Overview: Social Web

Xi Jinping is using artificial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control... exporting ... to regimes around the globe... all-seeing digital system of social control... precog algorithms that identify potential dissenters in real time ... every person ... identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data..…

Facebook ... fact-checking partners “do review and rate climate misinformation... But opinion articles about climate change don’t receive fact-checking ... Climate change misinformation isn’t a priority

Social media companies are struggling with an onslaught of deceptive and divisive messaging from political parties, foreign governments and hate groups... echo the Russian ... efforts ... U.S. 2016 presidential election... far more insidious and sophisticated ... And ... amplified by mainstream news outlets and major U.S. political figures ...Nat…

Privacy Zuckering... when “you are tricked into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really intended to... Facebook... paid a $5 billion fine for making “deceptive claims about consumers’ ability to control the privacy of their personal data.” ... “dark patterns,” ... particularly insidious “when you’re deciding what privac…

At least 800 people may have died around the world because of coronavirus-related misinformation in the first three months of this year... about 5,800 people were admitted to hospital as a result of false information on social media... further threat that anti-vaccine campaigners will use the platform provided by social media to persuade people …

to divert someone away from prejudice and toward greater acceptance of others ... “Deep canvassing,”... “giving them grace.”... to hear someone say something that can be hurtful, ... think about how to ... connect with them...have patience with them, ask them to reflect on their life, and listen... many communities have a call-out culture... conde…

counties that had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 exhibited 14% less physical distancing... higher Covid-19 infection and fatality growth rates ...the hormone oxytocin... promotes bonding... plays a role in trust... When participants trusted and felt trusted, oxytocin levels ... jumped... Trust just feels good... But risky if we give it to the w…

As the internet lit up ... Accounts identified as belonging to Latino social media users voiced outrage about politically correct “mob” bullying ... activists immediately grew suspicious... thousands of posts were coming from ... bots... activists cooked up a counteroffensive... exposed “recipes” for disinformation and distorting facts... educatio…

Books on note-taking... always too vague and boring, full of platitudes ... never an overarching system for turning notes into concrete results ... [but]How To Take Smart Notes ... is by far the most impactful and profound book I’ve ever read on the subject... most books are a few morsels of real insight wrapped in... fluff... I systematically unr…

foreign pro-Trump troll farm was based in Romania... Facebook... didn’t see “clear evidence of financial motivation” or “clear links to known commercial actors...separate troll operation, tied to pro-Trump media organization Epoch Media Group, featured 303 Facebook accounts, 181 pages, 44 Facebook groups and 31 Instagram accounts... followed by mo…

Facebook employees collected evidence company giving right-wing pages preferential treatment when it comes to misinformation... worried how the company will handle the president’s falsehoods in an election year... Facebook is going to be used to aggressively undermine the legitimacy of the US elections... senior engineer collected internal evidenc…

This is a piece for people who have been part of the Q Anon movement... beginning to get tired ... starting to get skeptical... Q mostly stopped making specific predictions after a series of embarrassing failures... demanding that we all Trust the Plan and stop asking why Q is always wrong... There’s a reason you got scammed... why did you keep be…

The president’s reelection campaign ... multimillion-dollar ad blitz ... shaping Americans’ understanding of ... impeachment ... micro-targeted ads ... portraying Trump as a heroic reformer ... while Democrats plotted a coup... An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape ... I wanted to see it from the inside...I was surprised by the effec…

GPT-3... AI that can produce shockingly human-sounding (if at times surreal) sentences... imagine a future in which the vast majority of the written content ... is produced by machines... adjust, and adapt, to a new level of unreality ...video may turn out to be the easiest to detect ... Politicians will now be able to dismiss real, scandalous vid…

“This hearing has made one fact clear to me. These companies as they exist today have monopoly power. Some need to be broken up. All need to be properly regulated ... their control of the marketplace allows them to do whatever it takes to crush independent business and expand their own power. This must end.”

Covid-19 case numbers are now spiking in many counties across West Texas ... [but] resolve of ... skeptics appears to be stiffening... the denial of facts is often rooted in identity and belonging, not in ignorance ...people who deny science ... trying to uphold membership in ... a political or religious affiliation or some other group ... a commu…

Amazon is accused of abusing its role as both a retailer and a platform hosting third-party sellers ... Apple ... unfairly using ... App Store to block rivals and to force apps to pay high commissions.... Facebook has a monopoly in social networking... Google... multiple antitrust allegations ... dominance in online advertising, search and smartph…

Should you blog on dedicated blogging platforms like Medium, or on your Hub? It's not an either/or.

my last column in this space is not about “cancel culture.” Well, almost... The quality of my work does not appear to be the problem... A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me ... orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in …

marginalization of those with radical critiques... poisoning both the right and the left ...resentment and victimhood spread across the American right — an intellectual inferiority complex combined with a moral superiority complex ... Thinking was no longer for understanding. Thinking was for belonging ... Sarah Palin and Donald Trump reintroduc…

For the 6th episode of his Futurized podcast, Trond Undheim asked me why surveillance capitalism inevitably leads to polarised, undemocratic and dysfunctional societies, and what we must do about it...If we don’t change course, in the future we will be less will informed, more polarised, massively manipulated, living in more corrupt and less democ…

a new Al Jazeera investigation that identified 120 Facebook pages — with a total of over 800,000 likes ... Facebook frequently talks up its algorithm and moderators for catching a lot of hateful content — but ... some of these pages have been online for a decade.

LEVERAGING CLOSE TIES to Twitter... Dataminr helped law enforcement digitally monitor the [BLM] protests ... with the latest whereabouts and actions of demonstrators... essentially surveillance by U.S. law enforcement entities, contradicting its earlier assurances... siphoning vast amounts of social media data ... converting it into tidy police …

8 in 10 Americans do not trust social media companies to make the right call on what content to leave up or take down. Yet a majority still favor letting companies make the call rather than letting government decide... Section 230 ... protects digital platforms from legal liability for third party content... [except] illegal content... child porno…

echo chambers and epistemic bubbles... systematically exclude sources of information... exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs... work in entirely different ways... epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side...‘epistemic bubble’ …

I needed to review everything I had ever Hubbed relevant to surveillance capitalism, polarisation, social media and society... As I cast around for something interesting to say, I realised a MyHub.ai Service Page could help organise and clarify my thoughts: I would use it to create a Zettelkasten Permanent Note...While not a blog post, it is defin…

That fake news shifted copies had been known since the earliest days of printing... So what if they weren’t true? Printers argued, as internet giants do today, that they were merely providing a means of distribution ... But newspapers were different... had reputations to maintain... As the 19th century progressed, impartiality and objectivity were…

We are asking all businesses ... not advertise on Facebook's services in July.What would you do with $70 billion? We know what Facebook did. They  allowed  incitement  to  violence  against  protesters  fighting  for racial justice... named Breitbart News a “trusted news source” ... turned  a  blind  eye  to  blatant  voter  suppression ...…

online “fake news” game, Bad News, can confer psychological resistance against common online misinformation strategies across different cultures... “prebunking,” ... can help cultivate “mental antibodies” against fake news... players “walk a mile” in the shoes of a fake news creator... significant and meaningful reductions in the perceived reliab…

Many of our political forebears pined for more polarization... fretted about the incoherence of their identities ... There were liberal Republicans ... opponents of civil rights and big government in the Democratic Party... 1976 ... Richard Nixon... proposed a universal health care ... created the Environmental Protection Agency... tighter i…