Twitter Blog
Twitter Blog
This. But seriously, happy to see Twitter adding some friction to the system to slow misinformation. If friction helps the system during an election, why not all the time?
media
cyber.harvard.edu
cyber.harvard.edu"Our results are based on analyzing over fifty-five thousand online media stories, five million tweets, and seventy-five thousand posts on public Facebook pages garnering millions of engagements. They are consistent with our findings about the American political media ecosystem from 2015-2018, published in Network Propaganda, in which we found that Fox News and Donald Trump’s own campaign were far more influential in spreading false beliefs than Russian trolls or Facebook clickbait artists."People believe the President and he’s a disinformation campaign.
Gimlet Media
Gimlet MediaWhen you hear who Q of the conspiracy theory really is it kind of kills the mystique and makes the whole thing seem silly. PJ Vogt does some nice work here going to the origins of the mass delusion in the darker corners of the Internet.
kottke.org
kottke.orgJason connects conspiracy thinking with Hannah Arendt and it is depressing.
If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.I have to hope that some strain of American skepticism still exists somewhere but it definitely feels like it's fading in the face of social media peer groups.
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com“Some stories demand collaboration, and this one is a plain example. The nation’s newsrooms — working together and, crucially, with the help of the public in communities around the nation — could find out and explain what is going on, at the macro and micro level,” he said.Dan Gillmor on how the media should work to ensure the postal service story is told.
Browseulator
BrowseulatorFun experiment: see if loading up Paul Ford's random archive.org ephemera thing gives you the same dopamine hit as the random crap social media gives you to look at. I enjoy it.
nytimes.com
nytimes.com"But at the highest levels of most news organizations and the big social media platforms, executives and insiders told me that it simply hasn’t sunk in how different this year is going to be — and how to prepare audiences for it."TV and social media executives are experts at engagement, not democracy. They thrive on conflict and chaos, not on functioning government processes. They have no business incentive to educate their audiences. We have to require it through regulation.
their.tube
their.tube"Theirtube is a Youtube filter bubble simulator that provides a look into how videos are recommended on other people's YouTube. Users can experience how the YouTube home page would look for six different personas."What if the YouTube I see is not the YouTube you see? This is a good demonstration of how personalized recommendations work.
mediamatters.org
mediamatters.org"Fast forward five years and journalists and commentators are still talking about imminent pivots and praising him for always-temporary changes in his tone."Tiring Trump trope.
washingtonpost.com
"Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and previously unreported documents obtained by The Washington Post."This article is a good summary of how Facebook rewrote its policies to accommodate hate speech and misinformation so they could stay in favor with the current administration. Related, so far more than 100 advertisers have agreed to stop advertising on Facebook in July: Facebook’s reckoning arrives.
Facebook is on the Wrong Side of History
So much Facebook in the news:
NYT: What’s Facebook’s Deal With Donald Trump?
The Atlantic: How Facebook Works for Trump
NYT: What’s Facebook’s Deal With Donald Trump?
"While executives across Facebook insist that Mr. Zuckerberg’s position on free speech on the platform is a matter of long-term planning and principle, not political expediency, his political team also recognizes that they are badly out of position for a Democratic administration."Mashable: Facebook faces boycott push from NAACP, ADL, and other civil rights groups
"They allowed incitement to violence against protestors fighting for racial justice in America in the wake of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and so many others. They amplified white nationalists by including news sources with known extremist ties into their 'fact checking' program. They turned a blind eye to blatant voter suppression in their platform."And I think this older article from April gives important context about why exactly Facebook's alliance with the administration is dangerous:
The Atlantic: How Facebook Works for Trump
"Instead of paying to put particular media in front of a specific audience, an advertiser now pays Facebook to deliver a selected outcome from a certain stripe of people. For example, a clothing manufacturer might pay Facebook for webpage visits from women in their 30s who live in Los Angeles, or for likes by parents with college degrees whose online behavior is similar to that of users who had previously made purchases."The combination of microtargeting, proprietary machine learning, increasing radicalization through recommended groups, and an unwillingness to prevent voter supression or misinformation is hurting our ability to have a healthy democracy.
nytimes.com
"As I scrolled through endless collections of these online, I found it hard to escape the conclusion that America’s police forces are not just unfairly brutal — they also do not seem to care anymore about being caught on tape."Cameras are capturing what our system with no consequences for bad actors looks like.