Overview: Politics

Technology has altered the foundations of news and media, and as trust in media continues to decline, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms have come to play a critical role not only as threats to the integrity and quality of media, but also as a source of potential solutions. The core threats to information quality associated …

it just felt like the conversations that we were having subsequently were actually pretty shallow and actually pretty useless, because we were talking over each other because everybody meant different things... we can only really start talking about interventions if we understand what we’re talking about... I say, “Please don’t use the term.” “Yea…

“We wanted democracy... but got mobocracy.”... Bots generated one out of every five political messages posted on Twitter in America’s presidential campaign last year... “we need to reform our attention economy.”... groups which had mostly been excluded from the mainstream media... developed the dark arts they would use to further their agendas..…

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…

... no one has direct access to reality. The real world is nearly impossible to see in this maelstrom ... because human minds need to “construct” their own version of reality — and each of us does this within a community of shared experiences and beliefs... there are many social worlds and each is built on its own version of what is real and true.…

the idea that fake news was central to the outcome of the campaign has little basis in fact... it’s mostly likely to be shared by people who have already bought into a partisan or ideological worldview... Clinton’s campaign ... problem was ... coverage that dwelled overwhelmingly on a bullshit email server scandal, devoted far fewer resources to…

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