these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy... We’ve monitored more than 7,000 social media accounts over the last 30 months and at times engaged directly with them. Trump isn’t the end of Russia’s social media and hacking …

the evidence of this orchestrated Russian intelligence effort to hack the outcome of the American election... seems flimsy at best... saying is that Russia took advantage of the social web’s desire to just share things without reading them. It may be true, but so does every other media outlet.

foolish to assume that “experience” is an unalloyed asset ... In this age of rage against anything or anyone that can be depicted as “the establishment” ... a handicap to be an “insider” and a great advantage to be an “outsider”... calling them dangerous did not amount to an answer to the grievances driving substantial numbers of voters ... tell…

Zuckerberg’s emerging dilemma. He doesn’t want Facebook ... to be an arbiter of what’s legit and what’s not. But if Facebook is now going to prohibit fake news sites from using its ad network to sell ads, it will need a list of its own... Google has long had its own list of legitimate news sources... hasn’t apparently wanted to cut into its own…

Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," ... found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects.... virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings... "Diversity... seems to bring out the tu…

Perfectly open communities always go sour. You need filters. Every functional community has them. And that’s where machine learning comes in... If you can detect trolls, you can protect the people they’re trolling by muting or putting a warning over the trolls’ posts... Twitter... already have a way of screening out porn. Why don’t they do the sam…

Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood...two people together can mutua…

Seven years ago I started working full time at the Guardian in the glamorous role of SEO editorial executive. ... very like being in the Matrix but with less kung fu and more Polly Toynbee and Nigel Farage... here are a few of the things I’ve learned…

a lot of people don’t know fake news when they see it, sensationalized reports are more likely to go viral on social media than sane ones, and distrust of traditional (and genuinely more reliable) media sources is rising. Professor Nicole A. Cooke ... focusing on human information behavior, information literacy, and diversity in librarianship.... …

Does what it says on the tin.Prospect Commonality: ‘View recent activity’ on a connection's profile page "will show you what is hot topic for this prospect, what pain points they are suffering from, what’s getting them excited and what opportunities they are discussing"Hiding your connections: " Your competitor’s profiles are f…

Confirmation bias is usually described as a tendency to notice or search out information that confirms what one already believes, or would like to believe, and to avoid or discount information that’s contrary to one’s beliefs or preferences. This presidential election was undoubtedly the most contentious of any in the memory of most voters... Th…

There’s bad information out there that’s not necessarily fake. It’s never as clear-cut as you think... Facebook’s algorithm may not understand the various shades of falsehood. Facebook could tweak its algorithm to promote related articles from sites like FactCheck.org so they show up next to questionable stories on the same topic in the news fee…

Preteens and teens ...often clueless about evaluating the accuracy and trustworthiness of what they find... 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story... according to a Stanford University study of 7,804 students

Legacy media is thriving in Scandinavian news feeds... public broadcasters in all four countries seem to be competing strongly on Facebook... what do Scandinavian legacy publishers have to their advantage...?... many Scandinavian publishers see platforms such as Google and Facebook as only one part of their audience development strategy... small…

the groundbreaking work on “post-truth” was performed by academics, with further contributions from... middle-class professionals... Instead of “the truth”, which was to be rejected as naïve and/or repressive, a new intellectual orthodoxy permitted only “truths” – always plural, frequently personalised, inevitably relativised... all claims on trut…

mainstream AI tools: machine learning and deep learning...lack an element that will be key to building the sentient machines ...

All the BS that’s fit to click. A Medium Collection

As Facebook attempted to capture the fast-moving energy of the news cycle from Twitter... it built a petri dish for confirmation bias... Here’s how... ‘Share’ Button ... encouraging people to share quickly and without much thought... “original sharing,” where people post their own photos, text updates... was declining..., content from celebritie…

We do not estimate the integrity and ability of an acquaintance by his flabby willingness to accept our ideas… But when a candidate for public office faces the voters ... he faces a mob of men ... quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental ... whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understa…

the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end... many good effects... But the fixation on diversity ... produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.

“So all the fact-checking of Trump’s lies, all the investigative journalism about his failures, even the tapes — none of it meant anything.” In short, what happened to news ...? determining what counts as journalism and who counts as a journalist is a perpetual struggle ... No single trend explains the dissolution of news... What we ended up with…

Today, the newsletter is a petri dish, where audience-development teams tinker .... Publishers that treated email as its own animal saw benefits including massive boosts in traffic and upticks in digital subscribers... subscribers are disproportionately loyal ... an ideal group to test ideas on

the most-coveted project planning tools include file sharing, time tracking, email integration and Gantt charts... using social media facilitates “small talk ... help build rapport and create a more nurturing, supportive, collaborative and trusting environment... dedicated Yammer newsfeeds in SharePoint, for example, can be useful for communicatin…

Today I have just one Topic: Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. This advice, from Professor Cal Newport in the New York Times, may seem counter-intuitive. Which is exactly the point.

the market rewards things that are rare and valuable. Social media use is decidedly not ... Any 16-year-old with a smartphone can invent a hashtag ... The idea that if you engage in enough of this low-value activity, it will somehow add up to something of high value in your career is dubious ... snake oil and flimflam... why not also expose your…

Let’s take a break from the Donald, Facebook and the end of democracy, and try to focus on what’s important.

If you’re shocked, as I am, by the Presidential election result, you live in a bubble...Your job now is to step outside of whatever bubble you live in and educate yourself... Paying for news — investing in quality journalism and a free and open press — is what allows us to maintain our democracy. It’s not a coincidence that despots like censorship…

explore-blog: How power is divided in the American government – an animated explanation from TED. Also see British vs. American government, explained in vintage infographics.

Man differs from other animals... he has some desires which are... infinite, can never be fully gratified... Russell points to four such infinite desires — acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power... However much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will always elude you... eclipsed by an…

what we were doing was akin to “curation”: picking the best gems of news and analysis, and constructing a narrative around them for time-pressed readers drowning in the information overload of the web. And we were forging a direct relationship with our readers. That led me to talk with colleagues in other media organizations... understand the tre…