Overview: Social Web

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 ...

when I saw the potential of the Internet, I thought it would be solved. The web would allow us to come together, not just across the world, but across the park, across racial lines, across our many divides... everything turned upside down. The open communication network we thought we were building turned into a hunting ground for trolls and spamme…

BBC’s Reality Check team will focus on content that is clearly fabricated and attempting to mislead the public into thinking it has been produced by a reputable news organisation... part of the BBC’s attempt to do more “slow news”, using in-depth analysis and expertise in a bid to help the public understand an especially tumultuous period in the …

Storyful released Verify, a free add-on for Google’s Chrome browser that automatically tells users whether its 40 journalists around the globe have vetted the videos they’re watching... browser icon lights up green if the video is in Storyful’s vetted archive, or red if it isn’t... index is fed largely by automated bots ... Verify incorporates its…

European countries... still behind the U.S. in terms of sheer volume of fake-news ... But posts designed to be entirely false and deliberately trick people is growing. In the U.K.... “It’s rare that a complete falsehood goes viral ... stories written by hyper-partisan sites, that have a kernel of truth and then are expanded into lies lathered with…

the liberal critiques I read weren’t so much attacking my decision as they were questioning my intelligence and my ability to understand the issue... I was on the outside of the so-called liberal bubble... what I saw was not pretty... contempt and arrogance, and an offensive air of intellectual superiority... incapable of talking with those who …

Back in 2004, I was one of about thirty people to become the first bloggers ever to get a press pass to a major party’s convention... we were the story. We were followed around by mainstream media, and at any given moment, at least a few of us were giving interviews on radio or TV... it was a great honor to be in the room for Obama’s breakthrough …

German Interior Ministry proposed creating a Center of Defense Against Misinformation, to help hunt down and eradicate fake news or other false information... Czech Republic... plans to open a fake news center .... strategy to force Facebook to delete suspicious or fake news could backfire... 'the story Facebook didn't want you to read' could beco…

Find influencers, and partner with them to create Youtility content that helps people make better decisions about their home, auto, boat, motorcycle, etc. But at the operational level, this kind of program creates a number of questions, starting with, “What influencers do we want to work with, and why?”

Freedom of speech, and of the press... also brings responsibility. The Editors’ Code of Practice... requires the “highest professional standards”... IPSO’s overall message is that ocean acidification is just a matter of opinion – not a hard-won, testable understanding ... Why support any research if 250 peer-reviewed papers ... can all be summaril…

thousands of activists have started to push companies to take a stand on ... “hate news” ... Sleeping Giants ... and their followers have communicated with more than 1,000 companies and nonprofit groups whose ads appeared on Breitbart, and about 400 of those organizations have promised to remove the site from future ad buys... In the old normal,…

Anxious about... propaganda and fake news ... progressives are calling for an increased commitment to media literacy ... Others ... focus on expert fact-checking and labeling.  ... fail to take into consideration the cultural context ... Understanding what sources to trust is a basic tenet of media literacy education... underlying assumption ... N…

German media and politicians have warned against an election-year spike in fake news after the rightwing website Breitbart claimed a mob chanting “Allahu Akbar” had set fire to a church in the city of Dortmund on New Year’s Eve... local newspaper said Breitbart had combined and exaggerated unconnected incidents to create a picture of chaos and of…

the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet... doesn’t serve people... it’s not designed to... “content” we all consume on a daily basis is paid for — directly or indirectly — by corporations who are funding it in order to advance their goals. And it is measured, amplified, and rewarded based on its ability to do that. Period. As a result…

Where things get interesting is to consider the deep cognitive mechanisms that shape the emergence of truth networks where a coherent shared set of understandings, assumptions, and beliefs are in play.