Overview: Politics

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 Faceboo…

Facebook's 2017 newsfeed algorithm tweak intentionally reduced traffic to left-leaning outlets " to avoid adding fuel to critics’ argument that the platform has an anti-conservative bias"... and overcorrected."Mother Jones saw a roughly $400,000 drop in the site’s annual revenue"

the next iteration of technology applied to politics will be a huge leap forward with a greater ability to target people... address each of the 156 million of registered voters on the US with personalized messages.... a falsehood delivered in a personalized way is likely to be more efficient but less visible than a blatant lie put on Twitter; it w…

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:

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…

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

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.

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?

As Facebook attempted to capture the fast-moving energy of the news cycle from Twitter... it built a petri dish for confirmation bias... Here’s how... ‘Share’ Button ... encouraging people to share quickly and without much thought... “original sharing,” where people post their own photos, text updates... was declining..., content from celebritie…

a lot of media sources you don’t recognize ... a new and distinctive sort of operation ... political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook... engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the news feed... Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle... together make up 2016’s most disruptive, and least understood, force in med…

bringing new technology into the newsroom to change how the outlet commissions and publishes opinion pieces ... expand the coverage beyond just text, into visual story formats that can be accessed and shared across different platforms.... the FT's comment section is a "huge source of strength and a very valuable asset".... a new Facebook commu…

As I mentioned in my previous post, the past couple of years have seen a lot of innovation in online content strategy, coupled with growing disenchantment with "Big Internet".