Overview: Social Web

our racial, cultural, and religious identities ... overlap with our political identities ... polarization operates on a social — and even primal — level... media executives can now create programming and content that really efficiently checks all the boxes...: political, psychological, racial, cultural, and even aesthetic...Path No. 1: We stay in …

It was 2010 and techno-optimism was surging... Pew Research Center ... asking 895 leading technologists, researchers, and critics for predictions of what the internet-connected world of 2020 would look like... 85 percent of respondents agreed that the “social benefits of internet use will far outweigh the negatives over the next decade,”...Flaws e…

as social media expands its cultural dominance, the people who can steer the online conversation will have an upper hand in whatever niche they occupy ... media, politics, business...the lessons they learned from performing on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok will stick... regardless of where they end up... 21st century ... business moguls, politici…

journalism primarily do one thing: cover events... The internet has sped up the news cycle. Now we put more emphasis on covering the last event... But ... events in this era have ceased to drive politics...impeachment... Mueller investigation ... “Access Hollywood” tapes... barely leave a trace on the polls...Events don’t seem to be driving politi…

recent UK election was a quarrel about the character of politics...Labour Party argued that it can be used for good... Conservative Party claimed that politics is bad... promised to... ‘get Brexit done’, so that we can all forget about it ...wage war on the political process, on trust, and on truth. Ensure the whole experience is miserable, bewild…

a workplace that is perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos... people develop severe anxiety in training... struggle with trauma long after they leave... conspiracy videos ... gradually lead them to embrace fringe views... By the end of 2018... more than 30,000 employees working on safety and security — about half of whom were content modera…

the creation of partisan outlets masquerading as local news organizations... distributing thousands of algorithmically generated articles and a smaller number of reported stories... focusing attention on issues such as voter fraud and energy pricing, providing the appearance of neutrality for partisan issues, or to gather data from users that can …

despite this being an election defined by Brexit, there is no substantive discussion of Brexit...Labour have failed to fill out what their ‘sensible Brexit’ would look like... the Conservatives have said little beyond their ‘get Brexit done’ slogan...the real and difficult choices ... Johnson would immediately face over Brexit... from one of the c…

In the US, radio began as a free-market free-for-all. More than five hundred radio stations sprang up in less than a decade to explore the possibilities... 40 percent were noncommercial... network of interlinked stations playing local and national content supported by local and national advertising, became dominant players...Soviet Union... ideolo…

Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry... We’ve spent the past two years studying online disinformation and building a deep understanding of Russia’s strategy, tactics, and impact...to develop procedures to identify disinformation campaigns... Profes…

AI-powered software ... could soon be weaponized for online disinformation... Although the output can be nonsensical... has also shown moments of unnerving clarity... far better-written than right-wing text we have analyzed as scholars... reliably generate tweets on political topics favored by the disinformation group, complete with hashtags... Mu…

does researchers’ presence on Twitter influence citations to their papers?... although the relationship between tweets and citations is poor, actively participating on Twitter is a powerful way of promoting and disseminating academic outputs... an author needs three times more followers to gain only one mention more... to be or not to be on Twitte…

More Americans have confidence in scientists, but there are political divides over the role of scientific experts in policy issues... six-in-ten Americans say scientists should play an active role in policy debates about scientific issues... but Americans are divided along party lines in terms of how they view the value and objectivity of scientis…

For those who have grown up with social media... childhood, an era that was fruitfully mysterious for the rest of us, is surprisingly accessible. ... this is certain to have some kind of profound effect on the development of identity... children and teen-agers have gained a level of control that they didn’t have before... Humans have always tried …

How seeing the other side’s narrative can de-polarize your mind... the heart of polarization is often not a disagreement about the facts of a particular narrative, but about whether that story is somehow representative... in a big, diverse and complicated society, multiple narratives can all be true at once...

the bubble machine creates a politics of purity... I am not telling anyone to be mates with racists or stop being leftwing. I am just asking that we be less comfortably numb. The result of not speaking to those who don’t inhabit our precious bubbles will confront us this week

2017 study ... showed that voters in Britain highly satisfied with their lives were 1.6% more likely to support the party in power... a 10% rise in family income was associated with a mere 0.18% increase ... happiness seems more important to the outcome of elections than money... in 15 European elections ... Life satisfaction... twice as important…

proposal ... for a U.S. government agency to regulate online speech... on all social media.... fails to make the case... the idea that a government agency would necessarily do better is naive... think about exactly who would appoint that agency’s leader, and to what political ends they might seek to put it...

Facebook needs to engage its users in more substantive acts of participation. ... mistakenly assumes that locally respected fact-checking NGOs can supply the trust Facebook itself is lacking. But NGOs lack standing... In a liberal democracy, NGOs can legitimately elevate arguments and offer counterarguments to government positions... we assume arg…

Information operations are rarely about changing the things people believe, but changing the way they feel. Anger and fear are not things we can correct with better facts... accounts run by ... Internet Research Agency, or IRA... shared [news from] some of the biggest, most reputable news organisations in the world... rhythmic, regular sharing o…

we’ve grown wary of the so-called attention econom... But we also benefit from social media and hesitate to disengage from it completely... a loose collective of developers and techno-utopians ... the IndieWeb ... developing their own social-media platforms... preserve what’s good about social media while jettisoning what’s bad... Facebook and I…

It’s taken me over ten years to move from enthusiasm, through frustration into a Zen-like state where I no longer blog about EU comms. But when the Eurobloggers called, I had to answer ;)- my link in the #EU09vs19 blog chain …

"Most criticisms lodged against the content creators that chose to work with the platforms are made with the benefit of hindsight... the decision many publishers made to close down their comment sections should be considered one of the industry’s worst blunders.... editors looked down into their article comments sections and did not like what…

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes laid out an argument for dismantling the social media behemoth... via antitrust legislation... a new age of innovation and competition... maybe not... competition  demands more data... engagement ... efforts to increase competition risk simply aggravating these problems.... We could simply choose not to have socia…

It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade. But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility... Mark’s influence is staggering... his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks... surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challengi…

How fake news gets into our minds, and what you can do to resist it... to understand why it gets into our mind... by examining how memory works and how memories become distorted.... Fake news often relies on misattribution ... we retrieve things from memory but can’t remember their source... one of the reasons advertising is so effective... Repe…

report reviews and summarises the recent available literature connecting polarisation and the news media...key findings...: little evidence that increased exposure to news featuring like-minded or opposing views leads to the widespread polarisation of attitudes... some studies found both can strengthen attitudes of minority who already hold stron…

Medium was never something that we would get to define. Instead, it’s turned out to be an endless thought experiment into what publishing on the internet could look like.

The systems in the brain that light up when we access our beliefs are the same systems that help us understand stories... the same brain systems involved when people think about who they are and about the beliefs that are most important to them... the default mode network, a set of interconnected areas of the brain associated with identity and sel…

The web was designed to bring people together and make knowledge freely available. Everyone has a role to play to ensure the web serves humanity. By committing to the following principles, governments, companies and citizens around the world can help protect the open web as a public good and a basic right for everyone.