Targeted ads for outreach on skeptic topics

HBO premiered the Alex Gibney Scientology documentary “Going Clear” last night. It airs many more times on various HBO channels through April and on their on-demand service – I encourage you to check it out. It is based on the 2013 book of the same name by Lawrence Wright, which detailed many abuses that have gone on in the church. Both the book and the documentary feature damning testimony by many ex-members of the church, some of whom had very high ranking positions.

The church itself, needless to say, is not amused. In typical fashion it has waged a PR war against the film, starting with an expensive full-page ad in the New York Times on January 16. It has continued its assault with a series of articles printed in their own “Freedom Magazine”. (The material there largely consists of a series of ad hominem attacks on the former Scientologists interviewed in the film).

But how is the church expecting any of this additional material to be seen by the general public? Freedom Magazine is not well known outside church circles, and the New York Times ad has not repeated.  Who is going to bother to go to this obscure website to read these attacks?

The answer is in online advertising. How the church is using online ads may have some interesting lessons for skeptics.

Deepak Chopra’s Twitter Trolling Continues

Deepak Chopra is still trolling people on Twitter, it seems. On February 10th Professor Brian Cox appeared on Conan and related a familiar story about Chopra’s behavior. Watch the short clip:

As you may recall, last May I documented Deepak Chopra’s habit of trolling well-known skeptics and atheists on Twitter. He repeatedly taunts them, tweets links at them and makes snide or insulting remarks.

Among the things that make the behavior so blatant is Chopra includes Daniel Dennett and Jerry Coyne in his taunts. Dennett very rarely converses with anyone on Twitter, and never with Chopra.  Coyne has specifically stated on his blog that he never converses on Twitter at all – he just uses it to as an alternate blog feed. Chopra must know this. One can only conclude his one-sided conversations are an elaborate show for his own followers.

But some people do respond to Chopra, including Brian Cox as seen in the clip. (Their previous Twitter exchanges have been documented by Jerry Coyne on more than one occasion).

Incidentally, the angry tweet Cox mentions in the clip appears to have been deleted by Chopra. He does that a bit too, in my earlier post I document one tweet to me that he deleted. Tracking Chopra’s deleted tweets might be an interesting skeptic project.

After the program aired, this bizarre exchange occurred:

Where is @ProfBrianCox @TeamCoco pic.twitter.com/28Pb6QfUSv

— Deepak Chopra (@DeepakChopra) February 12, 2015

What the HOLY JESUS is this? RT @DeepakChopra: Where is @ProfBrianCox @TeamCoco pic.twitter.com/FVKEUDEqH0

— Dr Adam Rutherford (@AdamRutherford) February 12, 2015

@AdamRutherford @DeepakChopra @TeamCoco I have no idea, but I'm having it made into wallpaper for my under-stairs bathroom.

— Brian Cox (@ProfBrianCox) February 12, 2015

Herbal industry attempts to astro-turf New York’s A.G.

photo of supplements by Sage Ross distributed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

On February 3, the Attorney General of the state of New York, Eric Schneiderman, announced his office had taken action against several major retailers regarding some herbal remedies sold in their stores. The state’s investigators found that about 80% of the products contained none of the active ingredients on the label! Further, some products contained allergens or other substances not listed on the label. The testing was done using a DNA barcoding technique. A “cease and desist” order was issued, requiring these products to be removed from shelves in the state of New York.

Skeptics were generally supportive of this action, of course – we’ve long argued that many herbal supplements have poor evidence of efficacy and are poorly regulated. The supplement industry, needless to say, is not happy. They have attempted to rally opposition to this move, and to get supporters of herbal supplements to call, write and Tweet the Attorney General about this issue.

Only the Attorney General’s office knows how many letters or phone calls were generated. But Twitter posts are, by default, public. This means we can peek at their efforts to lobby on this issue.  Let’s do that and see how it is going.

There are times you should not use DoNotLink

I think it is a good time to remind everyone of the proper context for using different tools to avoid algorithmically boosting bad content. This is important for all skeptics, because the very act of linking to something you are debunking can make it more visible on platforms like Facebook and Google.

One of several tools for this purpose is DoNotLink. There was a minor kerfuffle last week in which the Food Babe website unsuccessfully attempted to block incoming links using DoNotLink. That raised the potential that skeptic reliance on that service might have disadvantages.

I’ve also noticed that in addition to many people on social media who’ve adopted DoNotLink, some bloggers are also using it for links within their posts. Frankly, this is overkill and I don’t recommend it. There’s already a standard HTML feature for handling this on web pages – it is called NOFOLLOW. In this post I’ll compare the two and offer advice on when to use each.

More twists and turns in the saga of David Mabus

Dennis Markuze at the provincial courthouse in Montreal, Nov. 21, 2014. Photo by Phil Carpenter for Montreal Gazette. (Note the Depeche Mode shirt)

The long story of Dennis Markuze (aka “David Mabus”) did not end today, as expected. We had expected him to be sentenced in his second guilty plea.  This was the plea to threatening both myself and a Montreal Police officer, and violating his previous plea agreement to refrain from posting on social media and Internet forums.

Instead, his sentencing hearing was called off at the last minute – and in an unusual twist I got the word of this literally while I was talking about the case live on an online webcast!

The hearing today was presaged yesterday by a very interesting article in the Montreal Gazette by Paul Cherry, who has been following the case for some time. (I am quoted in the article).

The article points out that Markuze has nodded in agreement and admitted to his crimes while in front of the judge on multiple occasions. That includes the threat made at the time of his second arrest, quote: “You bitch. The same thing will happen to you like what happened to the (World Trade Center) twin towers in 9/11.” Markuze has never disputed any of this in court.

But does Markuze truly believe his own plea? Cherry gives reason to doubt.

Facebook adds feature to reduce spread of viral fake news

Like it or not, Facebook is now central to the propagation of news and other media online. Links to online articles from Facebook posts often constitute the lion’s share of traffic to that post. So savvy publishers do anything they can to increase the likelihood that you will post or repost their content. At the same time, many legitimate journalists are a little freaked out that a private company like Facebook has so much power over what we all see.

This has led to the rise of click bait – posts with headlines and/or graphics that all but dare you not to read them, sometimes with salacious or silly content that will encourage sharing. One annoying variety of click bait that became prominent starting in 2013 are “fake news” sites. They post content ostensibly similar in intent to the comedy site The Onion, without any of the clever or hilarious writing. Some of them deliberately design their sites to encourage confusion with well known media properties. One of them (National Report) even basically admitted in an interview that what they are doing is trolling extreme conservatives for clicks.

I’ve recently written about these sites, and how Facebook’s engagement numbers sometimes exaggerate their true reach. But exaggeration or not, Facebook still sends millions of readers every day to these sites and myriad other sources of misinformation. That’s a problem central to what skeptics are all about.

But last week Facebook made a change that might help solve this problem in a general way – and which also might be useful to skeptic activists. Read on.

Do Not Link has added new features

DoNotLink.com is an excellent tool for all skeptics to have in their toolkit. I’ve written about it before. I noticed recently that it has added some new features over the last few months. I thought it would be worth calling them to your attention.

The problem this tool solves is sort of an online skeptic variation of the Streisand Effect. When you critique a bad idea that has been posted on the web, you often start by linking to it. The link allows your readers to understand what you are debunking. In addition to allowing your readers to see the source, the link itself will become input to various algorithms such as Google PageRank, Facebook’s news feed algorithm and Twitter trends. But these algorithms share a crucial limitation – they all treat any reference to content as positive. (It is illustrative that there is a “Like” button on Facebook, but no “Dislike” button.) To these algorithms, there’s nowhere to go but up.

And so skeptical links literally send mixed signals out on the web. While you are telling all the humans, “This content is bad!” your hyperlink is telling all the robots “This content is good!”

DoNotLink.com solves that problem for social media, by providing a way to link to something while disabling the algorithms’ ability to measure it.  The link still works, the site still can get visitors and can still count a hit and show visitors some ads and so on. The site is in no way damaged by this way of linking! But the algorithms can no longer add that hyperlink to the site’s popularity score.

That makes it very valuable to skeptics.  So lets look at the new features, which make it even better.

Facebook “like inflation” exaggerates the scope of Internet hoaxes

Over 70 thousand people shared a story about a totally fake Sarah Palin quote! Over 5 million people shared a hoax story that Macaulay Culkin had died!  It gets depressing hearing how many people get fooled by these hoaxes, doesn’t it?

The problem is, the numbers in those reports are wrong! Often, wildly wrong. They’re exaggerations caused by the confusing way that Facebook reports engagement.

Now, the underlying problem is real – social media hoaxes and rumors are bigger than ever. As a result debunking these things has become a popular pastime, well beyond the circle of organized skepticism.

Even the Washington Post runs a regular feature on Friday called What was fake on the internet this week. The science fiction site IO9 regularly debunks fake images that are making the rounds. And of course there are the old standards such as Snopes and Museum of Hoaxes, still in the business of debunking this stuff.

Read on to see how many of these well-meaning debunkers are being misled by Facebook into over-reporting the problem.

Online science of interest to skeptics this week at #ICWSM

I know many tech-oriented skeptics are paying attention to the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco this week, wanting to find out what’s next in Macs, iPhones and iPads. But I’d like to call your attention to a different conference – a scientific conference – also going on this week. The conference is the 8th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, it runs through tomorrow in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

It might surprise you to learn there is a great deal of peer-reviewed science going on around blogs, social media and other newer online technologies. Curiously, while I see skeptics blogging about studies in alt-med, psychology, biology or physics almost daily, I rarely see skeptic blog posts about studies on Internet technology. (There are exceptions, of course). I see much more interest in this among the computer scientists, data scientists and journalists I follow online.

I suspect one of the reasons is studies in older scientific fields have more application to pseudoscience, the paranormal and other things skeptics seek to critique. But this newer Internet research can address the methods and techniques of skepticism itself. Many skeptics these days do a great deal of our work online. We should take advantage of the available science in this area to make our online efforts more effective.

One nice thing about the AAAI conference going on this week is much of it is published online already – indeed, full copies of all the papers to be presented were available online before the conference started.  I find a number of them cover topics that will be of interest to skeptics. One of them is specifically about sending Snopes.com links to people on Twitter – a common pursuit. And another may confirm some things we know about trolls.

Let me give you a peek.

Dennis Markuze (aka “David Mabus”) pleads guilty for the second time

Earlier today in Montreal, Dennis Markuze – better known to skeptics and atheists online by his online persona “David Mabus” – pled guilty to three counts including harassment, threatening a police officer, and breach of probation. The victim of harassment in this case was the author of this blog.

Paul Cherry in the Montreal Gazette was in court and has the full story:

Dennis Markuze, 43, a man who often uses the alias David Mabus when he makes threats, appeared before Quebec Court Judge Jean-Claude Boyer at the Montreal courthouse on Thursday where he entered a plea to three charges in all, including a breach of his probation.

The breach of probation charge was from his first guilty plea on May 22, 2012 and was what led us to campaign for his arrest the second time back in November 2012.  As my earlier blog post explained, the authorities were not supervising Markuze, and seemed unaware that he had resumed posting online in violation of his plea agreement.

The news article has more on Markuze’s mental state:

On Thursday, Markuze’s lawyer, Richard Bellefeuille, told Boyer that a psychiatrist who evaluated Markuze in February again attributed his actions to an abuse of cocaine and alcohol. The psychiatrist also noted that Markuze is being treated for a delusional disorder “which could explain his Internet activities.”

An expert at the Philippe Pinel Institute who examined Markuze earlier in the current case had determined that Markuze’s mental health problems could not be used as a defence if his case ever went to trial.

I had been told of the additional threats Markuze made at the time of his second arrest, but not their exact nature.  The article reveals that he told the police officer, “You bitch. The same thing will happen to you like what happened to the (World Trade Centre) twin towers in 9/11.”

As in previous stages of this long case (in which skeptic activists had to exhibit patience at every step) we will have to wait for a full resolution. Sentencing has been set for November 21 (six months from now) to give time for the Crown to verify that cocaine and alcohol abuse “are the only problems Markuze has.”

I sincerely hope that investigation will finally result in Markuze getting the treatment he clearly needs.