Free Republic

In the 18th century, Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer, introduced the idea of the Panopticon, a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. Each cell is flooded with light, which creates an environment in which prisoners are under constant watch. Even if no guard is on duty, a prisoner will always feel as if they are being watched. Bentham described it as “[a] new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.” The Panopticon is the optimal prison; it enables an unprecedented...

Donald Trump has united some of his supporters and detractors in buying shares in his new company and hoping to score a big win. Anthony Nguyen, a 49-year-old software consultant from Austin, Texas, is a Republican who refused to vote for the former U.S. president in last year's election. Last week he joined the millions of online day traders who drove up the value of the company that will house Trump's new social media venture to almost $12 billion. The company's app has yet to be rolled out even on a trial basis, and Nguyen said he invested because he...

I feel like I am beating a dead horse because I am. Facebook is in one hell of a mess. It never was a good platform for me and many others that I know. That's because it is always censoring those who are of a conservative bent and is constantly changing its algorithms on what it will or will not publish. Add to this the fact that Facebook is spying on you through some major loophole in the privacy law to the point of following you around the Internet and dishing up ads based on what it sees you searching...

Trump supporters share more fake news on social media than any other political group, according to a new study from Oxford University. Researchers studied more than 13,000 Twitter users and 47,000 Facebook pages in the days leading up to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address to determine which social media users spread the most “junk” news. They discovered that Trump supporters on Twitter shared more unreliable news than all other groups combined. On Facebook, extreme conservatives share more junk news than all other audiences put together. The researchers defined “junk news” as “misleading, deceptive or incorrect information purporting...

Have you ever wished there was a social media platform purely focused on your musical needs; where you could connect with everyone in the music industry, from engineers to singer-songwriters? Well, we’re here to tell you that your wishes have been fulfilled in the form of new music social network called Potentiam. All members are offered monetary rewards for engagement within the community. So, the more time you spend communicating with other music lovers, the better off you will become.

It might be time to whittle down your friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. Not just because they continually post “news” articles from The Daily Mash or because they upload twelve pictures of their newborn baby every day, but because they could be negatively affecting your credit scores and credit worthiness. In a society where online data is abundant and easy to obtain, creditors are starting to use this information to their advantage. Lenddo, a ‘trust-based lender,’ is very open regarding their policy of using social media data as a factor in loan applications. In an article by Fortune...

In a move that brings to mind George Soros’ machinations in the various colored revolutions, comes the Alinsky inspired Arab Spring model that our government recently deployed in Cuba by way of a Twitter-like social media platform, ZunZuneo. The project, which was codenamed “ZunZuneo,” slang for a Cuban hummingbird’s tweet, was publicly launched shortly after the 2009 arrest in Cuba of American contractor Alan Gross. He was imprisoned after traveling repeatedly to the country on a separate, clandestine USAID mission to expand Internet access using sensitive technology that only governments use. If you guys are going to spy, could you...

About a month and a half ago from this writing I actually had a friend give an me admonition that defending my conservative views (they said "Republican," which shows you how much they actually know about politics) would cost me lots of friends on my social networks.I basically responded with what the graphic below says. Their response?...Crickets.

U.S. News and World Report noted yesterday: [The IRS] will use in robo-audits and data mining [and] it has told government and industry groups that its computers are capable of scanning multiple networks at the same time to collect “matching” comprehensive profiles for every taxpayer in America. Such profiles will likely include shopping records, travel, social interactions and information not available to the public, such as health records and files from other government investigators, according to IRS documents.

IRS checking out your Facebook and Twitter to help keep you honest You have less than two weeks to file your taxes and your Facebook or Twitter accounts could end up getting you in big trouble with the IRS. They're looking for tax cheaters. The IRS has been known to check car records, employment documents and other public records. Now, your social media page is on that list too. “I think that’s a little bit ridiculous,” replied one person we talked to. Some of the people we talked to were surprised. “I think it’s still an invasion of privacy,” commented...

Michael Hickins Editor A new feature introduced by crowdsourcing site Quora may suggest a way for CIOs to address a problem that has long plagued business social networks: a lack of adoption by the employee population.Quora is a site that allows users to ask questions of the other users, and to recommend the best answers, making those answers rise to the top of the page. Many users come to the site simply to read answers to questions they find interesting, while others participate more actively by answering questions. In many cases, these users are also hoping to become recognized...

Hedge fund manager Eric Jackson stated on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street that in the next five to eight years Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) may disappear just like Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) has ‘disappeared.’ “Yahoo is still making money, it’s still profitable, still has 13,000 employees working for it, but it’s 10 percent of the value that it was at the height of 2000. For all intents and purposes, it’s disappeared.” Jackson does mention that his prediction about Facebook is a shadow of the company’s present self. The chairman of Ironfire Capital says Facebook’s power may erode due to the continued emergence...

One of the biggest market events of the coming year will undoubtedly be the Facebook IPO. You will read seven million articles about it in the next three months (sorry about that). It will likely come public as one of the largest IPOs in history, with a starting valuation somewhere in the vicinity of $100 billion. It is a tech giant to be sure, one of the most important companies in world right now.But there is a major difference between Facebook and the other tech giants of the past and present like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Oracle, IBM, Yahoo, Netscape and...

If you are interested in social networks, don’t miss the slick video about Max Schrems’ David and Goliath struggle with Facebook over the way they are treating his personal information.  Click on the red “CC” in the lower right-hand corner to see the English subtitles.Max is a 24 year old law student from Vienna with a flair for the interview and plenty of smarts about both technology and legal issues.  In Europe there is a requirement that entities with data about individuals make it available to them if they request it.  That’s how Max ended up with a personalized CD from Facebook that he printed out on a...

Who knew Skynet would be a financial, rather than a defense network? Watching the protest in lower Manhattan metastasize from an eager call for volunteers on various social networks to a full-on movement has been a dizzying exercise in the power of technology to render protest both irrelevant and remarkably powerful at the same time. Perhaps this is the condition of all political movements in the 21st century, but Occupy Wall Street feels like a post-post-something exercise in the ability of social networks, citizen journalism and the always-on news cycle to amplify the power of symbols. It's also a demonstration...

Some rather sobering, even shocking data is available over at the CARA (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate) blog. The data stunningly refutes the claim that the way to reach young Catholics is via the Internet. I must say I was more and more startled as I read the data, thinking, “This can’t be so.” But the bottom line seems that if you are a Catholic, reading this or other Catholic blogs for information or encouragement about your faith, you are a very rare bird. If you are under 30, and reading Catholic blogs and news sites, you are...

According to database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to “a fate worse than death,” and the only way out is “bite the bullet and rewrite everything.” Not that it’s necessarily Facebook’s fault, though. Stonebraker says the social network’s predicament is all too common among web startups that start small and grow to epic proportions. During an interview this week, Stonebraker explained to me that Facebook has split its MySQL database into 4,000 shards in order to handle the site’s massive data volume, and is running 9,000 instances of memcached in order to keep...

You now have another reason to check your privacy settings. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Social Intelligence Corp, has been given the legal thumbs up to archive seven years worth of your Facebook posts. These archives will be used by SIC (oh the applicability of the acronym) as part of their background checking service for job applicants. There are a couple sides to this argument that have been hashed out many times over. A hiring manager could say that they were glad they discovered that Johnny the master of the great resume also drank heavily every night and...

I use a certain large Social Networking site for most of the usual stuff; keeping up with family and friends and posting an occasional article which interests me. A few days ago, I posted a link to a Blog regarding the Obama Birth Certificate. Nothing offensive, just a story regarding what's been documented, what's been said and inconsistencies in the Obama past. The link had the normal amount of responses, nothing out of the ordinary. The next day, I signed on to my account and the post I made had vanished, comments and all, just like it was never there....

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss say they — not Mark Zuckerberg — invented Facebook. And they are willing to risk $160 million for the chance to prove it. The ambitious young Olympic rowers made famous in the Oscar-nominated "The Social Network" are taking their last shot at the gold — in London in 2012 and in San Francisco, where they are contesting an out-of-court settlement they reached with Facebook three years ago. If they prevail, their legal appeal would overturn the settlement, now worth in excess of $160 million because of the soaring value of the privately held company.