the surest way of defeating the erroneous views of others is not by bombarding the bastion of their self-righteousness but by slipping in through the backdoor of their beliefs... People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others... Pascal frames persuas…

Let’s start with a broad definition of “fake news” as information... that then proves unverifiable or materially incorrect... used to be called propaganda. And there is an extensive social science literature on propaganda... How does mainstream journalism that is also clearly politically biased – on all sides – claim the moral high ground? ... “f…

Echo chambers aren’t just a product of the internet and social media, however, but of how those things interact with fundamental features of human nature... Understand these features of human nature and maybe we can think creatively about ways to escape them... our tendency to associate with people like us. Sociologists call this homophily.... t…

Not only is Facebook not providing little red warnings along with links to potentially specious news—it’s now blocking links to the plugin that did... . “It would seem I’ve caused them some embarrassment by showing them to be full of bull when it comes to their supposed inability to address fake news and they are punishing me for it.”... Update #…

Facebook’s application for Patent 0350675: “systems and methods to identify objectionable content.” ... filed in June 2015, describes a sophisticated system for identifying inappropriate text and images and removing them from the network... improve the detection of pornography, hate speech, and bullying... much easier to identify than false news s…

The brain ... is an “inference generating organ.” ... predictive coding, according to which perceptions are driven by your own brain and corrected by input from the world... When “the sensory information ... does not match your prediction... you either change your prediction—or you change the sensory information that you receive.” We form our bel…

fake news wouldn’t be a problem if people didn’t fall for it and share it. Unless we understand the psychology of online news consumption, we won’t be able to find a cure... online news readers don’t ... care about the importance of journalistic sourcing ... “professional gatekeeping.”... I mocked up a news site and showed four groups of partici…

Most people in the news industry hate comments.... yet audience engagement ... is so worth the investment ... trust in media and journalists has sunk to a new low. Talking to each other can help build relationships and therefore trust. What business leader out there doesn’t want to earn more per user? And what journalist doesn’t want to have the b…

the increasingly collaborative nature of modern science. Perhaps nothing captures this dichotomy better than the story of the Higgs discovery... Almost 3,000 people qualify as authors on the key physics papers ATLAS produces... easier to guard against bias in interpreting the data The depth and breadth of this effort transform the act of discov…

For a term that is suddenly everywhere, “fake news” is fairly slippery... government propaganda designed to look like independent journalism... any old made-up bullshit ... a hoax meant to make a larger point... only ... when it shows up on a platform like Facebook as legitimate news? What about conspiracy theorists ... satire intended to entertai…

What we need today is metaliteracy – an ability to make sense of the vast amounts of information in the connected world of social media... educators and policymakers must “demonstrate the link between digital literacy and citizenship.” ... Metaliterate individuals ... learn to carefully differentiate among multiple sites... question the validity o…

psychological science suggests that exposure to false news would have an impact on people’s opinions and beliefs... repeated exposure to false information can change people’s beliefs ... phenomenon is called the “illusory truth effect.”... simply repeating false information makes it seem more true... prior knowledge does not protect people from …

Scottie Nell Hughes ... drove a stake into the heart of knowable reality: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts... So, how should Trump’s statements during the campaign have been covered? Should reporters have added something like this in the second paragraph of every news story? “Trump probably didn’t mean that he would appoin…

a new contract where the focus of consulting support doesn’t fall so much on prompt responses (“I have the answers and come to tell you what to do”) as on the facilitated co-creation and dissemination of new operational models (“I’ll use my experience to accelerate your ability to learn and change) ... Only under this condition digital transformat…

founders of the Hub Institute in Paris, have just released a manual (in French) The guide to Digital Transformation... a useful and simple way for every company to measure its progression, with prioritized steps to follow in order of degree of maturity, as well as defining the next stages to undertake.

Tech companies may face new legislation after struggling to comply with voluntary code of conduct... Under a code of conduct announced in May, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft agreed to review and respond to “the majority” of hate speech complaints within 24 hours

most deployments fall into the ‘deploy and pray’ category, a minority address known pain points and use cases, whilst only about 20% of projects involve a concerted organisation-wide roll-out aimed at creating a connected company. He argued that some kind of paradigm shift is needed to go beyond just adopting social technologies towards creating a…

I had lived in prior to the advent of the Internet was the true definition of a Bubble or Echo Chamber... everyone watched the same shows at night. Everyone got their news from the same small number of sources... rarely interacted with anyone who lived much differently from them... Nowadays ... we live in a world of endlessly competing and often …

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…

Major enterprise stories — stories that take deep dives and attempt to inform readers in substantive ways or to elicit impact... require considerable resources... the potential audience is limited... how can journalists get readers to complete these long pieces?use multiple elements and platforms to tell the story... the parts that pull your reade…

Propaganda warfare is increasingly shaping narratives, policies and lives around the world.

We have ideas for sponsored Codas, that are of interest to specific groups.

I think Jason Kottke nailed it back in 2013...the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice... I think they’re still worth fighting for. Ultimately, it comes down to two things: ownership and control... There’s no guarantee ... platforms will be around ... ten years from now... Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down...

what a few decades ago would have just been a matter of internal politics could now become an international economic shock.

Business coaching to a media startupOne of the smallest, yet sweetest, projects of 2016 was helping specialist online media Borderlexrethink its business and relaunch its website. Coaching ranged from overall business model right down to the nuts and bolts of social media promotion, engagement and monitoring.

Do we really want to set up Facebook or Google as censors ... to decide what is real and fake, true and false?

a look at the growth of fact-checking sites in Europe... legacy news media remain the dominant source of political fact-checking... in Western Europe. “In the East and the South, meanwhile, the practice is less a supplement to conventional journalism than an alternative to it, based almost entirely in NGOs and alternative media outlets...

a post for my Facebook friends about my personal experience with narcissistic personality disorder and how I view the president elect... who almost certainly suffers from it or a similar disorder.

The Five Star Movement controls ... sprawling network of websites and social media accounts that are spreading fake news, conspiracy theories, and pro-Kremlin stories to millions... profitable sites that describe themselves as “independent news” outlets but are actually controlled by the party leadership... crossposted scores of fake stories... o…

democracies are not as secure as people may think... since 2005, Freedom House’s index has shown a decline in global freedom each year... signs of democratic deconsolidation in the United States and many other liberal democracies are now similar to those in Venezuela before its crisis.