www.propublica.org/article/secret-border-patrol-facebook-group-agents-joke-about-migrant-deaths-post-sexist-memescker.org/lookup/whois-lookup.php?query=Propublica.org
Cowboy Image, https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/slide-show/photos/2018-Sep/USBP-Horse-Patrol-Unit-Carousel.png

JOUR304.3001--Assignment: Activism, African Style--UNIV OF NEVADA, RENO; SUMMER 2019

 JOUR304.3001
James L'Angelle
Univ of Nevada, Reno
Dr. Paromita Pain
30 June 2019

Activism, African Style

     Upheaval not seen since the Arab Spring swept across north African nations several years ago, a new and similar movement, fueled by social media, is taking shape from Zimbabwe to Chad, from Sudan to Ethiopia, from the Congo to Mauritania. The causes are familiar; dictatorship, famine, disease and especially the rise of social media itself to connect dissidents in each of the hotspots.
     Zimbabwe has seen a great deal of unrest since the new government took power with the ouster of Robert Mugabe in late 2017. (Wikipedia) Gasoline shortages soon followed and the financial status of the nation has been unstable ever since. Very recently, the government announced it would place a ban on foreign currency drawing threats of even more violent protests;
     “'If the government does not reverse this ruinous policy immediately and announce U.S. dollar salary payments, we will immediately mobilise workers for mass action,' Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) president Peter Mutasa told a news conference." (CNBC)
ZCTU's online presence exists with a Facebook page. (Facebook) and a Twitter online presence, @ZctuZimbabwe. (Twitter) The Facebook page has 3000 followers and the Twitter page has 13,500 followers. However, the news that it will organize a strike appears to be, "fake;"
     "'We are not involved in the current calls for protests on Monday (July 1), we are not involved. Some people have just been trying to use our name, without seeking our consent or talking to us,' said ZCTU president Peter Mutasa on Saturday." (RosGwen24News)
To what degree CNBC is responsible for circulating the false news story is not verified. Zimbabwe has nearly 900,000 Facebook users in a population of 17 million. (Internet World Stats)
     Across the board shutdowns in Africa frequently occur for the same reason as in Zimbabwe, as reported by Daniel Mumbere in Africa News;
     "Chad which has implemented a social media blackout for over a year now claims applications like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp have helped to organize anti-government protests and threatened internal security." (Mumbere, Africa News)
Chad has only 260,000 Facebook subscribers in a population of 15 million. (Internet World Stats) It appears to be enough possibly due to a high level of education or an advanced degree of internet savvy in the nation.

     Sudan and Ethiopia are ground zeros for internet organizing of protests with the recent clashes of citizens as Sunday's "Million Man March" in connection to online organizing by activist Azaz Alshami (Twitter);
     "At least seven protesters were killed and more than 180 wounded Sunday during mass demonstrations in Sudan, according to health ministry officials, as tens of thousands answered the opposition’s call for a “million-man march” to end military rule." (France24)
Alshami's Twitter page has 22,400 followers but the link to her website appears either expired or blocked.                 Ethiopia restored internet access to its 4.5 million Facebook users following one week of shutdown in the wake of a failed military coup. (BBC) Mauritania, in West Africa followed the rest of the despotic mid-African nations into the denial-of-service pit shutting down the web to its nearly 800,000 Facebook users (Internet World Stats);
     "The outage has taken its toll on all of Mauritania’s consumer internet providers, with 92 percent of nationwide connectivity knocked out. Nonetheless, a small number of users have reported that they have been able to maintain intermittent connection." (Andrew Christian, Gadgets-Africa)
The blackout was a direct result of a shaky government following dubious election results and the fear of online protest organizing.
     Dissent, African style, is no different than anywhere else in the world. Reports of denial-of-service due to online organizing are becoming more frequent, in particular where the government is the sole service provider. The advantages of organizing campaigns through social media are plenty; easy access to a population base, combined with advertising targeting the affected regions and utilizing instant messaging to coordinate street level tactics. The disadvantages may affect the entire population.

Works Cited
Mugabe, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mugabe
ZCTU, https://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/financial/2019/06/25/labour-group-in-zimbabwe-threatens-protests-over-ban-on-foreign-currencies/
ZCTU Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=Zimbabwe%20Congress%20of%20Trade%20Unions
@ZctuZimbabwe
Fake Strike, https://www.facebook.com/RosGwen24News/
Zimbabwe Population, https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm
Mumbere, D., https://www.africanews.com/2019/06/18/scitech-governmentscitizens-battle-over-access-to-the-internet//
Million Man March, https://www.france24.com/en/20190630-sudan-braces-million-man-protest-march-against-military-rule
Azaz Alshami/Twitter, https://twitter.com/3ozaz
Ethiopia, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48653392
Christian, A., https://gadgets-africa.com/2019/06/28/mauritania-internet-shutdown-internet-ethiopia-restored/
Link

JOUR 304.3001--MidTerm: The Crash of Social Media---UNIV OF NEVADA, SUMMER 2019

JOUR 304.3001
James L'Angelle
Univ of Nevada, Reno
Dr. Paromita Pain
Summer 2019

Disruptive Innovation and Social Media

      Paradigms are meant to be replaced. The phenomenon known as "social media" may or may not be considered a paradigm in the strict sense of the word but it has made a major mark not just on the internet but on culture itself.

      Within the confines of the social media universe, trends rise and fall depending on the demands made by consumers and demands developed by industry. Pressure from both of those demands creates an atmosphere where progress, often times radical, replaces inertia. That pressure in radical form is defined by Clayton Christensen of Harvard University as "disruptive innovation."
     “Disruptive innovation” was outlined in the Jill Lepore 2014 article in The New Yorker titled “The Disruption Machine.”  Citing one of her associates at Harvard, Clayton Christensen, she defined disruptive innovation as;
    “The selling of a cheaper, poorer quality product that initially reaches less profitable customers but eventually takes over and devours an entire industry.” (Lepore, New Yorker)
Curiously, Lepore goes on to report that a company using the disruptive innovation paradigm will have to fail in order to succeed. She cites Morrison-Knudsen's effort for mass transit which resulted in total failure of the company.

     By his own account, the founder of Friendster, Jonathan Abrams,  blames venture capital for its failure. Another entrepreneur, Joel Spolsky, has it right when he says;
     "The basic venture capital system is structured so that there are built-in conflicts of interest between the VC and the entrepreneur,"  (Max Chafkin, inc.com)
The market for upstart social media networks in the days of Friendster survived in a narrow range and investors hedged their bets by spreading cash out across the board. Naturally, when a better platform surfaced, the money went there, and Friendster was relegated to the dustbin of history; the first disruptive innovation in social media had failed.
     That, in fact, is the paradigm we are looking for in whether a social media endeavor, or social media itself, will survive in cyberspace, where survival of the fittest is the bottom line, and money is what fuels it.

     Fast forward to the current status quo of the primary social media platform, Facebook (NYSE:FB). The company went public in May of 2012. It's current stock value is just under $200 a share. Its primary source of revenue is, not being liked by everyone posting pictures of their pets or trip to Paris, but advertising.  By the 4th quarter of 2018, the revenue topped just over $16 billion, most of which were publishers from the United States. Facebook depends on its US advertising to survive, there is no diversification, a basic component to stay in business in America. (Statista)

     According to Statista, the United States does not lead the world in Facebook users, but it is India, a predominant market in what Dr. Pain of the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, refers to as "The Global South." (Statista)  Facebook is still a one-trick pony depending chiefly on running ads to generate revenue basing its success on the number of users on the platform, but that's changing;
"...despite Facebook’s advertising growth, its user growth rate slowed during the quarter. The social network only added 38 million new monthly active users during the quarter. " (Digital Commerce 360)

     Now that we have set the stage for the crash, let's examine the mechanics. The above might be considered the hard scientific data on the current state of social media. We might call it a synthetic, or an inductive, interpretation. What about the analytical, or deductive interpretation? That's where we can see the weakness in the system, and it goes back to what happened to Friendster. The evolution from that site through the rise of Myspace to the eventual social media pinnacle established by Facebook is no matter of personal privacy, everybody knows about it. The difference was that Myspace never went public and was bought out by NewsCorp in 2005 (NAS:NWS);
     "News had been looking for $100m but settled for $35m offer from advertising targeting firm Specific Media. The sale is believed to be mainly in stock and News Corp will retain a small holding." (The Guardian)
Of course, what else would the site be good for but to run ads, just like the rest of the social media platforms that have no diversified material products to sell. This brings us back to deducting just what the flow chart looks like to the eventual decline of Facebook itself. Consider two things, where the revenue is coming from to float its income and who are the venture capitalists behind the wall propping it up.

     First, the graph shows half its income is in the US-Canada market, which makes sense because that's where the money is. That's who can afford to promote their favorite pet or trip to Paris video on mobile phones. The problem isn't how much Facebook rakes in on the successful market, but its limited returns in The Global South. The largest prospect for growth is there, as seen in the explosion of users from India; even though the prospect to find ad publishers is very limited. No matter how many people Facebook has coming into the site, if the money isn't there to support them, the stress will fall on the infrastructure. (Graph, Merch Today)

      Footing the bill for the stock is Vanguard Group out of Pennsylvania, one of the largest funds in the world. Its portfolio is spread across a myriad of sectors but its top holdings fall into a limited category, with ten out of top twenty stocks on the Dow Jones Industrial Average of 30 stocks. Even though there is a strong tech presence in the top twenty, it all about drugs, and it always is. Three of those are on the Dow30, Proctor & Gamble (NYSE:PG), Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) and Merck (NYSE:MRK).  (Nasdaq) Keeping with the theory that venture capital spreads cash across the sector, betting big in hopes another Google (NAS:GOOG) will surface from the faces in the crowd, Vanguard is also the principal investor in Omnicom (NYSE:OMC). (Nasdaq)  OMC is one of the largest ad agencies in the world and even though its venues are different, it stands in direct competition with Facebook for consolidating the worldwide advertising publishing market. They are on a collision course, in effect, a head-on train wreck.

     When the crews clear the debris, it will be clear OMC survived due to a given number of basics, depending on global reach across a wide variety of venues, diversification in content, the ability to undercut the cost, and add to that the variability of clients it can attract for advertising. As FB revenues decline, Vanguard will opt to keep its particular portfolio in the sector balanced and the money will go not just to OMC but others who, as disruptive innovation requires, will emerge from the rubble. The timeline, as in any good deductive inquiry, is always up for speculation.

    It depends on the market as a whole, global pressure on the survival of social media as a bona-fide cultural necessity, emergence of it in regions such as the poorer Global South and the ability of those in the sector to support the infrastructure required to keep it online. There are the other usual restrictions, such as political, as seen every time some general decides he wants to topple a Third World country in a coup and an internet blackout is ordered with surveillance and shutting down of social media to contain organizing and dissent. Can Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all of the cars on the train survive the crash?

Works Cited:

Disruptive Innovation, Lepore, Jill, The Disruption Machine, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine
Chafkin, M., Friendster, How to Kill a Great Idea, https://www.inc.com/magazine/20070601/features-how-to-kill-a-great-idea.html
FB Revenue, https://www.statista.com/statistics/218701/largest-source-of-revenue-of-leading-tech-companies/
FB Growth, https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2018/07/25/facebooks-ad-revenue-jumps-42-in-q2/
MySpace, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/30/myspace-sold-35-million-news
FB Revenue Graph, https://martechtoday.com/despite-ongoing-criticism-facebook-generates-16-6-billion-in-ad-revenue-during-q4-up-30-yoy-230261
Vanguard Top, https://www.nasdaq.com/quotes/institutional-portfolio/vanguard-group-inc-61322?sortname=sharesheld&sorttype=1
OMC Investors, https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/omc/institutional-holdings

JOUR 304.3001
James L'Angelle
Univ of Nevada, Reno
Dr. Paromita Pain
Summer 2019