Cambridge Analytica (part of SCL Group Ltd.) constructed a significant data set based on US voter rolls... Some respected observers argue the firm’s psychographic profiling methodologies may not be nearly as potent as its sales pitch suggests... the firm’s psychographic practices remain as unreviewable as the campaign’s voter advertising. Journal…

Having an agile learning mind-set will be the new skill set of the 21st century.

A chatbot like CNN’s is a great way to send news and alerts ... How can you build a chatbot like this?... Tangowork, a platform for communications teams that lets them easily create news-type chatbots... the Microsoft Bot Framework ... lets us support 9 channels — Facebook Messenger, SMS, Skype, Slack, Web-part, etc.—from a single codebase... you…

there are more than 1.97 million blog posts published online every single day... four (specific) ways that marketers can fix their broken content marketing and social media programs...

The new right’s echo chamber is hermetically sealed, while the left’s is not.... Private platforms like Facebook are under no obligation to provide us a diverse worldview. If it is more profitable to ... isolate us in a bubble of ideologically comfortable information, they will.... build an aggregator where the algorithms can be reviewed by schola…

rather than asking “Is the internet good for democracy?”... explore whether the human characteristics ... amplified or diminished by the internet support a functioning democratic system... The internet... collapses geography, greatly amplifies people’s ability to make connections ... However, the American democratic system is structured in a wa…

A communications strategy answers the question, “Why are we doing these activities?”... if you’ve been doing customer discovery and using the value proposition canvas, you know a lot about each customer/ beneficiary.

combat fake news by combining professional journalism with volunteer fact checking... professional journalists will be paid to write “global news stories,” while volunteer contributors will “vet the facts, helps make sure the language is factual and neutral... transparent about the source of news, posting full transcripts, video, and audio of in…

The open internet is a powerful tool in the fight against discriminatory mass surveillance... democracy’s antidote to authoritarianism... where the voices of dissidence that have always been watched, can watch and talk back.

every individual picks their idea, we vet it ourselves and make sure the data’s there, that it’s interesting, and we just go off and do it... We specifically seek out stories that aren’t news related, because we don’t want to compete in that space

The main advantage of starting with mobile first is that it forces you to pare down your experience to the nuts and bolts... Once you commmit to scrollytelling, you have two mobile choices: keep it scrolly, or stack it... preserve the scroll is if the transitions are truly meaningful, and not just something to make it pop. Seeing change over time…

“Scrollytelling” is when content (e.g., a graphic) is revealed or changed as the user scrolls... creating a scroll-driven story is hardly a standardized practice, and there are many libraries out there

Interactive and participatory media allows viewers to get involved, to become expressive, and give voice. It is inviting and contagious for those who share views—seeing enough notes and posters in public makes it more welcoming to add your own... civic action... moves from digital support to public support only when it is clear that such actions h…

Corporations are taking pages from startups, to emulate the culture of a fast-moving smaller company.

the number of content moderators scrubbing the world’s social media sites, mobile apps, and cloud storage services runs to “well over 100,000”—that is, about twice the total head count of Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook.

illustrates the current limitations of artificial intelligence... a human being invisibly takes over, responding to your request as if the algorithms were still at the helm... to reveal how people would react to an omniscient virtual assistant, and to provide data that would let the algorithms learn ...progress has been harder won than expected...…

Facebook ... can never be, a platform where people have the power to build anything... the company’s main focus ... analyzing your data and showing you ads in exchange for advertiser’s money. A future where Facebook is the global social infrastructure, is a future with no refuge from advertising and number crunching... the future of social media …

a list of wireframes made by some of the best UX designers, in the hope that they might inspire you

an extensive list of projects, initiatives and tools created to fix trust in journalism and false/fake news and misinformation

Facebook will start adding “related” articles from different publications underneath a news post about a trending topic in your News Feed.

if everyone has the same information, the crowd is no smarter than a single individual... a diverse collection of opinions, especially including minority views, is crucial for creating a smart group... we have an innate desire to imitate our peers... it may also be because of a rational, profit-seeking motivation... The more complex the situation…

Venting my spleen a little over on Medium.

Everyone wants to test and learn, so long as it’s failing fast without the failure... to win the award for taking the risk, so long as it wasn’t risky... Innovation is sweaty, risky, terrifying and takes balls... Innovation is the opposite of what we are pretending the word means.

I’d grown up in the kind of millenarian sect of Christianity where pastors were always throwing out new dates for the Rapture. But Kurzweil’s prophecies seemed different because they were bolstered by science.

there is no obvious way to design such a system so that it could always explain why it did what it did... How well can we expect to communicate—and get along with—intelligent machines that could be unpredictable and inscrutable? ... a journey to the bleeding edge of research on AI algorithms... including a meeting with one of the great philosopher…

Storytelling and EU projects - some guidelines I wrote for the 2017 “EU in my Region” blogging competition, which I’m managing for the EC’s DG REGIO.

becoming a learning organization was nothing like winning a marathon ...cultivating an award-winning orchard... nurturing systems and culture to produce meaningful results... We embarked on a systematic and phased approach to cultivating the organization we all wanted.

in hot pursuit of the perpetrator, we discover a trail of evidence leading to our own doors... the issue of fake news ... an opportunity for public reflection, political economic imagination, and more thoughtful... interventions around the organization of the platforms and infrastructures which pattern our lives in the digital age... a shift from…

Google News determines whether an article might contain fact checks in part by looking for the schema.org ClaimReview markup. We also look for sites that follow the commonly accepted criteria for fact checks.... use that markup in fact-check articles.

a free bot interface and resources already in the newsroom, Hefty built and launched her first bot, dubbed Elexi, prior to the November 2016 elections to provide audiences with the necessary information to become more informed voters... We had all these preview stories on our site on local issues. If a user asked a question about a candidate or a …