Overview: Social Media Strategy

Trump signed an executive order ... easier for federal regulators to argue that companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter were suppressing free speech when they suspended users or deleted posts... Twitter has doubled down... added fact-checking labels to ... spokesman for China’s foreign ministry ... tweets that falsely claimed a photo... was …

the level of bot involvement in discussions about things like US elections or natural disasters is typically 10% to 20%... among tweets about "reopening America," 66% came from accounts that were possibly humans using bot assistants... 34% came from bots...

Twitter added information to refute the inaccuracies in President Trump’s tweets for the first time... urged people to “get the facts”... a CNN story ... and ... bullet points that Twitter had compiled rebutting the inaccuracies... Twitter determined that those unsubstantiated assertions could lead to voter confusion and that they merited a correc…

when something important is missing in your life, your brain can only seem to focus on that missing thing... scarcity... leads you to take certain behaviors that in the short term help... in the long term only make matters worse... robs people of insight... in a hole, we sometimes dig ourselves even deeper...human brain is wired to respond to scar…

In less than a year... weekly church-attending white Protestants convinced that Donald Trump was anointed by God to be president grew from 29.6 percent to 49.5 percent... Capitalizing on that devotion is integral to Trump’s re-election ...all-enveloping digital campaign website... campaign app... a self-contained, self-reinforcing arena where Trum…

For a handful of disinformation researchers, the information crisis that has unfolded around the coronavirus pandemic seemed inevitable... get a sense of what we should be watching for and what the internet might look like after the virus has passed...Joan Donovan... coined "strategic silence," editorial discretion ... notion that users…

More than 1,000 social marketers were surveyed by Sprout Social for better understanding of goals, metrics and use of social media data in business... Sixty-nine percent ... increasing brand awareness is their number one priority ... top three uses... 1. Understanding their target audience, 2. develop creative content, and 3. Assess campaign pe…

coronavirus i... global rallying cry for ... white supremacists and anti-vaxxers in the U.S. to fascist and anti-refugee groups across Europe ... far-right populists on both continents ... using the outbreak to push their political agenda ...barrage of false messages [risk] ... feeding ... “infodemic” that makes it hard to separate fact from ficti…

social distancing ... led us to reconsider how we reach our audiences at scale ... through events... already conducted more than 15 large-scale virtual events... partner summit for over 4,000 attendees ... employee town hall with our CEO... Here’s what I’ve learned ...people show up to events to learn, network, and discover... to enable ... on a d…

Begin unbiasing with education, accountability, measurement, and more

why Wikipedia has been a more successful news source than Wikinews... Wikipedia’s formulaic style and continuous format are more conducive to collaborative writing projects ... writing a news story with a lead, a coherent narrative, and a deadline is very different than writing an encyclopedia article...tension between the Wikipedia community... …

The Syllabus collects the best articles, podcasts and videos about the political, economic and social consequences of the coronavirus pandemic on a daily basis...world’s foremost technology critic... scans 100 pages per minute, 12 books in an hour, 100 in one day... can determine the relevance of every book in the world... all information and know…

when climate skeptics in government and media control the message and the channels, it becomes fact for people like councilor Allen that Australia’s fires... have “nothing” to do with climate change... Climate skepticism runs deep in Australia, origin of ... Murdoch’s media empire... long history of climate science denial and diversion... in the w…

The rage-engage cycle is a key part of how malign narratives gain traction on social media... into traditional media... disinformation content is designed to be polarizing... exploits the business models of social media... pointing out that something is false and dangerous ... giving more oxygen to the fire... [Trump] tests and revises purposefull…

NewsGuard has been tracking the top hoaxes ... websites that are publishing those false stories... Today, we’re introducing a new data set focused ... on the Facebook Pages that repeat, share, and amplify...31 Facebook Pages that are “super-spreaders”... Combined... reach 21,352,918 followers... publish blatant misinformation about COVID-19 — seem…

While vowing to police COVID-19 misinformation on its platform, Facebook let advertisers target users interested in“pseudoscience” ...The Markup paid to advertise a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience... ad was approved by Facebook. ... boosted a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience on Instagram... ad was approved in min…

The editor-in-chief of The Lancet... I do believe lives could have been saved had we acted earlier"... demanded transparency on the opaque epidemiological models ... included ... “herd immunity”... The idea you can strip out politics from medicine or health is historically ignorant. The medical establishment should be much more politicised...…

a conservative leader in Australia and a progressive prime minister in New Zealand are ... converging toward an extraordinary goal: completely eliminating the virus from their island nations... succeeding with throwback democracy... partisanship recedes, experts lead, and quiet coordination matters more than firing up the base...the public initial…

The EU’s main task force for fighting Russian disinformation is in danger of becoming a source for disinformation itself, and so of skewing policy decisions... public discourse throughout Europe... EUvsDisinfo’s misrepresentation of Russian COVID-19 media coverage ... analysed is troubling. Two ... methods are particularly problematic....From omis…

people with low levels of formal education are much less likely to ... rely on news organisations ... more likely to rely on social media and messaging ... Argentina, South Korea, Spain, and the US, young people are much more likely to rely on social media... Germany, the UK, and the US, to rely on messaging applications groups...very high numbers…

After years of influencers buying fake followers, hiring click farms and promoting products that they don’t even use, consumers feel that they can’t trust much of what influencers say... today’s consumers... gravitating toward more grassroots communities, where people share information and original content about the brands and products they love w…

some of the main types, sources, and claims of COVID-19 misinformation seen so far... the number of English-language fact-checks rose more than 900% from January to March... coronavirus misinformation has almost certainly grown even faster...most (59%)... various forms of reconfiguration... true information is spun, twisted, recontextualised, or r…

geoengineering technologies are hypothetical... to be used ‘in case of emergency’ ... should radical emissions cuts fail... Running concurrently... ‘chemtrails’ ... interchangeably with the term geoengineering... belief that the persistent contrails left by aeroplanes provide evidence that a secret programme of large‐scale weather and climate modi…

we needed to take investigative journalism and combine it with technology to build communities of action... I went from managing 1,000 journalists to 12 people...Our information ecosystem has already been destroyed. We’ve been poisoned... We were the third [news outlet] attacked... we stood up because we have no other business interests...In the o…

McNamee has mentored many of the people who have transformed Silicon Valley... advised Mark Zuckerberg to turn down Yahoo’s offer... a billion dollars... encouraged Zuckerberg to hire Sheryl Sandberg...Ten days before the Presidential election... “I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed,”... I was expecting them to take it seriously... t…

big tech companies have spent the past three years working to avoid a repeat of 2016... struggling to handle the new challenges of 2020...foreign governments ... are now using ... bots that are nearly impossible to distinguish from hyperpartisan Americans... partisan groups in the United States have borrowed Russia’s 2016 playbook ... tough calls …

many organisations are not content to simply run a website, they want to run an online community too... I continually see the same mistakes...the harsh realities of running an online community [are] ... Community is about people and relationships, not technology. The technology is the easy part... it also takes commitment.... months to get off the…

Every feature that adtech is bragging on, or working toward? Email spam had it in the 1990s... staying away from spam was the right answer... spam from a high-reputation brand doesn’t look any different from spam that any fly-by-night operation can send...The “new reality,”... is a place where you win based not on how much the audience trusts you,…

The Cranky Uncle smartphone game is currently being developed... teach you to throw the arguments of even your crankiest climate-misinformed uncle back at him... let’s learn the arguments of denial to defeat them...cartoons and gameplay to interactively explain the denial techniques used to cast doubt on climate science... ‘active inoculation’ — l…

Most current definitions of engagement are bimodal – someone is either engaged or they ‘re not...a limited view that hampers our ability to manage engagement in meaningful ways...Community management is the discipline of building technical and social environments in such a way that individuals can easily organize and collaborate to achieve an obje…