Overview: Social Web

scientists and their supporters need to paint a positive vision of the future, where science re-affirms its moral authority, articulates how it will help us, and advances a noble cause

We know little about the amount of fake news an average citizen consumes, or how it fits into their overall news diet... What we found calls into question the severity of the fake news crisis.... We gathered data for both the real and fake news sites from comScore... First, the fake news audience is tiny compared to the real news audience–about 1…

Several contributors suggested that different media organizations could come together both on a reporting level and on a broader level. There’s the idea for a “‘pooled’ White House new dashboard,” “a new kind of aggregation site for specific topics.”

3rd of my posts for Chatbots Magazine: Chatbots allow governments and other public bodies to provide citizens highly customised content and services. And invade their privacy. Citizens deserve better choices. 

Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals... “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”,,,an assumption that news... will con…

If there’s a single Top3ic running through the following stories, it’s probably Artificial Intelligence (AI), but I’m deeply into learning about psychology for the moment, so that’s my starting point.

our current misinformation problem is only the tip of a massive iceberg — and this looming disaster starts with AI...when we see a picture that seems very unlikely, we naturally assume that it is photoshopped... with AI, we are heading toward a world where this will be the case with every form of media: text, voice, video, etc.

when bot platforms take off, we will be... completing the new shift in data control from the users’ hands to Facebook’s, Google, and Microsoft’s hands... the next big privacy concern... end-to-end encryption between the user and the bot developer... goes against their [platform's] business models

artificial neural network... takes in a given type of data... and finds patterns in them... Nobody knows quite how they work. And that means no one can predict when they might fail... If there hadn’t been an interpretable model, Malioutov cautions, “you could accidentally kill people.”.. European Union recently proposed to establish a “right to ex…

model to assess human beings based on five personality traits, known as the "Big Five." also known as OCEAN... openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism... their needs and fears, and how they are likely to behave. ... the problem with this approach was data collection... Then came the Internet. And Facebook... on the b…

my thinking was that one of the best ways to get young men to go see a movie was to tell them they should not be allowed to see it... ultimately sold millions of dollars worth of tickets, dvds and books... the exact playbook that right wing blogger Milo Yiannopoulos is running on his own cross-country trolling tour... Numerous leaders of the alt-r…

pro-active warnings designed to contextualize and pre-expose web users to related but fake information in order to debunk factual distortion in advance... the more detailed warning was about twice as effective as the general warning at shifting opinion towards acceptance of climate science consensus despite exposure to fake news. Warnings were pre…

You’re going to use the twit library to build a Twitter bot. It will like and re-tweet whatever you specify. It will also reply to your followers with a selection of canned responses.

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.

the most recommended stories on Medium have either to do with startups, life or productivity. Sometimes, all three topics are squeezed in a single story — How to be super productive in your startup and change your life… If we can undo the follower bias, I think everybody becomes a writer and nobody really becomes a celebrity.

everyone is intransigent now ... Social media acts as a massive collective Sorting Hat, silently assigning most of us to filter bubbles wherein our beliefs and biases are rarely challenged. News (or “news”) sources rise up to cater... slowly, these isolated groups do what isolated groups do... become more extreme. Increasing extremity in one group…

Many scientists are asking themselves: What can I do?... the answer from ... 314 Action is: Get elected... most scientists view their work as pure and noble, and politics as a dirty game... since Trump’s victory, “many more scientists are realizing why their voices are needed... Scientists bring a unique perspective in how they ... think about …

incipient technologies appear likely to soon obliterate the line between real and fake... you or I will be able to create fake digital clips as easily as regular people created fake-news stories

To some liberals, Donald Trump’s inauguration portends doom... to many conservatives, it’s a crowning moment ... as if each side is living in ... a different reality.... information avoidance... all of us ... ward off any new information that makes us feel bad, obligates us to do something we don’t want to do or challenges our worldview... we’re …

The festering European economic crisis was joined by two additional crises in 2015 – the refugee crisis and the security crisis that public terrorist attacks generated. All of this was played out in mass media and provided the final push for nationalist parties across Europe ... In contrast to Trump, European populists are committed conservative…

a way for publishers to combine multiple Instant Articles into one post.

When you can’t understand why people behave in a certain way, the easiest thing to do is to convince yourself that people do not know what they are doing. This is what European political, business and news media leaders have done... difficult to understand the rage against the meritocratic elites best symbolized by the well-trained, competent civ…

structure of the underlying social network can dramatically skew an individual's local observations, making a behavior appear far more common locally than it is globally... "the majority illusion," ... As a result a behavior that is globally rare may be systematically overrepresented in the local neighborhoods ... facilitate the spread of social c…

today’s news outlets are all in a no-win situation where they are forced to contribute to the causes of their own demise to survive... well-meaning people try to “fix” the news. But instead, those methods erode trust in all news outlets... You can draw a straight line from the bad incentive structure forced upon news outlets to the unprecedented d…

level of trust in business, media, government, and NGOs. This year was the first time the study found a decline in trust across all four of these institutions... lack of confidence in leadership: 71% ... said government officials are not at all or somewhat credible, and 63% said the same about CEOs... 60% of respondents trusted “a person like your…

Publishers are using Facebook’s latest Instant Articles update, which lets publishers post multiple articles within one post, to publish regular editions of must-read content straight to the platform.... akin to receiving a daily email with the day’s top stories, but readers won’t have to leave Facebook to get it... option to subscribe to get aler…

20.1 million Facebook engagements on the 10,818 articles... a huge 68% jump in engagements from November 2015... the Post produced more articles... what’s really changed is the average Facebook engagement rate ... from 1,092 Facebook engagements per post in 2015 to 1,293 ... Fostering organic engagement on Facebook. Writing descriptive headlines …

... fears about how changing technology is affecting the quality of information and the state of our democracy. ... heated debate about the role and size of tech platforms and the extent to which their activities should be regulated. Artificial Intelligence (AI) takes over from mobile as the hottest topic in technology...Expect widespread innovati…

the deeper I went into my own work, the more I realized how my always-on, always-connected state had rendered me largely useless... The medium was no longer the message, it was just an asshole. I want my attention back...I could live on Twitter all day, everyday, convincing myself I was being productive. Or, at least inducing the chemicals in the …

An average post in the private subscribers group ... attracts about twice the number of comments ...