Overview: Online Strategy

There’s bad information out there that’s not necessarily fake. It’s never as clear-cut as you think... Facebook’s algorithm may not understand the various shades of falsehood. Facebook could tweak its algorithm to promote related articles from sites like FactCheck.org so they show up next to questionable stories on the same topic in the news fee…

Facebook makes billions of editorial decisions every day. And often they are bad editorial decisions — steering people to sensational, one-sided, or just plain inaccurate stories. The fact that these decisions are being made by algorithms rather than human editors doesn’t make Facebook any less responsible for the harmful effect on its users and t…

Facebook wants to have the responsibility of a publisher but also to be seen as a neutral carrier of information that is not in the position of making news judgments... when Facebook was still censoring the napalm photo ... the site’s trending bar began posting ... a story suggesting September 11 were caused by a “controlled demolition”.

Today, we’re announcing an update to News Feed that helps you see more posts from your friends and family.

There is no such thing as neutrality when it comes to media. That has long been a fiction... It’s also dangerous to assume that the “solution” is to make sure that “both” sides of an argument are heard equally... It is even more dangerous, however, to think that relying more on algorithms will remove this bias.Recognizing bias and enabling process…

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…

Facebook is not a friend of journalism.. Yes, Instant Articles are sexy and monetisable... a hugely important route to readers, but the more dependent we get on them, the more they’ll be able to charge us to access that audience... Facebook is seeing an alarming (to them) drop in sharing of personal information...we’ll see Facebook start to turn d…

Civil Comments, a commenting platform ... aims to produce respectful dialogue in comment sections through a system that crowdsources comment moderation... Commenters are shown two random comments from elsewhere on the site, and must rate the comments’ quality and civility and determine whether they include harassment, abuse, or personal attacks. T…

if all content is ranked together and swift approval is the primary metric (whether that be views, reads, or recommends), the platform will become dominated by generic bullshit. Aspirational pap is just Medium’s version of the cat meme... Publications aren’t communities. Tags aren’t communities. They are content ownership vehicles and search tools…

To get a better grip on the questions that bots raise... organized a workshop that brought together a diverse group of bot experts. This article is the output of the event, a tour of the bot and its semi-autonomy from three perspectives: that of the designer, the implementer, and the regulator... The last several years have seen a rise in bots …

BotOrNot checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score based on how likely the account is to be a bot. Higher scores are more bot-like.

Facebook’s news feed algorithm can be tweaked to make us happy or sad; it can expose us to new and challenging ideas or insulate us in ideological bubbles... The algorithm’s rankings correspond to the user’s preferences “sometimes,” Facebook acknowledges... not the success rate you might expect A glimpse into its inner workings sheds light ... on…

taking us towards what an American legal scholar, Frank Pasquale, has christened the “black box society”... subtitle – “the secret algorithms that control money and information” ... it’s not just about money and information but increasingly about most aspects of contemporary life... we know that Facebook algorithms can influence the moods and t…

Here’s how BuzzFeed, The Economist, The New York Times, Quartz, Vox, and Yahoo News slim down a day’s worth of news into manageable forms. Every day, readers are faced with a firehose of news online. News organizations realize this, and they’re trying a bunch of different ways to make the news more manageable — creating chatty summaries of thei…

the social network will share analytics, and Instant Articles is compatible with audience measurement and attribution tools... won't receive preferential treatment from Facebook's News Feed sorting algorithm... Facebook will parse HTML and RSS to display articles with fonts, layouts, and formats ... also providing vivid media options like embe…

Personally I've been creeped out by all this since reading the Filter Bubble, but apparently I'll be feeling less lonely about it next year. Great image here: "Think of a world in which your phone constantly checked in with the central phone company to decide which of your relatives it should allow you to call, and to jumble their sentences aroun…

"But for those searching for what's next, Ello is not it. There have been a few versions of this virtuous social network before—from Diaspora (forgotten), App.net (oof), and even Path (oy) ... [Diaspora] was intended less as an imitation of Facebook than as an escape route from it... New York magazine wrote almost four years ago to the day."

Not all shortform content is clickbait - Chartbeat thinks Circa shouldn't worry. "The depressing truth of the Internet is that short-form content hangs out on the same end of the distribution curve of the Internet as long form when it comes to attention. ... the majority of pageviews get fewer than 15 seconds of engagement. Facebook is looking …

"It seems like Facebook’s favorite pastime is messing with its algorithm, to the terror of brands, media, and consumers everywhere. ... Today’s change is all about timing. The company wants to make the posts that appear in your feed more relevant based on the context of “when.” That way, you’re not seeing your friends statuses about the Emmys day…

"Just because Twitter wants to be more like Facebook doesn't mean Facebook doesn't want to be more like Twitter. " - Facebook Takes Another Tip From Twitter And Pushes Trendy Topics - ReadWrite

"It doesn’t refer to Ferguson, Ice Bucket Challenge videos or a solemn responsibility to bring you news that really matters, but Facebook does seem to be addressing concerns about the service’s ability to surface timely, important news stories." - Facebook: More timely News Feed on the way | Poynter.

"The process of placing an ad on News Feed is a complicated dance. Facebook has to decide not only which ad to show to its users, but when to show it to them... any given user has around 1,500 stories they could see each day. ... a rather complex algorithm that weights how engaging each post is ... and a wide range of other signals ... For examp…

"Facebook seems to be trying to get more transparent about how the algorithms ... function, with a statement on Monday about cracking down on “clickbait.” ... But despite the attempts at openness, the bottom line remains the same: Facebook is a black box. No one really has any clue why the site chooses to show or hide certain content... what com…

Interesting & contested view of that Facebook study, by its co-author: ""If you say, 'I don't want to be experimented on,' ... what does that mean?"[Google is ] constantly needing to tweak their algorithm. If I say, 'I want to opt out of that,' does that put me back to Google search 2004? " Others beg to differ: "It's not A/B testing. It's just b…