No, it wasn’t secondary. That’s what I assumed at first. The racial aggravated crime is the primary.

Contrary to what the police said. Got it.

UKIP was s collection of extreme racists.

UKIP is basically a dissolved party that led Brexit to a majority vote.

No, it wasn’t secondary. That’s what I assumed at first. The racial aggravated crime is the primary. Dislike of the speech, which was again quoting Churchill, led to a fig leaf alternative charge. There was nothing much that required dispersal.

Paul Weston was arrested in London for a racially aggravated crime.

Sort of but not exactly. He had been quoting a passage from one of Churchill’s books. That wasn’t the primary reason for the arrest. There were complaints to the police that he was causing a nuisance, the police responded, and he was detained after he failed to comply with a request by police to move on under the powers of a dispersal order made against him. That was the primary reason for the arrest — the racism bit was secondary. From the police report (bolding is mine):

“A 50-year-old man from Dorset was arrested outside Winchester Guildhall at approximately 2.30pm on Saturday April 26 after he failed to comply with a section 27 dispersal order.”
“The dispersal order was issued following complaints from members of the public about the man’s behaviour.”
“He was further arrested on suspicion of religious/racial harassment. He has been bailed pending further inquiries to report back to police on May 24.”

Weston is an amazingly virulent racist and bigot — too extreme even for UKIP, and they’re despicable people themselves.

Farm trolls and people of immature character have so populated discussion boards as to have made many of them unreadable, unpleasant, irrational, and in-congruent with reality. Such people have turned what might have been an oasis of intellect and information instead into uncivil testosterone pits reminiscent of a Devonian sea bottom.

Just as using your free speech rights to promise or threaten to murder someone will not go unchallenged or un-prosecuted, using ones free speech rights to support tropes that amount to the promise or threat of genocide will not go unchallenged or ignored, nor should they.

Should Nazi nationalist disease vectors be left unchallenged? Well, only if you are in favor of non-nonsensical genocidal wars and atrocities and the weakening or death of civil society. Or if you are personally such a patchwork of narcissism and recessive genes that everybody not your twin is a threat to your biological existence. Or if you are a mental defective more stuck on the adolescent fear of nanny government intruding into your sacrosanct room full of pathologies than you are aware of the interconnectedness and interdependence of humans, society and physical reality.

Or in other words, yes, Nazi and nationalist disease vectors should be dealt with and dealt with seriously and severely.

Have a nice day.

I was thinking of Google searches, not Facebook

Google searches are based on the Page rank (named after Larry Page, although Sergey Brin worked on it and co-authored at least one paper on it) algorithm. It’s one of the systems that’s understood.

I was thinking of Google searches, not Facebook. You’re probably right about FB.

It seems likely to me that a significant amount of the crap on “social networks” is just being parroted from Faux News et al. inasmuch as Fox is (or was?), “America’s most watched news network.”

That could well be. I have to say that I’m on Facebook, keep in touch with relatives, friends from grad school, a couple old buddies from grad school who now teach in different locations, and friends from cycling groups I’ve ridden with — probably fewer than 60 people total. All of them are scattered around the U.S. and Europe. I haven’t had my feed littered with the crap we’re talking about here, but I do try to keep things buttoned pretty tight. (The same with Twitter: I follow about 5 comedians and that’s it.)

I suspect ‘algorithms’ is just an excuse to cover up what they do. More likely employees are just fiddling with some weights to knock out things occasionally. Other ties they are doing it for money.

No. There is no way they could manage the social graphs of over a billion users (active or not) without some serious AI and learning systems running. The volume of data is just too large. We know a little bit: the posts that catch FB’s algorithms “attention” have large numbers of likes (especially if the likes come quickly), are related to relevant issues, come from pages where the user has completely filled out his/her profile, and more. The details of how the models are trained and tuned aren’t generally known (or, if they are, I don’t know where).

The genuine “it’s in the algorithm” is more occasional like that Microsoft bot that was accidentally racist.

Accidental is generous. Tay (its name) was designed to “learn” from conversation and interaction with the public. It was “taught” to be racist by a tide of racist (and generally bigoted) comments from Twitter users. It’s a simplification, but essentially Tay would repeat anything people asked it to, and the repetition and constant input did the training.

It seems likely to me that a significant amount of the crap on “social networks” is just being parroted from Faux News et al. inasmuch as Fox is (or was?), “America’s most watched news network.”

This is just a comment/reaction that occurred to me, not in any way meant as a criticism of the post from which the quotation was taken.