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…

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..…

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…

In the United States... the chances that two people visiting the same news site have different political views is about 45 percent... the internet is far closer to perfect desegregation than perfect segregation... you are more likely to come across someone with opposing views online than you are offline... a surprising amount of the information …

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

the evidence of this orchestrated Russian intelligence effort to hack the outcome of the American election... seems flimsy at best... saying is that Russia took advantage of the social web’s desire to just share things without reading them. It may be true, but so does every other media outlet.

You may not care about social media now, but if you read a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch TV, then it’s shaping your world already... The real game is hardening your own support in ways dramatic enough to be picked up by the mass media ... the easiest way of doing that is to pick a rollicking fight... Lacking an established political mac…

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…

I spoke to seven news organizations - Recode, The Verge, Reuters, Mic, Popular Science, The Week, and USA Today's FTW - about their decision to suspend comments, the results of that change, and how they manage reader engagement now... Here's how they're all using social media to encourage reader discussion. - What happened after 7 news site…

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".

There are more good recommendations in here than can be summarised, but if I had to choose one, it's: "Integrate the developers and editors, from where they sit to whom they report to. If you’re going to do social journalism well, you’re becoming a technology platform company... Almost all the important breakthroughs in social media have come fro…