Overview: Social Web

federal investigators are looking at whether the Trump campaign helped Russia disseminate “fake news.”... just as the Trump administration appears poised to ramp up its own campaign against the news media... a new phase of escalation in Trump’s “fake news” wars, in which he will counter reports ... by calling those reports “fake news.”... Trump …

our analysis shows that social media use is clearly associated with incidental exposure to additional sources of news ... with more politically diverse news diets... The algorithms, of course, continually change... More sources does not necessarily mean more diverse... the majority in most countries and in most groups do not use sources from a…

to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth ... to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump... isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care... he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him …

The problem with connecting everyone on the planet is that a lot of people are assholes. The issue with giving just anyone the ability to live broadcast to a billion people is that someone will use it to shoot up a school. You have to plan for these things. You have to build for the reality we live in, not the one we hope to create....digital laye…

researchers found that the more people use Facebook, the less healthy they are and the less satisfied with their lives... monitored the mental health and social lives of 5,208 adults over two years... Using Facebook was tightly linked to compromised social, physical and psychological health... each statistical jump ... in “liking” other people’s p…

The more you engage with a particular kind of post, the more you will see its ilk... eventually constructs a small “in-group” cluster of Facebook friends and topics that dominate your feed... causes your behavior to change... reinforcing their in-group status… ... because “engagement” is the metric, Facebook inevitably selects for the shocking an…

Fighting people with facts only makes them cling to their beliefs more strongly, further polarising our damaged societies. Different tactics are needed, and they start closer to home than you think.

a “Topics to Follow” box in the News Feed that lets you swipe through a range of themes... Tapping “Follow” brings you to a dedicated feed for that theme populated by a collection of Pages ... tap through to see all the Pages you’ll then see public posts from in your main feed... Facebook could expose people to contrarian views that might make the…

instead of highlighting a single news outlet when you click through to a Trending topic, Facebook will now show a carousel of the other most popular articles written about the subject by different publishers... that could backfire by showing you more biased sources than you’d normally read. Not every fact needs an “alternative” take.

the best gift the publishing industry could hope for... digital advertising technology that will be most frozen by limitations - and that is good news for content makers... collection and processing of the kind of data essential to ad targeting must now be explicitly consented to by readers. Furthermore, consumers will have the right to erase data…

Alan Sokal attempted to prove that the influence of postmodern ways of thinking in the humanities had reached the point where academic nonsense was indistinguishable from academic sense. As a physicist, Sokal found writing about science to be particularly offensive... Sokal was conducting an experiment to see if “a leading North American journal o…

Pariser’s work has led him to believe that blaming fake news for fractured discourse is a red herring... The filter bubble explains a lot about how liberals didn’t see Trump coming, but not very much about how he won the election... my guess is that talk-radio, local news, and Fox are a much more important piece of that story than random conservat…

In the United States... the chances that two people visiting the same news site have different political views is about 45 percent... the internet is far closer to perfect desegregation than perfect segregation... you are more likely to come across someone with opposing views online than you are offline... a surprising amount of the information …

confidential document prepared by Facebook that revealed the company had offered advertisers the opportunity to target 6.4 million younger users, some only 14 years old, during moments of psychological vulnerability... the big fear isn’t just what Facebook knows about its users but whether that knowledge can be weaponized in ways those users canno…

A little bit of something bad helps you resist a full-blown case... Inoculating text requires two elements. First, it includes an explicit warning about the danger of being misled by misinformation. Second, you need to provide counterarguments explaining the flaws in that misinformation... explaining the misinformation technique completely neutra…

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...

someone that saw a Facebook native video had a higher likelihood of clicking on a link post in the near future ... we look at top performing articles and then see if we can turn them into short form videos for Facebook... we strive to be original storytellers... We understand what the mission is. It’s not just to get views... it’s always to be tel…

Social media is making us miserable... “Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides.”

"Internet subcultures take advantage of the current media ecosystem to manipulate news frames, set agendas, and propagate ideas..." plus a lot more: it's a 100+page report

Cambridge Analytica (part of SCL Group Ltd.) constructed a significant data set based on US voter rolls... Some respected observers argue the firm’s psychographic profiling methodologies may not be nearly as potent as its sales pitch suggests... the firm’s psychographic practices remain as unreviewable as the campaign’s voter advertising. Journal…

The new right’s echo chamber is hermetically sealed, while the left’s is not.... Private platforms like Facebook are under no obligation to provide us a diverse worldview. If it is more profitable to ... isolate us in a bubble of ideologically comfortable information, they will.... build an aggregator where the algorithms can be reviewed by schola…

combat fake news by combining professional journalism with volunteer fact checking... professional journalists will be paid to write “global news stories,” while volunteer contributors will “vet the facts, helps make sure the language is factual and neutral... transparent about the source of news, posting full transcripts, video, and audio of in…

the number of content moderators scrubbing the world’s social media sites, mobile apps, and cloud storage services runs to “well over 100,000”—that is, about twice the total head count of Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook.

Facebook ... can never be, a platform where people have the power to build anything... the company’s main focus ... analyzing your data and showing you ads in exchange for advertiser’s money. A future where Facebook is the global social infrastructure, is a future with no refuge from advertising and number crunching... the future of social media …

an extensive list of projects, initiatives and tools created to fix trust in journalism and false/fake news and misinformation

Facebook will start adding “related” articles from different publications underneath a news post about a trending topic in your News Feed.

Storytelling and EU projects - some guidelines I wrote for the 2017 “EU in my Region” blogging competition, which I’m managing for the EC’s DG REGIO.

in hot pursuit of the perpetrator, we discover a trail of evidence leading to our own doors... the issue of fake news ... an opportunity for public reflection, political economic imagination, and more thoughtful... interventions around the organization of the platforms and infrastructures which pattern our lives in the digital age... a shift from…

Google News determines whether an article might contain fact checks in part by looking for the schema.org ClaimReview markup. We also look for sites that follow the commonly accepted criteria for fact checks.... use that markup in fact-check articles.

Each side of the climate debate accuses the other of exaggeration and suffers from its own... sometimes feel like a shouting match in a roomful of children wearing earplugs... We have allowed our political, national, economic, and cultural narratives free play ... where... are the narratives from science itself? Where is the science teacher?... p…