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Overview: Communications Tactics

Relevant resources

The Information Age Is “Weaponized”
extranewsfeed.com
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many activists working to create positive change ... seem to think that if they just get their ideas to “go viral” they will ... dominate the discourse. The great lie of this approach is that no singular discourse exists! Each community is now capable of building consensus with itself, where the like-minded talk to others like themselves while fo…

Change My View - You Are Not So Smart
soundcloud.com
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reddit community called Change My View ... a ready-made natural experiment ... feed it into programs ... to understand the back-and-forth between human beings ... discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ : po…

Are your Google search results another kind of filter bubble? The answer seems to be: Kind of
misinfocon.com
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Approximately 1–3% of users in the sample get these ‘very different’ results when searching for the query terms. Perhaps less headline-grabbing than fake news in this regard are special interest and lifestyle media, which feature heavily in the personalized results. I think we need more research on the relevance of these sources for political comm…

22/08/2017
Backfire effect and Brexit (Top3ics, May 2017)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

I’ve been meaning to blog about the ‘backfire effect’ cognitive bias since first coming across it last December. It went to the top of my ToBlog list thanks to a little serendipity...

New research shows the internet is a swamp and the trolls have won | The Outline
theoutline.com

there’s plenty of reasons why negativity abounds online... Incivility is a basic human instinct that’s encouraged by anonymity and exacerbated by inequality... anger helps drive participation... anyone who benefits from trolling — whether it’s platforms themselves or populist politicians — have little reason to improve the tone of online chatting…

Here's What Facebook's Live Video Filter Bubble Looks Like - BuzzFeed News
www.buzzfeed.com
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But millions of people chose to skip the media ... and watch the speech live, via Facebook... greeted with a litany of comments and emoticon reactions, all colored by the point of view of the outlet broadcasting it...a live or real-time filter bubble, where a viewer’s perceptions of a live event are colored by the commentary that surrounds it.

Misinformation on social media: Can technology save us?
theconversation.com
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my research team’s analysis of data from Columbia University’s Emergent rumor tracker suggests that this misinformation is just as likely to go viral as reliable information... limiting news fakers’ ability to sell ads... a step in the right direction. But it will not curb abuses driven by political motives... Using BotOrNot, our colleagues found…

Storytelling and Branded Reality in the Internet of Experiences (and Trump’s Republican Party)
medium.com
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A couple of months ago I included augmented and virtual reality in Top3ics, my occasional newsletter, adding “Consider these as first notes towards a future post.” I then forgot about it. Thanks, Newt Gingrich!

Losing my religion
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
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Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

The long-term effects of ugly political discussions on Facebook
arstechnica.com
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Study shows political discussions are ruining Facebook and friendships... users who try to talk about politics on Facebook are often surprised by the political opinions of their acquaintances... a diverse set of opinions among a user's friends makes everyone want to speak up less...Facebook has a low threshold for “friending” ... can bridge togeth…

If you are reading this, we might be in the same news bubble
medium.com
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Search engines, social media and news aggregators are great at surfacing information close to our interests, but they are limited by the set of topics and people we choose to follow. Even if we read multiple news sources every day, what we discover is defined by the languages we are able to read, and the topics that our sources decide to cover. Ul…

'Three sides to every story': Behind Trinity Mirror's news-aggregation app
digiday.com
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... manually curate 10 stories from other publishers, which will run as a daily edition. Three different articles, often with opposing viewpoints, will run on each story, representing the left, neutral and right-wing political perspectives on the same story... For example, in Wednesday’s edition, it ran a Guardian story entitled “Terrorism publ…

Platforms, distribution and audience
ben-evans.com

Blogging has never been easier but getting read has never been harder... The problem isn't freedom or openness but distribution... you might post it on Facebook or Google Plus. Your friends might see it ... (though this is largely random) and they might share it ... You might post it on LinkedIn and your network might see it ... and LinkedIn migh…

How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election
www.politico.com
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... or any election, opinion poll ... "Google has amassed far more power to control elections and ... a wide variety of opinions and beliefs... easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more—up to 80 percent in some demographic groups—with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated.. In the United …

The Web We Have to Save
medium.com
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The rich, diverse, free web that I loved - and spent years in an Iranian jail for - is dying.Why is nobody stopping it?... The hyperlink was my currency six years ago... represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web ... a way to abandon centralization ... and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes an…

Rethinking & redesigning Google News
gigaom.com
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How much more could Google News be? See "... a presentation that a German designer came up with that involved a wholesale redesign and re-thinking of what Google News is and does." Lots of good stuff here. Particularly like how 'smart personalisation' is used to help penetrate the filter bubble: "automatically suggest related stories on a news t…

Algorithm tweaks don’t change the bottom line
gigaom.com
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"Facebook seems to be trying to get more transparent about how the algorithms ... function, with a statement on Monday about cracking down on “clickbait.” ... But despite the attempts at openness, the bottom line remains the same: Facebook is a black box. No one really has any clue why the site chooses to show or hide certain content... what com…

Facebook Paper: Curated Visual News Reader
techcrunch.com
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Seems Zuck's taken Filter Bubble criticisms to heart, combining human & machine curation (now where have I heard that before?) to create what Techcrunch calls “content serendipity” (wish I'd coined that one): "Each Section combines stories chosen by Facebook’s human editors and surfaced by the Paper algorithm [from] a publication, blogger, publi…

Facebook Flipboards you out of the filter bubble
mobile.theverge.com
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"You also can't add any site you want, as with a traditional RSS reader. Instead, Facebook has hired a team of content curators to pick stories for you in one of a dozen or so categories ranging from basic news to cute animals." - With Paper, Facebook just blew its own iPhone app out of the water | The Verge

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