"it's a start... Musk argued that disclosing what amplifies or downranks tweets would reduce the risk of “behind the scenes manipulation.” [but] algorithms alone offer limited insights" because it's not just an algorithm that defines what you see: it's a huge dataset - "content that enters the platform, each user’s p…

misperception of peers’ thoughts and desires... what other voters think and will do... voters commonly refrain from voting for women because they think other voters don’t believe they can win... women were more likely to cite gender as a factor... white men were seen as significantly more electable than white women and women of color... But... in …

BBC’s director general ... exasperation with “conspiracy theories” ... followed criticism of the editing out laughter aimed at Boris Johnson in a news bulletin, reporters uncritically repeating Conservative sources... the prime minister escaping scrutiny after dodging a one-on-one interview with Andrew Neil...“In a frenetic campaign ... hundreds o…

defended the corporation’s election output ... claiming the fact that it received complaints from all sides demonstrated it was unbiased...BBC’s head of news and current affairs... said: “I don’t necessarily subscribe to the view that if we get complaints from both sides we are doing something right.”...

anything the BBC does is always in the spotlight... people read conspiracy into a thing when it’s really a confluence of cock-ups and the wrong button being pressed at the wrong time, or the guest you wanted gets into the wrong taxi and doesn’t show up

taking on the BBC in the complaints framework is not for the faint-hearted... set-piece responses ... ‘we get complaints from both sides, so we must be getting it right’, or, ... you are not taking into account that seven weeks previously we broadcast a balancing item’... summarises the basic BBC stonewall approach...‘due’ impartialit... that not …

42% of the country see the BBC as ... pro-Remain ... just 25% who disagree... When was the last time that the BBC sought to explore the opportunities available to a post-Brexit Britain?... fits in with a general sense that the people are up against the establishment... Just 19% feel that the Commons is doing a good job of honouring the vote... two…

Gavin Hunt... Question Time... tracked the 25 editions of the programme in the series running from January 2017, and found that 22 had panels which contained a majority of EU Remainers... Ofcom... turned the complaint down... Damian Green expressed the Hard Brexit perspective, and ... in Ofcom’s judgment, host David Dimbleby ensured that debate wa…

Question Time, Politics Live and Any Questions… Since ... September, 72% of the official panel guests across the three shows have been Remainers, while a mere 28% have been Leavers...87% of the panels had a Remainer majority – only 13% of shows had a panel equally balanced between Leavers and Remainers. Not once have Leavers outnumbered Remainers.

Brexit coverage during, before and since the Referendum has been skewed in favour of Brexit... isn’t ... flagrantly biased or unbalanced: it is more subtle... because of the polarisation of views over Brexit, the BBC would attract criticism from both sides almost whatever it did...Nigel Farage stated ... BBC’s coverage had been “fair and balanced”…

monitored thousands of hours of radio and TV shows dating back to 1999... Of 4,275 guests on Today between 2005 and 2015 who talked about the EU, only 132 were Brexiteers... think-tank Civitas ... with the group News-watch, also found that Left-wing Brexiteers have been consistently excluded ... Clarke and Heseltine were given nine times as much a…

concern that social media sites contribute to political polarization by creating ``echo chambers" that insulate people from opposing views ... We find that Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative post-treatment, and Democrats who followed a conservative Twitter bot became slightly more liberal post-tre…

“death by PowerPoint,”... sucks the life and energy out of ... meetings... spreadsheets rife with errors and macro miscalculations. Email and chat facilitate ... inbox overload ... So what makes artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) champions confident that their technologies will be immune to comparably counterproductive outcomes? ... …

I’ve been asking psychologists variations on a basic question: What research can best help us reckon with uncomfortable social and political realities... Here are seven essential lessons on the hidden forces shaping our views and actions in the Trump era... When Gallup polled Americans the week before and the week after the presidential election,…

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 ..…

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…

While we would like to believe we can persuade people ... with evidence, studies show the other side is likely to become even more deeply entrenched in its view in the face of more information... “politically motivated reasoning,”... people use their minds to protect the groups to which they belong from grappling with uncomfortable truths. The mot…

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.’”…

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a best-selling[1] 2011 book by Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics winner Daniel Kahnema...: his early days working on cognitive biases, his work on prospect theory, and his later work on happiness.The book's central thesis is a dichotomy between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System …

not much drives traffic as effectively as stories that vindicate and/or inflame the biases of their readers... specifically tries to invent stories that will provoke strong reactions in middle-aged conservatives. They share a lot on Facebook... they’re the ideal audience. institutional distrust and cognitive bias are so strong that the people who…