Overview: Media

"it's a start... Musk argued that disclosing what amplifies or downranks tweets would reduce the risk of “behind the scenes manipulation.” [but] algorithms alone offer limited insights" because it's not just an algorithm that defines what you see: it's a huge dataset - "content that enters the platform, each user’s profile, the algorithms’ traini…

NYT's Kevin Roose writes "a column about NFTs that is, itself, being turned into an NFT and put up for auction". Good definition of an NFT: "digital collectible item stamped with a unique bit of code that serves as a permanent record of its authenticity and is stored on a blockchain... can be bought and sold ... can’t be deleted or counterfeited. …

Good intro to what Apple and Google are doing in the privacy space to fend off regulation. TL:DR; "Get ready for more random ads online, higher prices and subscriptions galore. But your privacy concerns may still not fade."Apple kicked this off in 2017 with a new Safari preventing the technology used by marketing companies to follow people from si…

I suspect this will be a canonical text for me moving forward with myhub.ai.Mike Caulfield in 2015, when my first hub was only about 2 years old, had also "been experimenting with another form of social media called federated wiki... instead of blogging and tweeting your experience you wiki’d it. And over time the wiki became a representation of t…

Another example of topic-based aggregation being better at avoiding the toxic effects of a socially-based newsfeed (cf Reddit).Flipboard's new feature lets them quickly specify the subjects they care most about from among its 30,000-plus topics... "Flipboard uses AI to classify the articles and videos it’s aggregating and weave them into its main …

A simple cartoon can spark a lot of thinking: what happens after "the “Cookiepocalypse” — when Google Chrome follows up on its promise to cut support for the third-party cookie by 2022"?My preferred answer is: better content marketing? Actually providing value to people, rather than surveilling and stalking them around the web?Others parts of this…

Real Facebook Oversight Board's 8-page "Q2 Facebook Harms Report ... deep-dive into Facebook’s impact on democracy, privacy, and human life this financial quarter" sets out:"serious problem with disinformation" which they actively choose to do nothing abouthow they let Trump's affiliate PACs to raise money on Facebook, and allowed him to announce…

An interview with Mark Z's, focusing principally on his "overarching goal ... to help bring the metaverse to life... convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space... [Defined as] spanning physical and virtual ... contain a fully fledged economy ... unprecedented interoperability” - the latter sounding very much l…

Looking at disinformation "from a technological angle ignores that disinformation is an idea", so "we asked what the greatest thinkers in the history of philosophy would make of disinformation".Starting with Plato, writing when Athens was socially and politically turbulent, caused by a new invention: writing and reading. Plato was not a fan, fear…

Cory focusing not on the content of conspiracy theories, but "the significance of those beliefs", as we rarely go beyond dismissing "irrational people as having irrational beliefs... a mistake. The stories we tell one another are a kind of Ouija board... " telling us not about reality, but revealing "our internal, unspoken anxieties and aspiration…

"the new media economy promises both to make some writers rich and to turn others into the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers" with most of the top writers making "seven-figure sums from more than 10,000 paying subscribers".Talent making money direct from audience is not limited to journalists on substack: try "adult performers on OnlyFan…

The first step in personal knowledge management is capturing ideas outside of your head... ideal quick capture tool is frictionless and easy to adopt without disrupting your flow. Eloquent is a tool developed for learners and knowledge workers to seamlessly capture information in-context and connect it to their knowledge bases.

Trump pulled the plug on his blog which, "On its last day... received just 1,500 shares or comments on Facebook and Twitter — a staggering drop for someone whose every tweet once garnered hundreds of thousands of reactions... Trump’s blog peaked at 159,000 social interactions ... on his blog’s first day." Downhill from day one.While his supporters…

A "perverse downstream consequence for debunking... being corrected by another user for posting false political news increases subsequent sharing of low quality, partisan, and toxic content".Looks like evidence for the backfire effect: "Direct correction ... backfires by making people feel defensive or focusing their attention on social factors (e…

Good history of the digital ad industry, from 3rd-party tracking cookies through to today's data-brokered behavioural advertising profiles:"Digital advertisers have steadily transformed the internet into a surveillance machine from which there is no escape... argue that ... universe of on demand digital content has created a crisis of attention sc…

Great piece on the implications for creators of the shift to algorithmically managed content platforms."Vine was an entirely new cultural platform ... Twitter had unwittingly enabled the creation of a true subculture... [but] didn’t know how to make money from it... in contrast... TikTok has prospered because it generally seems to understand wh…

"social and psychological forces that make people prone to sharing and believing misinformation ... are on the rise" - not so much created by bad actors, but exploited by them. Why?“cognitive and memory limitations, directional motivations to defend or support some group identity or existing belief, and messages from other people and political eli…

early adopters are not innovators, but are "willing to experiment... [but] they're not guinea pigs" make them feel they're getting something special, earlythey "are willing to work with your minimum viable product if it solves their problem" Give them something to test. But their reputation is on the line, so prove you're cutting-edge, innovative …

One of a great series of Reimagining the Internet podcasts. Guest: the Planetary.Social founder, discussing:the early days of Twitter: "Twitter's innovation ... happened all at the edges... users created everything... inline images and short links and retweets and the app, actual at and hashtags... the company... cultivated this garden where innov…

"GPT-3 ... generates tweets, pens poetry, summarizes emails, answers trivia questions, translates languages and even writes its own computer programs, all with very little prompting"It's surprised a lot of AI researchers, but also "often spews biased and toxic language" and isn't always convincing. It's a universal language model that's "learned f…

roughly 1 of every 1,000 pieces of content ... violates ... rules on hate speech... even with artificial intelligence and third-party moderators, the company was “deleting less than 5% of all of the hate speech posted to Facebook.”...civic integrity team... charged with protecting the democratic process and reducing misinformation ... recently dis…

What did I learn about learning as I explored using Zettelkasten idea and knowledge management to write five newsletters about disinformation in the 2020 US elections?

What did I learn from Hubbing 50 resources and writing five editions on disinformation during the US elections?

DFRLab’s Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker (FIAT) database (see Interference2020.org) "captures allegations of foreign #us2020 interference... and assesses their credibility, bias, evidence, transparency, and impact".80 allegations were catalogued: a "sharp increase from 2016... vary widely in their evidence and objectivity, sometimes even …

Fleeting Note (FN): the creation of Fediverse-based alternatives might suddenly become an urgency.

Trump's delegitimisation disinformation campaign bears fruit: while 60% of those polled by Economist/YouGov thought Biden legitimately won:86% of Trump voters said he hadn’t, with 80% saying he shouldn’t concede, and most thinking the courts will overturn the resultsover 75% think there was sufficient fraud to influence the outcome - although unde…

When changing their Newsfeed algorithm, Facebook's tests found "a dramatic impact on the reach of right-wing “junk sites,”... [by] January 2018 a second iteration dialed up the harm to progressive-leaning news organizations instead... Mother Jones was singled out as one that would suffer... Daily Wire was identified as one that would benefit... p…

"Facebook quietly stopped recommending that people join online groups dealing with political or social issues", and will "assess when to lift them afterwards, but they are temporary." This part of the Facebook's AI plays a key role in pushing "people down a path of radicalization... groups reinforce like-minded views and abet the spread of misinfo…

An interesting corrective: here's the Tech columnist for the New York Times, claiming Facebook is flooded with right-wing misinformation, not all labelled as such - and "it's not clear that labels are doing much". Most people - including, usually, me - will read that tweet, have their beliefs confirmed and move on. What's interesting is when you …

the Election Integrity Partnership and Disinfo Defense League ... two initiatives among hundreds ... reflect two mutually reinforcing sides of the same ecosystem... people devoting their livelihoods to combatting online misinformation and disinformation... These are their stories...EIP is uniquely close to the platforms, using Jira to communicate …