Overview: Politics

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.

Relevancy is one of the best practices for influencer marketing. The second thing is that it’s useful.... have influencers participate in programs that create something useful for potential customers... Co-creation makes it a lot more interesting for the influencer... more likely that they will participate... it was human.... about people, not ne…

Pariser’s work has led him to believe that blaming fake news for fractured discourse is a red herring... The filter bubble explains a lot about how liberals didn’t see Trump coming, but not very much about how he won the election... my guess is that talk-radio, local news, and Fox are a much more important piece of that story than random conservat…

People on opposing sides of the political spectrum read the same articles and then the same corrections, and when new evidence was interpreted as threatening to their beliefs, they doubled down. The corrections backfired. Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm... Just as confirmation bias shields you when y…

In the United States... the chances that two people visiting the same news site have different political views is about 45 percent... the internet is far closer to perfect desegregation than perfect segregation... you are more likely to come across someone with opposing views online than you are offline... a surprising amount of the information …

I’ve been meaning to blog about the ‘backfire effect’ cognitive bias since first coming across it last December. It went to the top of my ToBlog list thanks to a little serendipity...

Cambridge Analytica (part of SCL Group Ltd.) constructed a significant data set based on US voter rolls... Some respected observers argue the firm’s psychographic profiling methodologies may not be nearly as potent as its sales pitch suggests... the firm’s psychographic practices remain as unreviewable as the campaign’s voter advertising. Journal…

rather than asking “Is the internet good for democracy?”... explore whether the human characteristics ... amplified or diminished by the internet support a functioning democratic system... The internet... collapses geography, greatly amplifies people’s ability to make connections ... However, the American democratic system is structured in a wa…

Interactive and participatory media allows viewers to get involved, to become expressive, and give voice. It is inviting and contagious for those who share views—seeing enough notes and posters in public makes it more welcoming to add your own... civic action... moves from digital support to public support only when it is clear that such actions h…

Facebook ... can never be, a platform where people have the power to build anything... the company’s main focus ... analyzing your data and showing you ads in exchange for advertiser’s money. A future where Facebook is the global social infrastructure, is a future with no refuge from advertising and number crunching... the future of social media …

if everyone has the same information, the crowd is no smarter than a single individual... a diverse collection of opinions, especially including minority views, is crucial for creating a smart group... we have an innate desire to imitate our peers... it may also be because of a rational, profit-seeking motivation... The more complex the situation…

if you’re having a conversation with your friend, @person@custom.website, and another user from custom.website wants to chime in, they will be invisible.... how does one end up on this blacklist? ... mastodon.social’s community policy:... your social graph is not portable between platforms ... first principle of a workable, future-proof social ne…

Here we propose the following alternative to a democratic vote: select the answer that is more popular than people predict. We show that this principle yields the best answer under reasonable assumptions about voter behaviour, while the standard ‘most popular’ or ‘most confident’ principles fail under exactly those same assumptions. Like tradition…

the international artists and technologists creating our popular ideas of the future do so in contexts shaped by the pursuit of profit or power. If you can render the future in advance, after all, maybe you can also control it.

The objectivity that matters so much in science is not primarily a characteristic of individual scientists but of scientific communities. Scientists rarely refute their own pet hypotheses... Their fellow scientists will be happy to expose these hypotheses to severe testing... Not being afraid of being wrong... is a value we could promote... Intel…

Facebook officially released a tool Monday that lets its users — all desktop and mobile users in the U.S. — easily contact their local officials. It's called "Town Hall," reminiscent of what Facebook likes to see itself as, especially in political discussion. 

Groupthink produced a failure of the “wisdom of crowds” and an underestimate of Trump’s chances... political experts aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself ... Social media, esp…

Material that arouses heated emotions within the viewer spreads faster and wider than well-considered, evidence-based argument.For an elected leader, a u-turn is seen as the ultimate betrayal, but for a scientist, changing views in the face of better evidence is a sign of the highest integrity.... Imagine, if you will, a sort of spellchecker appl…

Regardless of partisan preference, belief in Trump falsehoods fell after these were corrected ... research found no evidence of a "backfire effect," i.e. an increase in inaccurate beliefs post-correction... [but] Trump supporters were just as likely to vote for their candidate after being exposed to his inaccuracies.... "If the original informat…

interviews ...suggest that its psychological approach was not actually used by the Trump campaign and, furthermore, the company has never provided evidence that it even works.

according to ... data, many UKIP voters will change their views on immigration if politicians can reassure them by highlighting the impressive rate of assimilation already taking place in British society... all ethnic groups – including the majority – want their community to have a future... It’s rare for stories such as these to shift people’s a…

Why Bots and Chatbots Are Optimal Tools for Politics

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias... a trait that should have been selected against. ... it must have some adaptive function... related to our “hypersociability.” ... Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned wit…

a digital community ... a space for anyone interested ... how to make “journalism more responsive to the public’s needs, more representative of the public’s diversity, and more inclusive of the public’s voices.”... Gather... for everyone working in news in some capacity

Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals... “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”,,,an assumption that news... will con…

our current misinformation problem is only the tip of a massive iceberg — and this looming disaster starts with AI...when we see a picture that seems very unlikely, we naturally assume that it is photoshopped... with AI, we are heading toward a world where this will be the case with every form of media: text, voice, video, etc.

Community engagement is about shifting that perspective. It’s about continuously listening, interacting and serving a community. How did the work contribute to the community reaching its goals? Far too often, journalists are obsessed with telling the story. And the story is good. But the story. isn’t. enough. design thinking ... can help us achi…

Over the past week in our Understanding AI series, we heard from a group of professionals exploring the impacts of AI... Sales coaches are valued, highly experienced, and well-paid. It’s hard to believe that a machine could potentially put them out of work, and yet…look at the data. And Sales’ counterparts over in Marketing are hardly any safer...…

With a few paragraphs buried in... bureaucrat-speak, the GDPR also restricts what the EU calls “automated individual decision-making.” ... what neural networks do... prohibit any automated decision that “significantly affects” EU citizens... provides ... a “right to explanation.” ... the option of reviewing how a particular service made a partic…

Convergence is occurring not just across the technology and future scenario curves, but also the various aspects of social change... the social dimension is impacted or squeezed by the curves, while at the same time, social change has a reciprocal effect