Overview: Social Web

Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report...The Cambridge Analytica scandal was facilitated by Facebook’s policies

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…

our vision and principles around building a privacy-focused messaging and social networking platform... Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally... private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication... an opportunity to build a simpler platform th…

We don’t charge for hosting, we never put ads on your content or share your data, and we will only put your story behind the Medium paywall if you choose to take advantage of Medium distribution beyond your followers.... We recommend stories to millions of Medium readers every day on our personalized home page, in our email digests, and in our mob…

Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization... With the new take, we’re also trying to bring more of a classic SvN style back to the site.…

In the case of vaccines, the fact that scientists and doctors are not producing a steady stream of new digital content about settled science has left a void for conspiracy theorists and fraudsters to fill ... Data voids may be relatively easy to diagnose, but they are very difficult to fix... cannot be achieved by removing problematic content... W…

The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee... final report on Disinformation and ‘fake news’.... in its evidence to the Committee Facebook has often deliberately sought to frustrate our work, by giving incomplete, disingenuous and at times misleading answers to our questions.

many of the initial conclusions ...about the scope of fake news consumption, and its effects on our politics, were exaggerated or incorrect. Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans …

Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I’ve decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten.

In all the urgent debate about regulating, investigating, and even breaking up internet companies, we have lost sight of the problem we are trying to confront: not technology but instead human behaviour on it... in their search for someone to blame, government outsource fault and responsibility, egged on by media (whose schadenfreude constitutes …

I have basically figured out for myself how to use Facebook as a workplace.

Take the Pro-Truth Pledge to encourage politicians – and everyone else – to commit to truth-oriented behaviors and protect facts and civility. ... Pledge-takers are held accountable through crowd-sourcing the truth.. volunteers who evaluate whether public figures violate the pledge by sharing misinformation.... this peer-reviewed article... Publ…

The most important nine words in behaviour design...“Put hot triggers in the path of motivated people.”... upfront deliveries of dopamine bond users to products...Instagram lets you try 12 different filters... transaction is emotional... you get to feel like an artist... “Make people feel successful... Give them superpowers!”... the triggers ar…

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…

the Oxford Circus panic ... was amplified by social media.... Fear can be transmitted digitally as easily as it can physically—and that’s a problem because digital technologies reach everyone.... the English-speaking world is in the middle of a fear pandemic... Cognitive biases leave us ill-equipped ... Amygdala hijacks and warped media business m…

The tension between literalism and contextualism is one fact-checkers face every day... Swing too far towards literalism and you’re a bone-headed bean counter. Get too contextual and you’re taking wild leaps of interpretation — something fact-checking was explicitly set up to avoid... This interpretative license can be heavily colored by personal …

political scientist Lilliana Mason ... new book, Uncivil Agreement ... we actually agree about most things... “our conflicts are over who we think we are, rather than reasoned differences of opinion... Our opinions can be very fluid... if we wanted to come to a compromise we could, if there were not these pesky identities in the way... we disagree…

societies have experienced extremism and fragmentation without the assistance of Silicon Valley for centuries... So just how responsible is the internet for today’s divisions? In this Twitter map... of the US political landscape, accounts that follow one another are clustered together, and they are color-coded by the kinds of content they commonly…

the next iteration of technology applied to politics will be a huge leap forward with a greater ability to target people... address each of the 156 million of registered voters on the US with personalized messages.... a falsehood delivered in a personalized way is likely to be more efficient but less visible than a blatant lie put on Twitter; it w…

A fairly simple, free routine that’s enabled me to market myself on LinkedIn with surprisingly good results. It worked for me, it might work for you.

Newport defines Deep Work as “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”... in an average office setting such a state of prolonged “distraction-free concentration” is all but impo…

Technology has altered the foundations of news and media, and as trust in media continues to decline, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms have come to play a critical role not only as threats to the integrity and quality of media, but also as a source of potential solutions. The core threats to information quality associated …

talk-show hosts like journalists ... know how to grab the brain’s attention and stimulate fear, sadness or anger.... We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that good stories require conflict, characters and scene. But in the present era of tribalism, it feels like we’ve reached our collective limitations... I met psychologists, med…

If Facebook is to thrive ... it’ll need to evolve. Here’s where we think it’s heading… developers and platforms ... will be unable to post content on behalf of personal Facebook profiles... can only post to business profiles and pages on both Facebook and Instagram... Facebook might be hoping that more unique content shared by users, reaching mor…

“So I and fellow Australian-in-Brussels Richard Medic decided to ask some friends to help answer a couple of questions: How can the EU support its superheroes, without destroying their credibility in the process? And under what conditions should it even try?”

The most powerful engine of elitism is the European Union... Founding Fathers of Europe deliberately removed a great deal of decision-making from the hands of the (nation-bounded and short-sighted) public... Confronted with popular revolts against the rule of experts they have simply dug in their heels... For the EU, technocratic decision-making …

The EU’s measures are still designed to target the disinformation of yesterday rather than that of tomorrow... should focus on the coming wave of disruptive technologies... four emerging threats in particular: the democratization of artificial intelligence, the evolution of social networks, the rise of decentralized applications, and the “back en…

Comey had told the nuclear industry’s spokesmen to become credible they must tell the truth... gave the same advice to the anti-nuke stalwarts ... He warned us that we didn’t need to embellish the truth. It was our strongest ally... our ally alone... he was perfectly confident that the nuclear industry would never follow his advice, would never te…

To #DeleteFacebook is to throw the baby out with the bathwater without solving the underlying problem.This is not another post on the benefits or evils of Facebook — you can figure that out for yourself…- my latest post accepted into The Mission

To counter disinformation and revalue quality journalism we need a competitive ecosystem of credibility indexes to stimulate innovation and avoid a Ministry of Truth, de facto or otherwise.- more on Medium