Tag: Social Media
How bots amplify fake news
Heightened bot activity typically signals fake news campaigns. Why aren’t social media companies responding accordingly?
Orwell, prophet
Meritocracy is a lie
A former YouTube star on the illusion of meritocracy.
Millennials were raised to believe in the value of self-expression, but “I think we found out no one gives a shit what we think,” Burnham says. “So we flock to performers by the thousands because we’re the few that have found an audience, and then I’m supposed to get up here and say ‘Follow your dreams,’ as if this is a meritocracy? It is not. I had a privileged life. And I got lucky. And I’m unhappy.”
Ethics Education in Data Science
Revisiting a forgotten (or ignored) topic in IT education. Very relevant in light of the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica fiasco.
State-sponsored fake news protects corrupt elite
Armies of ‘opinion shapers’” are now used on social media by the governments of 30 countries to support their agendas and attack detractors, according to a report by the nonprofit Freedom House.
What’s the proper response to this?
Data-opolies are bad
Data-opolies like Facebook and Google are bad, bad, bad. Here are all the reasons why.
The Information Apocalypse
Fake news was just the beginning. The postmodern curse is about to amp up.
“What happens when anyone can make it appear as if anything has happened, regardless of whether or not it did?”
Civic engagement in the time of the #hashtag
Ethan Zuckerman is studying how technology is changing how we try to effect social change.
We used to make change mostly using law as our primary lever. Now we use the legal lever less; we use the levers of norms of markets and technology more often. #MeToo is an example of a norms-based campaign. It’s basically saying, “We’re going to challenge how people talk about sexual assault and sexual harassment.” And once we change that norm, there’s other legal pieces, market pieces, that’ll come into play. But at its heart it’s trying to change how we have certain conversations.
Zuckerman, by the way, is also known as the inventor of the pop-up ad, an achievement for which he has since apologized. In his reformed life, he is professor of MIT’s Media Lab.
We don’t have to know what you said…
Classifying Conversation in Digital Communication eschews content analysis of social network threads and looks instead at who participated in the conversation and when. This approach can possibly reveal patterns of behavior.
Wearing my tinfoil hat, I will have to say this is another reason not to participate in social networks at all!