Overview: Social Media Strategy

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…

under Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network... more than 100 fact-checkers in 45 countries publishing in 15 languages. In less than two months, they have published 1,000 fact checks, articles and nine weekly reports pointing out misinformation trends and ways to combat it...journalists not only can but should drop competing with each other…

step-by-step guide to collect and analyse data from Twitter, about anything from coronavirus rumours to anti-vax claims... understanding how certain hashtags, links or claims are travelling on Twitter could prove crucial to limiting the spread of damaging misinformation... First Draft has prepared a sample script ...

When only some news is labeled as fact-checked and disputed, people believe stories that haven’t been marked as fact-checked more—even when they are completely false... the “implied truth effect.”... warning labels did work to flag fictitious content... when no true or false labels were used, people considered sharing 29.8% of all false stories—ye…

vertical video outperformed square video within the Facebook News Feed... as much as 68 percent less expensive in cost per view... Facebook outperformed Instagram in overall cost per click (CPC) within the feed... But which format drives more engagement within the Instagram Feed? ... vertical video!... organic DIY videos outperformed polished vide…

The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are... Roam attempts to implement a near-full conception of hypertext as originally conceived by visionaries... looks like a cross between a slightly weird wiki and ... Evernote. It’s not... block-level addressability, transclusion ... and bidirectional linking ... utterly transform the writing experienc…

House Democrats ... environmental justice bill, a novel collaborative effort between lawmakers and local groups ... used ... PopVox to allow disparate environmental justice groups around the country to comment on the legislation... also met with hundreds of groups and hosted a daylong environmental justice summit on Capitol Hill...environmental ju…

tweets posted by bots created the impression there was a high level of climate change denial... 6.5 million tweets from ... Trump's June 2017 announcement that he was removing the United States from the Paris climate accord... Posts in support of action to protect the environment were far less likely to come from bots... only 5%...the number …

the best skill to teach children is reinvention... the author of Sapiens reveals what 2050 has in store for humankind...once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and minds... We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function...too many schools focus on cramming information. In the p…

Watching Silicon Valley exercise news judgment has been like watching Walter Cronkite try to write code in Python... Four companies have created trustworthiness indicators for news websites: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and NewsGuard. Publishers have no way of learning their secret trust score from the Silicon Valley companies. NewsGuard’s journalis…

Much of modern economic theory is based around a simple idea: Human beings maximize utility... To an economist, utility simply means how much people want something... tend to assume that utility is good... But what if the things people desire don’t bring them happiness?...People seem to reliably seek out a few things that make them unhappy... peop…

Scroll, scroll, scroll... it’s got a name: zombie scrolling syndrome... Consider parasites... some have the power of mind control. Or... zombification... the jewel wasp... grabs a cockroach twice her size... injecting nonlethal venom... dopamine... alters the roach’s behavior... cleaning itself instead of running for its life...zombifying parasite…