Facebook et al. must be excited right now with this jackpot of acute behavioral data they're acquiring, in the context of a global catastrophe. I wonder if anyone has any insight here into what kind of research they are doing? I know it's all usually a tight secret.

One idea that came to mind is that this would be excellent data to weaponize. Now we (as in social media corps.) can generate a pretty good model of what a global conflict looks like on the level of individual behavior and how that can be used for an advantage. The other edge of the sword would be this will help future public health initiatives but somehow I don't see this info being made publically available...

It's been a while since we've had a thread like this and our active users have cycled around a bit (plus there's a lot of dead links in the old threads), so who here is on the fediverse?

Connecting with some more people from here sounds nice :)

News article: Fires misinformation being spread through social media

This includes a prominent local billionaire, Andrew Forrest, who has pledged $70 million for bushfire relief: "I think there's a multitude of reasons why the fire extent has bene so devastating. I think a warming planet would be part of that — [but] the biggest part of that is arsonists," he said.