Overview: Social Web

If you think this election is insane, wait until 2020... technologies like AI, machine learning, sensors and networks will accelerate. Political campaigns get ... so personalized that they are scary in their accuracy and timeliness. The single most important factor influencing your voting decision is your social network… so you can bet that politi…

“Capgras delusions,” ... the belief that loved ones have been replaced by identical imposters... the brain has separate modules for analyzing the cognitive aspects of recognition, and for feeling the emotional aspects of familiarity... these functional fault lines in the social brain... have given rise to the contemporary Facebook generation... …

information bubbles didn’t burst on 8 November, but ... mainstream media and polling systems underestimated the power of alt-right news sources and smaller conservative sites that largely rely on Facebook to reach an audience... fake news is not a uniquely Republican problem... What is ... is the validation given to fake news by the now president-…

Zuckerberg... suggested the real problem is that people by nature engage with content they like and find agreeable, and dismiss things they don’t agree with online as they would in real life... it needs to implement better features to help diversify the content we see... For such an influential platform ... it’s irresponsible for Facebook to give …

Breitbart News Network is expanding its U.S. operations and launching sites in Germany and France... as it seeks to monetize the anger and anti-immigrant sentiment unleashed by Donald Trump’... Milo Yiannopoulos is ... explore launching a new television show... an opening to tap ... a wave of American populism similar to forces driving Britain …

How to make sense of Donald Trump’s election? Here are some articles which helped me. Maybe they’ll help you.

the “crowd”—the concept, more so than the reality—was born in fin-de-siècle Paris... the fascination and fear of crowds obscures their reality and reach... But here’s the rub: “le crowd” is, in part, a mythical creature... less a feature of the modern political landscape than a creature of Le Bon’s private nightscape the “mob” that took the Bast…

many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondents said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about “basic facts.”... if you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth... when confron…

THE PARALLELS BETWEEN the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming.... both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.

Two convergent trends are making populism a potent negative force. First, democracies have morphed into unrepresentative plutocracies that lead growing numbers of people to feel shut out and voiceless... Media ... business model is now based on social media and clicks, not facts. Clicks depend on theatrical performance, stunts, celebrity, ent…

Segregated social universes, an industry moving from red states to the coasts, and mass media’s revenue decline: The disconnect between two realities shows no sign of abating... American political discourse in 2016 seemed to be running on two self-contained, never-overlapping sets of information... today’s media ecosystem encourage that separatio…

Facebook makes billions of editorial decisions every day. And often they are bad editorial decisions — steering people to sensational, one-sided, or just plain inaccurate stories. The fact that these decisions are being made by algorithms rather than human editors doesn’t make Facebook any less responsible for the harmful effect on its users and t…

Our latest whitepaper keeps you updated on what you need-to-know for your Facebook publishing into Fall 2016 and the holiday season...we consolidated our most recent and most important findings into a guide for you to master your social publishing on Facebook this season. 

the next greatest advancement in casual technology and User Experience... a set of glasses known as Spectacles pair up with Snapchat via Wi-fi or Bluetooth ... and enable their users to record 10 seconds of video... in a circle with 115 degrees of view... mimic human vision, so users can record what they see and play it back as if it came from the…

Facebook seems incapable of rooting out hoaxes even after acknowledging they are clearly fake news... at least five different pages shared a story after Facebook acknowledged it was fake and were still able to reach tens of thousands of people through the social network. None of the posts carry any warning that the content is fake... BuzzFeed anal…

The debate on whether Facebook is a media company or not is not new... My take: it matters how users perceive Facebook, not how others — Facebook insiders or not — define it.

will stream Trump’s rallies directly each night and feature pre-and post-event commentary... a way for the campaign to circumvent the mainstream media ... says as much about Trump’s future in media as it does about Facebook’s.

I finally vlogged my first event. Some first impressions.

voters feel let down by the BBC’s coverage being hampered by impartiality rules... we are entering, as the Americans seem to have entered, an era of identity politics where the politicians, the campaigners, are seeking by a process of nods and winks to let you know: ‘Hey, this is where you belong. Your people are here.’”

One of the vlogs I did at the EU Week of Regions & Cities with the winners of the #EUinmyRegion blogging competition I ran for the EC. All vlogs can be found in this Moment.

This updates both my earlier Taming the Firehose and Where is social media taking you in 2016? posts, and better aligns my productivity process with my personal content strategy.

“So far, the growth around online video news seems to be largely driven by technology, platforms, and publishers rather than by strong consumer demand,”

To approach someone else convincingly you must do so with open arms and head held high, and your arms can’t be open unless your head is high... the mastery of such intelligent, kind-hearted, and considered disagreement emerges as a supreme art of living And yet there are instances in which it is unsound to engage with another whose values are so …

Referral traffic to publishers from LinkedIn ... has been on a steady uptick... In January, publishers saw traffic to their sites from LinkedIn explode, in some cases tripling...puts LinkedIn into the top-10 referrers of the web... Publishers are now in a better position to make decisions on LinkedIn editorial strategy... a very particular traffi…

a great summary of the difference between Snap’s Spectacles and Glass too — the former is a pair of sunglasses that records video, while the latter was technology strapped to your face.

NBC News has found that people are willing to click through to its site when there’s breaking news, so it’s posting less of those articles on Instant Articles while posting more feature-type content... The New York Times ... tended to be long-form think pieces or analysis, not breaking news

lets people share illustrated filter-enhanced photos and videos that disappear in 24 hours, just like on Snapchat.

Facebook wants to have the responsibility of a publisher but also to be seen as a neutral carrier of information that is not in the position of making news judgments... when Facebook was still censoring the napalm photo ... the site’s trending bar began posting ... a story suggesting September 11 were caused by a “controlled demolition”.

over 30 news organizations ... and tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to share best practices on how to verify true news stories and stop the spread of fake ones.