Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts

Monday, April 15, 2019

POTUS wants snooping on disabled vets who look too happy?

Disability Advocate Slams White House’s Veteran Surveillance Plan


The Hill
BY TODD NEIKIRK
April 15, 2019

Republicans have long presented themselves as the unquestioned pro-military political party. In the last few months, however, conservatives have been targeting veteran benefits. Fox News hosts, Brian Kilmeade and Pete Hegseth, got in on the act recently, taking aim at vets who they believe to be claiming too many benefits.

The White House has recently taken aim at former troops as well, creating a new social media surveillance policy. According to the New York Times, the Social Security administration is on the look out for disabled vets who look too happy.

Lawyer, Robert Crowe, says, “There is a little bitty chance that Social Security may be snooping on your Facebook or your Twitter account. You don’t want anything on there that shows you out playing Frisbee.”
read more here

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Vietnam Veterans of America, among others, targeted by online trolls

House VA Committee Looks into Trolls Targeting Veterans Groups


Nextgov
By BRANDI VINCENT
MARCH 18, 2019
Someone’s spreading misinformation to veterans and their families and Congress wants to know who.

House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Mark Takano, D-Calif., launched an investigation this month into who’s impersonating veterans service organizations to target service members, veterans, their families and the American public.

“Our veterans served in uniform to guard against threats to our democracy just like those posed by these internet bots and trolls intent on sowing division and spreading misinformation,” Takano said in a statement. “Congress has a responsibility to stamp out these anonymous individuals and protect our country from threats foreign and domestic.”

The committee is looking into reports of campaigns that impersonate veterans and VSOs to share misleading content or fabricated “news” about military issues and ultimately cause confusion or inspire fear amongst veterans and their families. A committee staffer told Nextgov that they’re currently in the fact-finding stage of the investigation and plan to soon hold stakeholder meetings on the issue.

Today’s technological landscape has made it easy for instigators to use tools such as email and social media to influence voting behaviors or trick Americans into sharing their most sensitive personal data.

Kristofer Goldsmith, a veteran who served on the frontlines in Iraq before smartphones and social media were ubiquitous, has been tracking and combatting trolls and foreign adversaries targeting Vietnam Veterans of America, a congressionally-chartered VSO, since August 2017. He said the work is more important now than it has ever been.

“I’m really glad that Chairman Takano recognizes that too, because I feel like we’ve been screaming from the rooftops and until now no one has really heard us,” Goldsmith said.
read more here

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Fake Vietnam Veterans Facebook Page Got More Views Than Real One?

Facebook shuts down ‘imposter’ veterans page

Stars and Stripes
Nikki Wentling
October 25, 2017


Vietnam Veterans of America, a congressionally chartered veterans service organization, runs a public Facebook page. Another page, Vietnam Vets of America, isn’t affiliated with a major veterans group. VVA calls them an "imposter page." 

WASHINGTON – Facebook Inc. disabled a page on its social media platform Tuesday after determining it violated the intellectual property of a congressionally chartered veterans service organization.

The company shut down the page Vietnam Vets of America, which created politically divisive posts and had a following of nearly 200,000 people. That’s tens of thousands more than the number following Vietnam Veterans of America, a page run by the veterans service organization of the same name that accused the other page of being an “imposter.”
Vietnam Vets of America violated a section of the social media network’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities about protecting other people’s rights, said a Facebook official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information had not been publicly released.
The action comes months after Vietnam Veterans of America alerted Facebook’s security team.
“We’re glad to see that Facebook is taking seriously the fact that agents outside the U.S. are targeting veterans on social media,” said John Rowan, president of Vietnam Veterans of America.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Navy Response to ISIS Hit List Frustrates Families

Families frustrated by Navy response to Islamic State 'hit list'
By Dianna Cahn
The Virginian-Pilot (Tribune News Service)
Published: March 25, 2015

NORFOLK (Tribune News Service) — Families of some of the 100 servicemembers whose names and addresses appeared on an online "hit list" by Islamic State militants are struggling to figure out how much danger they really face.

The weekend posting by a group that identified itself as the Islamic State Hacking Division included pictures of servicemembers along with their names, home addresses, branches of service and, in some cases, ranks and titles. It claimed the information was hacked from military sites, while the Pentagon insists it was culled from the Internet. The posting, which has since been removed, called on unnamed "brothers in America" to seek out the servicemembers and "kill them in their own land."

On the list: 15 servicemembers from Hampton Roads, most of whom were assigned to warships that launched strikes against the Islamic State.

The wife of one sailor named said affected families are frustrated. They maintain that the Navy's public relations arm has been too lax in allowing information about naval operations onto the web and that the Pentagon is not taking the threats seriously enough. Additionally, they said, the Navy is not being forthcoming enough with them about how it intends to deal with the risk.
read more here

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Cater Ash Says ISIS Troops Info Taken From Social Media, Not DOD

Carter: Troop Data in Online Kill List Was Not Stolen 
Associated Press
by Robert Burns
Mar 24, 2015

WASHINGTON — The names, photos and addresses of 100 U.S. military members posted online by a group calling itself the Islamic State Hacking Division were not stolen from confidential government files, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Monday.

During a news conference at Camp David, Maryland, Carter was asked about the Internet listing over the weekend in which the purported hackers urged that the 100 individuals be murdered by sympathizers inside the U.S.

"The information that was posted by ISIL was information taken from social websites and publicly available," Carter said. "It wasn't stolen from any (Defense Department) websites or any confidential databases." He said the Pentagon, nonetheless, takes this event seriously.

Other officials have said it is being investigated by the FBI. "At the same time, this is the kind of social media messaging of a vile sort that ISIL specializes in" and is one reason the U.S. is determined to defeat the group, he added, using a common acronym for the Islamic State group that has captured large portions of territory in Iraq and Syria and beheaded a number of Americans.
read more here

Monday, March 2, 2015

RallyPoint Getting Veterans LinkedIn to Each Other

Veterans, active duty military, tap social media network for support
FoxNews.com
By Brian Mastroianni
Published March 02, 2015

Around last April, LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke was approached by Yinon Weiss about supporting an interesting twist on the social media networking model that he helped introduce back in 2003.

Weiss, who served for 10 years on active duty as a Marine Corps scout and sniper platoon commander as well as an Army Special Forces officer, met with Guericke to discuss RallyPoint, a professional network for active duty members of the military and veterans alike.

Weiss founded the site back in 2012 alongside Aaron Kletzing, another veteran, when they were both students at Harvard Business School. In fact, the idea literally was formed on the back of a napkin in a Cambridge, Mass. restaurant.

The two men saw their project as filling a big void for military personnel – both veterans transitioning to civilian life and individuals serving on active duty often express frustration at not having guidance and networking in navigating life in and outside of the military.

Flash forward three years, and the site has grown beyond networking.

It is a social forum that has become an online community, sounding board, and professional guide for over 500,000 veterans and active duty men and women serving in the military.

The site’s growth has made it an indispensable resource for individuals hailing from a very specialized career who didn’t necessarily find the guidance and social connections they needed from sites like LinkedIn or Facebook. With the announcement last week that Guericke was joining RallyPoint’s board of directors the site has further established itself as a go-to social networking venue.

“One of the big problems for people from the military is that they don’t build a strong network,” Weiss told FoxNews.com. “It’s not really part of the culture of the military – you don’t have a resume, you don’t practice job interviews, you typically get assigned to places, and you don’t have much influence over that. So, when you transition to civilian life, it leads to intense frustration.”
read more here

Saturday, December 27, 2014

Sinister side of social media depression app

Ok, so what sounded like a good idea to many made the hair stand up on the back of too many necks when it involves using social media to predict depression.

Let's get honest here. I use Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus for Wounded Times but on a personal level, I don't get into any of them very often. I just don't have time. I work a full time job for a paycheck and then full time on tracking news reports. A lot of people I talk to don't use social media because their friends share everything from what they just ate for lunch to how many times their baby needed a diaper change.

Then there are people with a lot of "friends" on their list they don't know and real friends too busy to read every keystroke. What is worse is when someone does unload how they're feeling and no one responds.

There are times when social media pulls someone out of a huge jam, solves problems and changes lives for the better but most of the time, people end up wondering why no one cares about them or why they are not one of the chosen to receive what others get. It isn't how many friends you have, but what kind of friends you have that makes the difference in life.

There were some cases of depressed veterans with PTSD being talked off the ledge because of Facebook and it even happened a few times to servicemembers. Most of the time, it doesn't happen at all.

There are great sites with experts working on PTSD and proper peer support but then there are far too many with hacks more interested in their own glory pushing their followers to believe garbage tossed at them as if they have the answers to all the problems in life.

Now there is a far darker side to what sounded like a good idea and that how depressed people reaching out for help can be left victimized with no assurance from anyone.

The CDC already knew depression levels by state but what they don't mention is, after all these years they still haven't come up with a way of addressing clinical depression and that is in itself depressing.
CDC Data and Statistics
Feature: An Estimated 1 in 10 U.S. Adults Current Depression Among Adults
United States, 2006 and 2008. MMWR 2010;59(38);1229-1235. 
(this map includes revised state estimates)

Risks in Using Social Media to Spot Signs of Mental Distress
New York Times
By NATASHA SINGER
DEC. 26, 2014
For one thing, said Dr. Allen J. Frances, a psychiatrist who is a professor emeritus at Duke University School of Medicine, crude predictive health algorithms would be likely to mistake someone’s articulation of distress for clinical depression, unfairly labeling swaths of people as having mental health disorders.

For another thing, he said, if consumers felt free to use unvalidated diagnostic apps on one another, it could potentially pave the way for insurers and employers to use such techniques covertly as well — with an attendant risk of stigmatization and discrimination.

The Samaritans, a well-known suicide-prevention group in Britain, recently introduced a free web app that would alert users whenever someone they followed on Twitter posted worrisome phrases like “tired of being alone” or “hate myself.”

A week after the app was introduced on its website, more than 4,000 people had activated it, the Samaritans said, and those users were following nearly 1.9 million Twitter accounts, with no notification to those being monitored. But just about as quickly, the group faced an outcry from people who said the app, called Samaritans Radar, could identify and prey on the emotionally vulnerable — the very people the app was created to protect.

“A tool that ‘lets you know when your friends need support’ also lets you know when your stalking victim is vulnerable #SamaritansRadar,” a Briton named Sarah Brown posted on Twitter. A week and a half after the app’s introduction, the Samaritans announced it was reconsidering the outreach program and disabled the app.

Munmun De Choudhury, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech. Credit Amber Fouts for The New York Times Social media posts offer a vast array of information — things as diverse as clues about the prevalence of flu, attitudes toward smoking and patterns of prescription drug abuse. Academic researchers, often in partnership with social media platforms, have mined this data in the hopes of gaining more timely insights into population-scale health trends. The National Institutes of Health, for instance, recently committed more than $11 million to support studies into using sites like Twitter and Facebook to better understand, prevent and treat substance abuse.
Dr. Eric Horvitz, the director of the Microsoft Research lab at Redmond, Wash., said his group’s studies demonstrated the potential for using social media as a tool to measure population-level depression patterns — as a complement to more traditional research methods.

“We could compute the unhappiest places in the United States,” Dr. Horvitz said. He added that social media analysis might also eventually be used to identify patterns of post-traumatic stress disorder immediately after events like tsunamis or terrorist attacks. “You can see the prospect of watching a news story break and using these tools to map the pulse of society,” he said.

But researchers generally agreed that it was premature to apply such nascent tools to individuals.

“People always ask, ‘Can you predict who is going to try to commit suicide?’ ” said Dr. Dredze, the Johns Hopkins researcher. “I think that’s way beyond what anyone can do.”
read more here

I buried a lot of people in my lifetime and most of the time I was depressed as hell about it. My ex-husband tried to kill me our last night together and after that level of betrayal, it crossed my mind that I didn't deserve to live. That was over 30 years ago before I met my current husband. Imagine if we had the internet back then. What would have happened if I actually shared that feeling online? Would my boss find out about what I managed to keep secret from him? What would he have done if he knew? I worked hard for him and he trusted my judgement but I have a feeling he would have treated me differently if he had known what I was going through.

It is up to me who I share things with and up to my judgement to decide if I trust them or not. I don't expect them to share my secrets with anyone the same way I cannot share secrets at all as a Chaplain. To think that someone I don't know is tracking what I tell a friend on Facebook makes me sick to my stomach. It limits what I do share and considering my profile has been viewed over 10 million times while Wounded Times reaches people around the world, I am picky what I share in the first place. As for the rest of it, there is always email and the thing called a phone people used to speak into instead of thumbing through life as if they are communicating.