Overview: Social Web

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…

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.

‘Vote Leave Take Control’ and ‘Make America Great Again’... future-focused, inspirational and told a sufficiently broad story for enough people to see a reflected image of themselves and their country that they could feel good about... get out of rebuttal mode, ditch the anaemic, snore-inducing, negative messages ... and go all in with a muscular…

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…

The “inclusiveness” of Kekistan and groups like Patriot Prayer... lures people who might not have been traditionally part of the GOP ... into the welcoming bosom of far-right causes. ... mainstreaming the more extreme versions of white nationalism and overt racism by making them appear more friendly and just about “free speech”... the “free speech…

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…

with a group, I as a community editor will have much more control and freedom over managing the discussion.... Here are some of the more interesting ways that publishers are using this feature:

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…

What will misinformation look like in 2030? The full report... includes some ideas for how Wikipedia can fight “misinformation and censorship...:

A number of so-called scientific journals have accepted a Star Wars-themed spoof paper. The manuscript is an absurd mess of factual errors, plagiarism and movie quotes. I know because I wrote ... a spoof manuscript about “midi-chlorians” – the fictional entities which live inside cells and give Jedi their powers in Star Wars.

federal investigators are looking at whether the Trump campaign helped Russia disseminate “fake news.”... just as the Trump administration appears poised to ramp up its own campaign against the news media... a new phase of escalation in Trump’s “fake news” wars, in which he will counter reports ... by calling those reports “fake news.”... Trump …

our analysis shows that social media use is clearly associated with incidental exposure to additional sources of news ... with more politically diverse news diets... The algorithms, of course, continually change... More sources does not necessarily mean more diverse... the majority in most countries and in most groups do not use sources from a…

to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth ... to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump... isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care... he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him …

The problem with connecting everyone on the planet is that a lot of people are assholes. The issue with giving just anyone the ability to live broadcast to a billion people is that someone will use it to shoot up a school. You have to plan for these things. You have to build for the reality we live in, not the one we hope to create....digital laye…

researchers found that the more people use Facebook, the less healthy they are and the less satisfied with their lives... monitored the mental health and social lives of 5,208 adults over two years... Using Facebook was tightly linked to compromised social, physical and psychological health... each statistical jump ... in “liking” other people’s p…

The more you engage with a particular kind of post, the more you will see its ilk... eventually constructs a small “in-group” cluster of Facebook friends and topics that dominate your feed... causes your behavior to change... reinforcing their in-group status… ... because “engagement” is the metric, Facebook inevitably selects for the shocking an…

Fighting people with facts only makes them cling to their beliefs more strongly, further polarising our damaged societies. Different tactics are needed, and they start closer to home than you think.

a “Topics to Follow” box in the News Feed that lets you swipe through a range of themes... Tapping “Follow” brings you to a dedicated feed for that theme populated by a collection of Pages ... tap through to see all the Pages you’ll then see public posts from in your main feed... Facebook could expose people to contrarian views that might make the…

instead of highlighting a single news outlet when you click through to a Trending topic, Facebook will now show a carousel of the other most popular articles written about the subject by different publishers... that could backfire by showing you more biased sources than you’d normally read. Not every fact needs an “alternative” take.