"Influencing" is based on suckering young people with the idea of beating everyone else in who can sucker more people in.

It's similar to multi-level marketing, in that of the many who enter at the bottom, very few make a success of it. Most of them become part of the many that the successful ones exploit.

Cory Doctorow believes that Facebook is doomed.

I hope so, but that will be nothing to celebrate if Facebook is replaced by another online dis-service that has the same basic injustices. These include requiring people to run nonfree software, collecting data users don't ask it to hold, and promoting whatever postings tend to cause outrage.

Don't be a zucker — don't be used by Facebook! But don't assume that everything else is ok!

*Massive feeding effort underway to save starving Florida manatees.*

But Republicans are working hard on eliminating the remaining seagrass and the remaining manatees.

*As a Russian, I don’t know how to live with the shame of Putin’s aggression.*

Ecuador's former foreign minister: the UK's goal all along was to send Assange to the US.