Overview: Media

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…

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…

How ideologues, opportunists, growth hackers, and internet marketers built a massive new universe of partisan news on the web and on Facebook... publishers are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue, with small operations easily earning five figures thanks to one website and at least one associated Facebook page... since T…

with a group, I as a community editor will have much more control and freedom over managing the discussion.... Here are some of the more interesting ways that publishers are using this feature:

The problem with connecting everyone on the planet is that a lot of people are assholes. The issue with giving just anyone the ability to live broadcast to a billion people is that someone will use it to shoot up a school. You have to plan for these things. You have to build for the reality we live in, not the one we hope to create....digital laye…

The more you engage with a particular kind of post, the more you will see its ilk... eventually constructs a small “in-group” cluster of Facebook friends and topics that dominate your feed... causes your behavior to change... reinforcing their in-group status… ... because “engagement” is the metric, Facebook inevitably selects for the shocking an…

confidential document prepared by Facebook that revealed the company had offered advertisers the opportunity to target 6.4 million younger users, some only 14 years old, during moments of psychological vulnerability... the big fear isn’t just what Facebook knows about its users but whether that knowledge can be weaponized in ways those users canno…

Cambridge Analytica (part of SCL Group Ltd.) constructed a significant data set based on US voter rolls... Some respected observers argue the firm’s psychographic profiling methodologies may not be nearly as potent as its sales pitch suggests... the firm’s psychographic practices remain as unreviewable as the campaign’s voter advertising. Journal…

readers could only remember where they saw a piece of news from, 56 percent of the time... how can you make your content stand out?... an actively engaged community is key. Content that disrupts a user scrolling through the newsfeed, and compels that person to comment, is a far more memorable experience.

Facebook today cannot exist without AI. Every time you use Facebook or Instagram or Messenger... your experiences are being powered by AI... Eventually, this “classifying” step—known as supervised learning—may become automated, as the company pursues an ML holy grail known as “unsupervised learning,” ... Facebook sees the visual cortex merging wit…

We know little about the amount of fake news an average citizen consumes, or how it fits into their overall news diet... What we found calls into question the severity of the fake news crisis.... We gathered data for both the real and fake news sites from comScore... First, the fake news audience is tiny compared to the real news audience–about 1…

Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals... “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”,,,an assumption that news... will con…

a way for publishers to combine multiple Instant Articles into one post.

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 …

An average post in the private subscribers group ... attracts about twice the number of comments ...

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…

thoughtfully designed user interfaces can make us a freer, more humane, and more just society, just as poorly designed ones seem to have made many of us less compassionate, less informed, and more antagonistic... for a case study, we only need to look ... online forum Nextdoor.com originally ... a way of fostering community through neighborhood-s…

if publishers disagree with their labels they’ll have to take it up with the third-parties... won’t receive any payment from Facebook, but may get a traffic and branding boost from the debunk post links... Facebook is still working on better classifiers to automatically detect fake news, and preventing fake news from appearing as “Related Article…

Mantzarlis expects the partnership will result in a huge increase of applications to sign on to the IFCN’s code.... leads to a surge in genuine fact-checking projects, so much the better... Facebook decides which fact-checkers to include; the IFCN code is just the ‘minimum condition...

Here’s a look at the challenges facing each of Zuckerberg’s specific ideas... The technology to identify blatantly false news exists — the real question is what Facebook will choose to do with the content it categorizes as “misinformation.”... Relying on third-party fact checkers could lessen scrutiny on Facebook’s verification process and give …

Facebook ... cannot — act as The Great Editor... It passes that task on to outside entities.... If Facebook is going to pay for video, it might want to consider paying for truth, which is also good for business... I would also like to see Facebook share data about how lies spread and what motivates people to reconsider before sharing lies so resea…

Users will be able to mark stories as fake...algorithm will look at whether a large number of people are reporting a particular article, whether or not the article is going viral, and whether the article has a high rate of shares... create an algorithm-vetted set of links that then goes on to a team of researchers within Facebook... links are sent…

A work in progress from an upcoming eponymous post. Another experiment with the enewsletter format: some initial thoughts on this seemingly intractable problem, with some of the source materials I’m studying.

Not only is Facebook not providing little red warnings along with links to potentially specious news—it’s now blocking links to the plugin that did... . “It would seem I’ve caused them some embarrassment by showing them to be full of bull when it comes to their supposed inability to address fake news and they are punishing me for it.”... Update #…

Facebook’s application for Patent 0350675: “systems and methods to identify objectionable content.” ... filed in June 2015, describes a sophisticated system for identifying inappropriate text and images and removing them from the network... improve the detection of pornography, hate speech, and bullying... much easier to identify than false news s…

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…

Do we really want to set up Facebook or Google as censors ... to decide what is real and fake, true and false?

Zuckerberg’s emerging dilemma. He doesn’t want Facebook ... to be an arbiter of what’s legit and what’s not. But if Facebook is now going to prohibit fake news sites from using its ad network to sell ads, it will need a list of its own... Google has long had its own list of legitimate news sources... hasn’t apparently wanted to cut into its own…

Perfectly open communities always go sour. You need filters. Every functional community has them. And that’s where machine learning comes in... If you can detect trolls, you can protect the people they’re trolling by muting or putting a warning over the trolls’ posts... Twitter... already have a way of screening out porn. Why don’t they do the sam…