Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with scattered afternoon thunderstorms and a high of 88. Sunrise is 6:06 AM and sunset 7:49 PM, for 13h 42m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1812, the American frigate USS Constitution defeats the British frigate HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada earning the nickname “Old Ironsides.”
Davey Alba reports Facebook removes Russian-based network that spread vaccine misinformation:
Facebook said on Tuesday [8.10.21] that it had removed a network of accounts based in Russia that spread misinformation about coronavirus vaccines. The network targeted audiences in India, Latin America and the United States with posts falsely asserting that the AstraZeneca vaccine would turn people into chimpanzees and that the Pfizer vaccine had a much higher casualty rate than other vaccines, the company said.
The network violated Facebook’s foreign interference policies, the company said. It traced the posts to a marketing firm operating from Russia, Fazze, which is a subsidiary of AdNow, a company registered in Britain.
Facebook said it had taken down 65 Facebook accounts and 243 Instagram accounts associated with the firm and barred Fazze from its platform. The social network announced the takedown as part of its monthly report on influence campaigns run by people or groups that purposely misrepresent who is behind the posts.
“This campaign functioned as a disinformation laundromat,” said Ben Nimmo, who leads Facebook’s global threat intelligence team.
….
The Fazze campaign was carried out in two waves, Facebook said. In late 2020, Fazze created two batches of fake Facebook accounts that initially posted about Indian food or Hollywood actors. Then in November and December, as the Indian government was discussing emergency authorization for the AstraZeneca vaccine, the accounts started pushing the false claim that the vaccine was dangerous because it was derived from a chimpanzee adenovirus. The campaign extended to websites like Medium and Change.org, and memes about the vaccine’s turning its subjects into chimpanzees proliferated on Facebook.
Facebook is a private platform, and it can (and in this situation should) ban Fazze.
The implications of Fazze’s people-into-chimpanzees disinformation campaign extend far beyond Facebook’s Menlo Park, CA headquarters. It is, after all, a local audience in towns across America that Fazze sought to impress.
They could not be impressed if they were not impressionable.
People are impressionable through ignorance, not stupidity. There are very few people who might possibly be considered ‘stupid.’ There are, however, any number of crackpot theories circulating every day.
QAnon, lies about vaccines that are truly safe and effective, the Big Lie that Trump actually won in 2020 (he lost by millions of votes), etc.: these are educational and cultural failures.
We have taught poorly – and tolerated substandard reasoning and conspiracy theories – while claiming in a vision statement to teach “Every student, Every Day, in a Unified Way.”
In a community beset with a faction lapping ignorance and superstition, our vision statement is little more than a rhyming self-parody.