As allegations and investigations of sex abuse in the Catholic Church become more widespread, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that confidence in the way Pope Francis is handling the crisis has plummeted among U.S. Catholics. Just three-in-ten Catholic adults say Francis is doing an “excellent” or a “good” job addressing the issue, which is down 24 points since 2015 and 14 points from when Pew Research Center last asked the question in January of this year.

While seven-in-ten American Catholics say their overall opinion of Pope Francis is favorable, six-in-ten now say he is doing an “only fair” or “poor” job handling the sex abuse scandal, including 36% who say his efforts on this front have been poor. This is nearly double the share who said he was doing a poor job at the beginning of this year, and triple the share who said this in 2015.

http:// www.pewforum.org/2018/10/02/confidence-in-pope-francis-down-sharply-in-u-s/

haha! they call us trolls now….

SPAMMERS, HACKERS, POLITICAL propagandists, and other nefarious users have always tried to game the systems that social media sites put in place to protect their platforms. It’s a never-ending battle; as companies like Twitter and Facebook become more sophisticated, so do the trolls. And so last week, after Facebook shared new details about a tool it built to analyze text found in images like memes, some people began brainstorming how to thwart it.

Social media companies are under tremendous pressure from lawmakers, journalists, and users to be more transparent about how they decide what content should be removed and how their algorithms work, especially after they’ve made a number of high-profile mistakes. While many companies are now more forthcoming, they’ve also been reluctant to reveal too much about their systems because, they say, ill-intentioned actors will use the information to game them.

https://www.wired.com/story/qanon-conspiracy-facebook-meme-ai/