Overview: Online Strategy

proposal ... for a U.S. government agency to regulate online speech... on all social media.... fails to make the case... the idea that a government agency would necessarily do better is naive... think about exactly who would appoint that agency’s leader, and to what political ends they might seek to put it...

It’s taken me over ten years to move from enthusiasm, through frustration into a Zen-like state where I no longer blog about EU comms. But when the Eurobloggers called, I had to answer ;)- my link in the #EU09vs19 blog chain …

Most criticisms lodged against the content creators that chose to work with the platforms are made with the benefit of hindsight... the decision many publishers made to close down their comment sections should be considered one of the industry’s worst blunders.... editors looked down into their article comments sections and did not like what they …

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes laid out an argument for dismantling the social media behemoth... via antitrust legislation... a new age of innovation and competition... maybe not... competition  demands more data... engagement ... efforts to increase competition risk simply aggravating these problems.... We could simply choose not to have socia…

In all the urgent debate about regulating, investigating, and even breaking up internet companies, we have lost sight of the problem we are trying to confront: not technology but instead human behaviour on it... in their search for someone to blame, government outsource fault and responsibility, egged on by media (whose schadenfreude constitutes …

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…

To #DeleteFacebook is to throw the baby out with the bathwater without solving the underlying problem.This is not another post on the benefits or evils of Facebook — you can figure that out for yourself…- my latest post accepted into The Mission

Technology is hijacking our minds and society.... we are advancing thoughtful solutions to change the system... Try these simple changes to live more intentionally with your devices.

When in doubt, blame the robots. Facebook ... has proposed a familiar solution: f the algorithm has failed, let’s just build a better algorithm.... the focus on the software misses the point ... the Internet has failed as a public forum.... Perhaps we wouldn’t still be defending this failed experiment if it wasn’t so stunningly profitable... highl…

these technologies ... kind of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the human will. Our phones are the operating system for our life. They keep us looking and clicking... wears down certain capacities, like willpower... repeated distractions lower people’s effective IQ by up to 10 points... over twice ... that ... from long-term marijuana usage....…

uses the social network to promote her business... set up various safeguards to avoid becoming too emotionally invested ... a web browser plug-in ... replaces the social network’s endless stream ... with a single inspiring quote.... hired a social media manager ... because she could no longer stand the addictive feedback loop ... She had been a …

the capacity to spread ideas ... no longer limited by access to expensive... infrastructure. It’s limited instead by one’s ability to garner and distribute attention. And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured... by just a few digital platforms:... tincreasingly stand in for the public sphere itself... at their core... They’re …

The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works....exploit[s] a vulnerability in human psychology” by creating a “social-validation feedback loop”... you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed

“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..…

Every time you open your phone or your computer, your brain is walking onto a battleground... Your captive attention is worth billions ... This has actually changed how you see the world... walls of code have turned you into a predictable asset — a user that can be mined for attention... by focusing on one over-simplified metric, one that suppor…

We need to strike a healthy balance between striving to reach more readers across platforms over which we have zero control, with bringing them back to... our apps and website... here’s how we’ve changed our approach over the past year:... an over-reliance on social media can leave us particularly vulnerable to sudden changes by platforms. Ultim…

Social media is making us miserable... “Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides.”

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 …

For every man-made crisis event... we found evidence of alternative narratives, often shared by some of the same accounts and connected to some of the same online sites. These rumors had different “signatures” from other types of rumors... rose more slowly, and then they lingered, ebbing and flowing ... sustained participation by a set group of Tw…

readers could only remember where they saw a piece of news from, 56 percent of the time... how can you make your content stand out?... an actively engaged community is key. Content that disrupts a user scrolling through the newsfeed, and compels that person to comment, is a far more memorable experience.

3rd of my posts for Chatbots Magazine: Chatbots allow governments and other public bodies to provide citizens highly customised content and services. And invade their privacy. Citizens deserve better choices. 

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

my research team’s analysis of data from Columbia University’s Emergent rumor tracker suggests that this misinformation is just as likely to go viral as reliable information... limiting news fakers’ ability to sell ads... a step in the right direction. But it will not curb abuses driven by political motives... Using BotOrNot, our colleagues found…

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…

Legacy media is thriving in Scandinavian news feeds... public broadcasters in all four countries seem to be competing strongly on Facebook... what do Scandinavian legacy publishers have to their advantage...?... many Scandinavian publishers see platforms such as Google and Facebook as only one part of their audience development strategy... small…

If you think this election is insane, wait until 2020... technologies like AI, machine learning, sensors and networks will accelerate. Political campaigns get ... so personalized that they are scary in their accuracy and timeliness. The single most important factor influencing your voting decision is your social network… so you can bet that politi…

Segregated social universes, an industry moving from red states to the coasts, and mass media’s revenue decline: The disconnect between two realities shows no sign of abating... American political discourse in 2016 seemed to be running on two self-contained, never-overlapping sets of information... today’s media ecosystem encourage that separatio…

“a monopoly of content distribution that will be mainly driven by user-generated content, and by professional content by commercially interested players.... pretty traumatic scenario of information or propaganda. It will be very painful for democracies.”

News Feed Changes Mean Brands Should Invest in Facebook People More Than Pages... The News Feed algorithm is a lagging indicator, not a leading one. It now properly reflects what study after study shows the public truly values: relationships... No organization will ever be on the same footing as peers... Invest in Facebook people, more so than p…

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.