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Overview: Science&Technology

Relevant resources

Mark Zuckerberg is betting Facebook’s future on the metaverse - The Verge
www.theverge.com
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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 v…

Facebook Algorithm Promoted Posts Supporting Myanmar’s Military
time.com
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Facebook’s own recommendation algorithms have been inviting users to like pages that share pro-military propaganda that violates the platform’s rules... in 2018 the social media company admitted it could have done more to prevent incitement of violence in the run-up to a military campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority ...hired more than 100…

Facebook Employees Leaving As Hate Speech Festers
www.buzzfeednews.com
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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…

Facebook Seeks Shutdown of NYU Research Project Into Political Ad Targeting - WSJ
www.wsj.com

Facebook threatens with legal action NY academics seeking to study Facebook's political ad targeting because their Ad Observer is a "scraping tool". The project collects data unavailable on Facebook's political ad archive: targeting data, geography, political contest, etc.., which they say now violates their rules established i…

Disinformation For Hire: How A New Breed Of PR Firms Is Selling Lies Online
www.buzzfeednews.com
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for manipulating public opinion... automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”...If disinformation in 2016 was characterized by Macedonian spammers... Russian trolls... 2020 is shaping up to be the year communications pros for hire provide sophisticated online propaganda operations .…

Climbing Out Of Facebook's Reality Hole
www.buzzfeed.com
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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 power to build communities, a response to Mark Zuckerberg
hackernoon.com
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Facebook ... can never be, a platform where people have the power to build anything... the company’s main focus ... analyzing your data and showing you ads in exchange for advertiser’s money. A future where Facebook is the global social infrastructure, is a future with no refuge from advertising and number crunching... the future of social media …

Inside Facebook’s AI Machine
backchannel.com
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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…

The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto: Great for Facebook, Bad for Journalism - The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com
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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…

20/02/2017
The Data That Turned the World Upside Down - Motherboard
motherboard.vice.com
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model to assess human beings based on five personality traits, known as the "Big Five." also known as OCEAN... openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism... their needs and fears, and how they are likely to behave. ... the problem with this approach was data collection... Then came the Internet. And Facebook... on the b…

Facebook is patenting a tool that could help automate removal of fake news - The Verge
www.theverge.com
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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…

Google, democracy and the truth about internet search | Technology | The Guardian
www.theguardian.com
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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.’”…

Machine learning can fix Twitter, Facebook, and maybe even America
techcrunch.com
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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…

Facebook, Mobocracy & Augmented Reality - (Top3ics, 23 May)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

This isn’t the first time I’ve covered the impact of social media on news; technologies like augmented reality; and the impact of both on society. It is the first time these Top3ics have meshed so perfectly in one month.

Social Network Algorithms Are Distorting Reality By Boosting Conspiracy Theories | Co.Exist | ideas + impact
www.fastcoexist.com
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The filter bubble... has evolved. Algorithms, network effects, and zero-cost publishing are enabling crackpot theories to go viral... impacting the decisions of policy makers and shaping public opinion, whether they are verified or not... Facebook's news feed ... tailored just to us ... to keep us interested and happy... drives engagement and mor…

How Facebook and Twitter are killing the open web
qz.com
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Platforms are eating publishers... The idea that Facebook and its ilk could act as information gatekeepers is also a bleak prospect... Facebook wouldn’t allow The New Republic to create an ad for an innocuous piece on medical marijuana ... If Facebook is squeamish about medical marijuana now, imagine the state of the fourth estate once controversy…

Nick Denton: Facebook dominance better than 'convoluted' ad tech
digiday.com
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Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton was an extreme skeptic of publishers relying too heavily on Facebook. Now he's ... “all in” on publishing directly to Facebook with its Instant Articles program, a backtracking on Denton’s well-publicized lament that publishers are too reliant on platforms...Facebook, with its deep pool of accurate user data, can help …

Community, comments, the open web & Facebook (Top3ics, 24 Sept)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

Get with the community; The death and rebirth of comments: The death of the open web?

Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook and the slow death of the web
www.theverge.com
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...with iOS 9 and content blockers, what you're seeing is Apple's attempt to fully drive the knife into Google's revenue platform.... So it's Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook, all with their own revenue platforms. Google has the web, Facebook has its app, and Apple has the iPhone. This is the newest and biggest war in tech going today. And the …

Platforms, distribution and audience
ben-evans.com

Blogging has never been easier but getting read has never been harder... The problem isn't freedom or openness but distribution... you might post it on Facebook or Google Plus. Your friends might see it ... (though this is largely random) and they might share it ... You might post it on LinkedIn and your network might see it ... and LinkedIn migh…

Introducing my newsletter (July 26, 2015)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

The last couple of years has seen a revival of the Art of the eNewsletter. I have found myself paying much more attention to enewsletters in my Inbox... than to the marketing junk gushing from social media

18million followers for a Facebook page about science?
www.cjr.org
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"Since it launched in March 2012, I F*cking Love Science has attracted more than 17.9 million Facebook followers—more than Popular Science (2.7 million), Discover (2.7 million), Scientific American (1.9 million), and The New York Times (8 million) combined. ... Her empire has since expanded to include a website, IFLscience.com, which has a staff a…

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