Overview: Social Web

algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth... one of the “largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence”... Lewd and violent videos have been algorithmically served up to toddlers ... “We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took to please the algorithm.”... how did that happen? And wha…

Americans believe that the media have an important role to play in our democracy — yet they don’t see that role being fulfilled... Here are 10 findings that stood out to us:

it just felt like the conversations that we were having subsequently were actually pretty shallow and actually pretty useless, because we were talking over each other because everybody meant different things... we can only really start talking about interventions if we understand what we’re talking about... I say, “Please don’t use the term.” “Yea…

Google is suspending a search feature that displayed fact checks associated to publishers after receiving criticism from conservative news outlets.... Reviewed Claims column that matched outlets’ disputed claims with fact checks contributed by independent fact-checking organizations to the Schema.org ClaimReview markup... The Daily Caller publishe…

We made a fake news detector with above a 95% accuracy (on a validation set) that uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing that you can download here. In the real world, the accuracy might be lower... we decided to just try and scrape domains that were known fake, real, satire, etc. and see if we could build a data set quickly... Th…

attempts to put a lid on the practice with tweaks to the platform are doomed to failure while the basic business model of a social network is advertising-driven, algorithmically-run and attention-focused.... the entire industry is built to leverage sophisticated technology to aggregate user attention and sell advertising... an alignment of interes…

Facebook will rely on users to rate how trustworthy groups, organizations and media outlets are... Leaving trustworthiness ratings to users without addressing online political polarization risks making civic discourse even more divided and extreme... Facebook needs to take responsibility for the content it publishes and republishes. It can combine…

it will rank news organizations by credibility based on user feedback... trust rankings will emerge from surveys ... Google announced it would cancel a two-month-old experiment, called Knowledge Panel, that informed its users that a news article had been disputed by independent fact-checking organizations... Facebook learned the wrong lesson fro…

Fake News is suddenly on the boil in the Brussels Bubble. Here are some ideas I brainstormed earlier this week. Comments welcome.

Wales wants to bring the power of the Wiki community and the wisdom of crowds to bear on the media business by creating a hybrid model... local community members can help direct the work of WikiTribune journalists when such events occur, suggesting avenues to explore and co-creating a more permanent news resource that will serve a longer-term comm…

algorithmic systems don’t simply cost money to implement. They cost money to maintain. They cost money to audit. They cost money to evolve ... divert taxpayer money from direct services, to lining the pockets of for-profit entities under the illusion of helping people....a diversion of liability ... those in powerful positions blame the algorithms…

discovering a filtering algorithm's existence in a curated feed influences user experience, but it remains unclear how users reason about the operation of these algorithms.... Interviews revealed 10 "folk theories' of automated curation... Users who were given a probe into the algorithm's operation via an interface ... visible …

it is more important than ever to define what “fake news” actually is, and what it is not... BBC Media Editor Amol Rajan has identified three sorts ... Huffington Post blogger ... five sorts... First Draft and ... Shorenstein Center... seven sorts... @DFRLab... fake news is “deliberately presenting false information as news.”... disinformation...…

Over the coming years, we’ll see the BBC develop and roll-out more and more machine learning algorithms for storing, retrieving, tagging and possibly even creating content.... What if we lock our audiences in to what they just want to hear, never challenging them? ... Should the algorithms we use be open to public scrutiny?... inform our own thin…

In 2018, we will prioritize News from publications that the community rates as trustworthy... that people find informative... relevant to people’s local community... We surveyed ... people using Facebook across the US to gauge their familiarity with, and trust in, various different sources ...

“If your job consists of Tweeting for someone else, you owe it to yourself to think of something else in 2018. Particularly if you’re under 35."It’s early January, and so time to add to the slew of “What you should do in 2018” posts sloshing around the Net.

The European Commission is discussing with platforms, news media, research and civil society organisations in order to design solutions to address the spread of fake news. The aim is to define the actors' responsibilities, while respecting the freedom of expression, media pluralism, and the right of citizens to diverse and reliable information.

Reuters designed a social monitoring tool, the Reuters News Tracer, which can identify events that are breaking on Twitter, analyzing millions of tweets with almost 80 percent accuracy.

The answer is different from person to person, and influenced by any number of muddy variables.... real News Feed samples from, 402 people ... half [news-related posts] were shared by someone other than the original publisher... Most of the obviously partisan stuff appeared not in news posts, but in the statuses of friends and family... journalis…

a report published with the Council of Europe... offers better categorizations for the tangle of bad information ... more specific than “fake news” ... [for] The U.S. midterms ... build out a hub ... monitoring disinformation, connecting with newsrooms around the country... we can start scaling it globally in 2019... The benefit of having centrali…

When it comes to how Europeans identify themselves, there are actually six different “political tribes,”... the current polarized debate of “pro-EU” versus “anti-EU” fails to capture the complexity ... 36 percent were the “hesitant Europeans”... proud to belong to the EU but also concerned about issues like immigration.... “contented Europeans.…

The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works....exploit[s] a vulnerability in human psychology” by creating a “social-validation feedback loop”... you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed

Even in a world where people increasingly get news from social media, the professional news media is still seen as largely to blame for low trust... Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism examines the underlying reasons for trust and distrust ...Bias, spin and hidden agendas come across as the main reasons...perceived decline in journalisti…

The second meeting Madeleina Kay had was with Luca Jahier. It went longer, and the wifi cut out midway this time - see the 2nd part of this lovely chat.

Could hybrid crowdfunding allow public Institutions to support citizen-driven projects without killing them in the cradle?- 2nd post in reaction to Luc van den Brande’s Reaching out to EU Citizens: A New Opportunity

Every day the web is becoming more personal... ... brands ... need to understand more than theoretical profiles or carefully honed audience segments.... master the fundamentals of identity...  In this report you’ll learn:  - What it takes to create a persistent individualized identity that crosses platforms and screens  - How brands and agencie…

to protect U.S. power ... more of the same: more surveillance, more propaganda (“strategic manipulation of perceptions”) and more military expansionism.... The “hyper-connectivity and weaponization of information, disinformation, and dis­affection”... the uncontrolled spread of information... the “inevitable elimination of secrecy and operational …

Mom did a very brave thing, considering where and when she lived... She watched a TV documentary about transgender identity... She let it change her thinking. .. turned to me during a commercial break and said, “I think maybe sometimes God makes mistakes.”... never spoke an unkind word about gay, lesbian, or transgender people after that day. For …

“We wanted democracy... but got mobocracy.”... Bots generated one out of every five political messages posted on Twitter in America’s presidential campaign last year... “we need to reform our attention economy.”... groups which had mostly been excluded from the mainstream media... developed the dark arts they would use to further their agendas..…

“fake news”... is grossly inadequate to explain the nature and scale of the problem... is being used by politicians... against the fourth estate and an excuse to censor free speech... There are four distinct motivations ... political, financial, psychological (for personal satisfaction) and social (to reinforce our belonging to communities or “tr…