to put the blame solely on the company is to overlook how people use the site, and how they themselves create a filter bubble effect through their actions.... Just as important as the algorithm is how people use the site and shape it around their own communications... people are actually exposed to a great deal of diversity through Facebook... But…

"Perspective" ... for news websites and blogs to moderate online discussions with the help of artificial intelligence... reports how "toxic" a given comment is. It lets the website publisher, or even readers themselves, choose a "toxicity" threshold for comments that won't be displayed publicly... will start screening for off-topic comments or one…

AllSides.com offers the news you’d expect on any US politics site, except that its lead stories include a choice of articles: one from the left, centre and right... to push the comfortably certain in new directions... When you click on one story you’re offered a range of alternatives... a patented ‘crowd-driven’ political bias rating. Visitors ..…

Why Bots and Chatbots Are Optimal Tools for Politics

There are always “alternative facts.” What matters is how we decide which of those alternative facts are most likely to be true... Conway’s statement based ... on a much older tradition of deciding what is true: the argument from authority.... the culmination of a long retreat from the scientific perspective on truth... pitted against creationist…

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias... a trait that should have been selected against. ... it must have some adaptive function... related to our “hypersociability.” ... Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned wit…

scientists and their supporters need to paint a positive vision of the future, where science re-affirms its moral authority, articulates how it will help us, and advances a noble cause

More than two dozen governments... have a team of behavioral scientists tasked with ... “nudge” their citizens toward what they deem to be higher levels of well-being... “nudges” are value neutral... both achieve altruistic ends or more malicious ones... our environment (and the government) is always exerting some influence on our behavior, so we’…

become the best at something no one else is attempting... Attracting customers isn’t something you “bolt on” in the end. It’s something you work on at every stage of your business, and your unique selling proposition is the first stage... how do you define yours?... when you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing no one... connect more stro…

a digital community ... a space for anyone interested ... how to make “journalism more responsive to the public’s needs, more representative of the public’s diversity, and more inclusive of the public’s voices.”... Gather... for everyone working in news in some capacity

employees have little faith in their leadership:22% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization has a clear direction for the organization.15% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization makes them enthusiastic about the future.13% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization communicat…

We know little about the amount of fake news an average citizen consumes, or how it fits into their overall news diet... What we found calls into question the severity of the fake news crisis.... We gathered data for both the real and fake news sites from comScore... First, the fake news audience is tiny compared to the real news audience–about 1…

Several contributors suggested that different media organizations could come together both on a reporting level and on a broader level. There’s the idea for a “‘pooled’ White House new dashboard,” “a new kind of aggregation site for specific topics.”

3rd of my posts for Chatbots Magazine: Chatbots allow governments and other public bodies to provide citizens highly customised content and services. And invade their privacy. Citizens deserve better choices. 

The Jobs-to-be-done methodology helps you focus on the job that the user wants done rather than who and how... First, we take the Persona out of the picture and instead add context. Then we focus on the motivation (i.e, answering the why). It gives us clarity to the whole situation and helps us be more creative in designing a solution.

to give our audience a glimpse at what’s happening outside their own social media spaces... Outside Your Bubble feature will appear as a module at the bottom of some widely shared news articles and will pull in what people are saying about the piece on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the web, and other platforms.

Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals... “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”,,,an assumption that news... will con…

If there’s a single Top3ic running through the following stories, it’s probably Artificial Intelligence (AI), but I’m deeply into learning about psychology for the moment, so that’s my starting point.

our current misinformation problem is only the tip of a massive iceberg — and this looming disaster starts with AI...when we see a picture that seems very unlikely, we naturally assume that it is photoshopped... with AI, we are heading toward a world where this will be the case with every form of media: text, voice, video, etc.

two potential progressions from natural language processing to artificial intelligence. For the symbolic path, we need to build world models based on deep and organized representations. Success on this path requires that the models we build be comprehensive and flexible. For the sub-symbolic path, we need to train large neural networks in an envir…

an AI system that could generate explanatory, insightful articles... foster “a seamless interaction” between human and machine... Heliograf software identifies the relevant data, matches it with ... the template, merges them, and then publishes different versions across different platforms... alert reporters via Slack of any anomalies it finds in…

Chinese researchers usually speak English so they have the benefit of access to all the work disseminated in English. The English-speaking community, on the other hand, is much less likely to have access to work within the Chinese AI community... Baidu has rolled out neural network-based machine translation ... when Google and Microsoft did so...…

idea is that the human agents only handle requests too complex for a bot. But the enterprise software companies building automated responses and those that manage live chat services for workers are jostling over how to do the so-called “handoff,” or the step in which a customer gets routed from a bot to a human

when bot platforms take off, we will be... completing the new shift in data control from the users’ hands to Facebook’s, Google, and Microsoft’s hands... the next big privacy concern... end-to-end encryption between the user and the bot developer... goes against their [platform's] business models

Community engagement is about shifting that perspective. It’s about continuously listening, interacting and serving a community. How did the work contribute to the community reaching its goals? Far too often, journalists are obsessed with telling the story. And the story is good. But the story. isn’t. enough. design thinking ... can help us achi…

what happens in a cultural ecosystem where the hearer has gone extinct and the speaker gone rampant?... so much of our communication today is defined by a rather ungenerous unwillingness to listen coupled with a compulsion to speak.

how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself... What is at stake is not just one more piecemeal innovation but control over what very well could represent an entirely new computational platform: pervasive, ambient artificial intelligence... Artificial general intelligence will not involve dutiful adherence to explicit instructions, …

leading researchers are finding that they can make software that can learn to... design machine-learning software.

Over the past week in our Understanding AI series, we heard from a group of professionals exploring the impacts of AI... Sales coaches are valued, highly experienced, and well-paid. It’s hard to believe that a machine could potentially put them out of work, and yet…look at the data. And Sales’ counterparts over in Marketing are hardly any safer...…

Your brain is the best pattern completion machine in the known universe... But how does it do this? ... new study has unravelled the machinery, right down to the level of individual neurons