Overview: Social Media Strategy

“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..…

“fake news”... is grossly inadequate to explain the nature and scale of the problem... is being used by politicians... against the fourth estate and an excuse to censor free speech... There are four distinct motivations ... political, financial, psychological (for personal satisfaction) and social (to reinforce our belonging to communities or “tr…

There are 17 people on the task force, including diplomats, journalists and computer experts, and it has a mandate to combat misinformation coming out of Russia. One of its tools is a website called EUvsDisinfo.eu, which hosts a database with a selection of the most common lies disseminated by Russian outlets

News Quality Scoring Project ... humans and algorithm to separate “commodity news” from “value-added news” ... based on quantifiable and qualitative signals — like word count, freshness versus evergreen material, quote density, contextualization, and the presence of a byline... human/machine, subjective/objective hybrid as the still-under-constru…

I have an obvious incentive to get claps: pretty decent money. ... I can write more polarized headlines... on polarizing topics. I can piggy back on the hot news of the day... write things I don’t actually believe using incendiary language ... Medium has safeguards ... a team of curators ... a policy against abuse that it actually enforces... a t…

Resources and first thoughts from my recent ‘EU communities & policy participation’ workshop at the European Week of Regions and Cities (EWRC).

Did participants in the ‘Future of Europe’ process influence President Juncker’s State of the European Union speech, as promised? Of course not. Rightly.- 2nd post in preparation for my EWRC 2017 workshop on online communities and public participation in policy

Saying goodbye to my oldblog on my old platform’s 10th birthday.

Confirmation bias... such a prevalent feature of human cognition, that until recently a second phenomenon has been hidden in plain sight. Recent research suggests that something called desirability bias may be just as prevalent in our thinking... When future desires and past beliefs are incongruent, desire usually wins out.

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

I was particularly ashamed of the way that the AAA ratings, which were in some sense a mathematical promise of safety, had been actually just lies, mathematical lies... like a weaponized mathematics ... actually people don’t want to know what their actual risk ... mathematics ... was being used ... so that people could go on doing essentially corr…

In the realm of knowledge, monopoly and conformism are inseparable perils. The danger is that these firms will inadvertently use their dominance to squash diversity of opinion and taste. Concentration is followed by homogenization... news media ... have rushed to produce articles that will flourish on those platforms... a duplication of the news…

a major new Yale University study finds that fact-checking and then tagging inaccurate news stories on social media doesn’t work... “disputed” tags made participants just 3.7 percentage points more likely to correctly judge headlines as false... Trump supporters and adults under 26... could actually end up increasing the likelihood that users wil…

A few people have asked me recently whether my Medium membership is worth it... We’re trying to fight the dark forces of advertising that are destroying our minds and democracy.

the future that Medium founder and CEO Ev Williams sees ... doesn’t include advertising, not even the native advertising that was a key piece of Medium’s plan ... a Spotify-ish model that pools subscribers’ $5 monthly contributions and doles them out to a select group of creators based on how many “claps” the creators get... once they’re in the …

A Mathematical Journey Into How Medium Payment [Probably] Works for Premium Authors

ProPublica published an in-depth investigation into the algorithms that Facebook uses to determine what it considers “hate speech” ...Facebook’s rules were being inconsistently applied... to learn more ... its first Facebook Messenger bot... to collect stories about people’s experiences with hate speech on Facebook... to help quantify the organiz…

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…

outrage explodsd... because it allowed us to make the story about ourselves... we could effortlessly and instantaneously join a global conversation... attracted more agreement from our following than resentment, and invigorated our social capital. We were putting our best face forward, aligning ourselves with an ethical and moral high ground, virt…

Financial incentive is key to Silverman’s understanding of fake news, which he defines as online misinformation that is completely false, created to deceive and economically motivated. If online misinformation is being created for ideological reasons it’s propaganda... delegitimising legitimate journalism... through delegitimising organisations t…

Clinicians should aim to understand parents’ values and engage in genuine, respectful conversations; these processes can help vaccine-hesitant parents feel heard and understood... Recognizing cognitive biases ... can also help ... omission bias may lead parents to blame themselves more if a child develops a vaccine-related side effect ... than ...…

Rupert Murdoch invested $70 million into VICE in August 2013... a portfolio company of the media genius that created the entire right wing tabloid machine’s is convincing a whole other demographic that the world is coming to an end. Anger and fear sell... exaggerated characters that create an extreme view of reality. It’s an appeal to your most b…

we investigate the cognitive psychological profile of individuals who fall prey to fake news. We find a consistent positive correlation between the propensity to think analytically – as measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) – and the ability to differentiate fake news from real news ... suggests that factors that undermine the legitimac…

the knowledge illusion is a common form of human fallibility, but Trump takes it to an exceptional degree... When asked to explain something, he changes the subject, his confidence in his knowledge unwavering... reflectivity... whether people are likely to be highly deluded about their own knowledge... Low scores on the reflectivity test correlat…

exposing agents to the possibility of fake news can be an effective way to curtail the spread of fake news in social networks. Our results also highlight that information about the users' private beliefs and their social network structure can be extremely valuable to adversaries and should be well protected.

New tools are needed to help organizations leverage on the power of ecosystems and enable participation of external entities in the business process. That’s what the Platform Design Toolkit is for: design systems that create much more value than they capture and motivate everybody to join.

public policy is being pushed into a realm where it’s not accessible... After PSA was adopted in Lucas County, Ohio... crimes committed by people awaiting trial fell, even as more defendants were released without having to post bail... Most governments ... didn’t appear to have the expertise to properly consider or answer questions about the pred…

How ideologues, opportunists, growth hackers, and internet marketers built a massive new universe of partisan news on the web and on Facebook... publishers are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue, with small operations easily earning five figures thanks to one website and at least one associated Facebook page... since T…

Communities for Newsroom - Guides on: Manage ModerationUse Smart MetricsBuild Newsroom Skills

Airbnb has been expanding its trust platform ... allowing them to translate their passions into professions... go to Airbnb’s site and click ... “experiences.” ... endless smorgasbord of people turning their passion into profit and their inner artisan into second careers.... grown tenfold this year... I’d like to say that Airbnb created 100 millio…