Overview: Media

“fake news”... is grossly inadequate to explain the nature and scale of the problem... is being used by politicians... against the fourth estate and an excuse to censor free speech... There are four distinct motivations ... political, financial, psychological (for personal satisfaction) and social (to reinforce our belonging to communities or “tr…

There are 17 people on the task force, including diplomats, journalists and computer experts, and it has a mandate to combat misinformation coming out of Russia. One of its tools is a website called EUvsDisinfo.eu, which hosts a database with a selection of the most common lies disseminated by Russian outlets

small experiments aimed at customizing that story selection to the individual reader, based on a variety of signals... where readers are located... the last time a reader visits the site. If,... publishes a particularly enterprising story on a Monday, but a reader doesn’t visit ... after that story has left the homepage ... personalize the user’s…

News Quality Scoring Project ... humans and algorithm to separate “commodity news” from “value-added news” ... based on quantifiable and qualitative signals — like word count, freshness versus evergreen material, quote density, contextualization, and the presence of a byline... human/machine, subjective/objective hybrid as the still-under-constru…

I have an obvious incentive to get claps: pretty decent money. ... I can write more polarized headlines... on polarizing topics. I can piggy back on the hot news of the day... write things I don’t actually believe using incendiary language ... Medium has safeguards ... a team of curators ... a policy against abuse that it actually enforces... a t…

Although curation can save very significant time to those who benefit from it, it positively does not save any time at all to the curators who exercise it. It does to those who benefit from it... it requires the author to find, vet/verify, organize high quality information from multiple sources, and to add value and perspective ... What follows is…

This is a heavily updated repost of my latest Top3ics newsletter. It’s not a copy/paste repost, because Before you Repost it, ReThink It.

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

I was particularly ashamed of the way that the AAA ratings, which were in some sense a mathematical promise of safety, had been actually just lies, mathematical lies... like a weaponized mathematics ... actually people don’t want to know what their actual risk ... mathematics ... was being used ... so that people could go on doing essentially corr…

In the realm of knowledge, monopoly and conformism are inseparable perils. The danger is that these firms will inadvertently use their dominance to squash diversity of opinion and taste. Concentration is followed by homogenization... news media ... have rushed to produce articles that will flourish on those platforms... a duplication of the news…

While consumers are increasingly prepared to pay for online services, news is seen as less valuable than entertainment apps like Netflix and Spotify, according to a new report... consumers may be more interested in paying for experiences that aggregate multiple news brands and perspectives than for any single brand... the widespread availability …

Habitual googling leads us to mistakenly believe we know more than we actually do ... even when we no longer have access to the internet. The more you use Google, it seems, the smarter you feel without it...

a major new Yale University study finds that fact-checking and then tagging inaccurate news stories on social media doesn’t work... “disputed” tags made participants just 3.7 percentage points more likely to correctly judge headlines as false... Trump supporters and adults under 26... could actually end up increasing the likelihood that users wil…

A few people have asked me recently whether my Medium membership is worth it... We’re trying to fight the dark forces of advertising that are destroying our minds and democracy.

the future that Medium founder and CEO Ev Williams sees ... doesn’t include advertising, not even the native advertising that was a key piece of Medium’s plan ... a Spotify-ish model that pools subscribers’ $5 monthly contributions and doles them out to a select group of creators based on how many “claps” the creators get... once they’re in the …

A Mathematical Journey Into How Medium Payment [Probably] Works for Premium Authors

It’s time to #pay4content, which is why I’m wearing The Oatmeal’s t-shirt and brandishing the YANSS book on Bondi beach. Next time you read and use something from an independent content creator (like I did for my #backfire post), find a way of supporting them.

Since launching Medium membership, our primary focus has been on funding the creation of exclusive content ... to empower writers and publishers to produce original content directly for our paying members and earn money based on depth of reader engagement... we’re partnering with many publishers we love to bring you... curated selections from The…

how do we put the genie back in its bottle? Here are three approaches... If the first model leaves it to the legislator and ultimately the courts to decide what constitutes fake news, the second outsources responsibility to social media.... Instead of killing the story, you surround that story with related articles so as to provide more context a…

Whether you read, curate or create, you need to manage the content that matters to you if you want to extract maximum benefit from it.

6th Scenario – More EuropeanismDemocracy needs an identity foundation that binds individuals into the demos... Europe does not have that. The proof?... There are no successful pro-European populists!The local and particular cannot be based on the general and universal.... There has to be something more ...

After violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12, media coverage differed on what aspect of the event to cover... we looked at what partisan Twitter users shared ... found a clear split ... Despite the split narratives ... the voting base has been less conflicted.

Financial incentive is key to Silverman’s understanding of fake news, which he defines as online misinformation that is completely false, created to deceive and economically motivated. If online misinformation is being created for ideological reasons it’s propaganda... delegitimising legitimate journalism... through delegitimising organisations t…

platforms like Facebook have ... amassed unprecedented gatekeeping powers ... Can new decentralized systems with no single point of control... be a remedy? A new report ... concludes that “protecting the future of speech online involves not only these ambitious experiments in decentralization, but the cultivation of an ecosystem of competing publi…

Clinicians should aim to understand parents’ values and engage in genuine, respectful conversations; these processes can help vaccine-hesitant parents feel heard and understood... Recognizing cognitive biases ... can also help ... omission bias may lead parents to blame themselves more if a child develops a vaccine-related side effect ... than ...…

The next stage of the web is the Curated Web... create massive opportunities for entrepreneurs who see the trend... characterized by a fundamentally different value to users than the social web... Web 1.0 was characterized by content published from one-to-many and social media was about easily creating and sharing content, from many-to-many, the c…

Rupert Murdoch invested $70 million into VICE in August 2013... a portfolio company of the media genius that created the entire right wing tabloid machine’s is convincing a whole other demographic that the world is coming to an end. Anger and fear sell... exaggerated characters that create an extreme view of reality. It’s an appeal to your most b…

we investigate the cognitive psychological profile of individuals who fall prey to fake news. We find a consistent positive correlation between the propensity to think analytically – as measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) – and the ability to differentiate fake news from real news ... suggests that factors that undermine the legitimac…

we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. We presented participants with bullshit statements consisting of buzzwords randomly organized into statements with syntactic structure but no discernible meaning

the knowledge illusion is a common form of human fallibility, but Trump takes it to an exceptional degree... When asked to explain something, he changes the subject, his confidence in his knowledge unwavering... reflectivity... whether people are likely to be highly deluded about their own knowledge... Low scores on the reflectivity test correlat…