Advocacy, leadership, social media

social media use

NBC News is sharing a database of 200,000 tweets from accounts that pushed Russian propaganda during the 2016 US election.

Mike Hearn, formerly with Google, calls a recent report on Twitter bots promoting Brexit "deliberate lying, or if you like, fake news."

Without having looked into it further than reading his response, I'm doubtful about his doubtfulness. I suspect the kind of bots he was trying to identify were a different variety. He says he never saw "cyborg" accounts. He doesn't mention that Russia is known to employ people for social media propaganda.

Is it, really? I think this confuses the issue.

Digital Hydra: Security Implications of False Information Online (NATO StratCom COE, Nov 2017)

Wer den Social Media fernbleibt, ist vielleicht online, vielleicht auch nicht. In beiden Fällen können die, die online sind und bei Social Media mitmachen, denjenigen, der fernbleibt, nicht «sehen», auch nicht als Leerstelle. Wer nicht bei den Social Media mitmacht, existiert – aus der Innensicht – in gewisser Weise nicht. Es sei denn, das Fernbleiben wird innerhalb der Social Media thematisiert. Und das kann nur, wer mitmacht oder prominent mitgemacht hat. Aus den Social Media heraus könnte zwar nach außen auf jemanden verwiesen werden, der nicht mitmacht – aber wäre das Kommunikation? Doch nur dann, wenn diese Person innerhalb der Social Media bekannt ist. «Ich mache bei Euch nicht (mehr) mit!» mach bei Social Media keinen Sinn. Ich würde also behaupten: im Zusammenhang mit Social Media ist Nicht-Kommunizieren durchaus möglich.

Jonathan Albright says that Instagram is another major channel of Russian propaganda.

IRA (Internet Research Agency) - a Russian troll factory.

David Karpf argues that actual user engagement among US citizens can be hard to estimate, since a lot of apparent activity comes from fake accounts.

This (“[hearts] increased likes by a billion!”) is said by an actual employee of Twitter as if it means something, but it means nothing. Clicking on a heart is not some inherent good like increasing exercise, or upping the amount of fiber in your diet, or decreasing poverty. It’s a decision to provide Twitter with more data. That’s it.

The truth is many people working these jobs are so far into the machine they don’t see the difference between platform engagement (clicking on hearts) and civic and personal engagement (enjoying life more fully, thinking about things more deeply, empathizing more broadly, imagining and building a better world). They upped the click rate on a heart which is good for marketing. They are food scientists trying to tweak a flavor profile to get people to consume thirteen more Doritos a day.

This is something that's been nagging at me for the last couple of weeks.

Does it all matter? Does that tweet, share, thumbs up, like really matter at all? If you/we/I share out of tweet of support, outrage, or indifference, does it really matter on the grand scale.

Yes, I might have some likeminded individuals value it, read it, use it, share it. But, ultimately aren't we really just shouting into the echo chambers that have been built up for us thanks to these algorithms and networks? We're preaching to the choir.

I'd like to think that open can/will combat this...but unsure.

I think this is a post for Hybrid Ped or elsewhere. Lemme know if this resonates with anyone and you want to write it out.

Kris Schaffer distinguishes bots, sockpuppets, and trolls, and talks about how to identify botnets. Twitter and other social media sites should be able to eliminate many of the bogus accounts. But they don't.

Interesting section

Twitter took 11 months to close a Russian troll account that claimed to speak for the Tennessee Republican Party even after that state's real GOP notified the social media company that the account was a fake.

The account, @TEN_GOP, was enormously popular, amassing at least 136,000 followers between its creation in November 2015 and when Twitter shut it down in August

The Bystander Effect - Crowds sometimes fail to help someone in trouble: everyone assumes someone else will do it.

Similarly, people in groups often fail to check facts as carefully as they would if they were alone. They assume someone else has already checked.

Careless people, and bots, tend to share news quickly, without bothering to fact check. Once something has been shared thousands of times, even fairly careful people are likely to assume it must be true.

Again, if social media was to think a bit bigger, there are ways to apply this insight to deprivilege the influence of the quickest, and privilege the influence of those making informed decisions.

Mike Monteiro's short history of Twitter from the point of view of a long-time user. They went bad when they started tolerating racists for the sake of continued growth. And now Trump's tweets are a genuine threat to the entire world.

Back in 2012, Zeynep Tufecki pointed out that election campaigns driven by big-data and social media could be bad for democracy.

This is a critical distinction.

Networks are like 'air'; they are all around us constantly. This class will not only help you see networks but also to see the complexity of them. They are growing more complex and more important to how our society functions. I often wonder if networks are not replacing institutions.

I think this is why we are so fascinated by social media; it has revealed what has always been under the surface. To me, networks are like 'air'; all around us but hard to see. SNA reveals the air.

I think this is a central question of our age--does social media make us happier? Increase democracy? Smarter? And the question always changes because the technology always changes. I now wonder about SnapChat. It functions a bit differently but with the same goal of connection. Does it produce better feelings than FB? Worse? More vicitimization? Less?

I think this is why they are hard to analyze...it is like trying to see and understand air. It is everywhere so it feels so normal and invisible. Networks, particularly human networks are the same. Humans have always been embedded in networks; we live, thrive and die in networks. They are another form of 'air'. The difference is that today, social media has made them more visible. We can now see them and analyze them in new ways. Hence, why this class is online :-)

Some ways to identify bots on Twitter.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07592

Bot tweets are retweeted by humans at the same rate as human tweets. Stories propped up by 1,000 bots spread just like stories propped up by a thousand humans.

The backfire effect is getting turbocharged online. I think we’re getting more angry and convinced about everything, not because we’re surrounded by like-minded people, but by people who disagree with us. Social media allows you to find the worst examples of your opponents. It’s not a place to have your own views corroborated, but rather where your worst suspicions about the other lot can be quickly and easily confirmed.

I concur. Diigo could have been a leader in the social annotation space, way ahead of Hypothesis. But now I think H is gaining more momentum than Diigo, because it adheres to open standards.

Em.. this is an interesting statement. So Diigo is moving away from being social?

The Shouting Class -- people who criticize things as a way of life.

we’re at a pivotal point not just in the life of our democracy, but in how we think, read, and make choices. Selective information is being presented to us in a way that encourages selective reading and offers psychological and social rewards for, to put it bluntly, being stupid and submissive and spreading stupid to submit others.

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What’s different now is that this propaganda is being gamed by professionals in a massive, orchestrated data campaign at a volume, pace, and consistency that not only muddies the truth, but completely eclipses the truth. Destroys the very notion of truth.

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The truth about the truth is that we believe because we want to, because our ability to think independently is a point of pride for Americans. The people behind the curtain are telling us the same story we tell ourselves about ourselves. But this is also a vulnerability: Independence is in its purist form a kind of division. If you exploit it the right way, you can turn a democracy against itself.

Analysis of a subreddit for Trump supporters, based on comparisons of the users of various subreddits.

The history of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.<br> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/05/20/the-seth-rich-conspiracy-shows-how-fake-news-still-works/

Participatory Propaganda - an analysis of current techniques for exploiting our online behavior. https://twitter.com/lageneralista

research on how ideas spread through social media

Detection of fake news in social media based on who liked it.

we show that Facebook posts can be classified with high accuracy as hoaxes or non-hoaxes on the basis of the users who "liked" them. We present two classification techniques, one based on logistic regression, the other on a novel adaptation of boolean crowdsourcing algorithms. On a dataset consisting of 15,500 Facebook posts and 909,236 users, we obtain classification accuracies exceeding 99% even when the training set contains less than 1% of the posts.

New Hampshire state legislator discovered to be the founder of the misogynistic online group The Red Pill.(Which has nearly 200,000 subscribers. Yikes.)

digital identity, as a practice, operates counter to the collaboration and cooperation that need to be part of digital citizenship.

This is our contemporary contradiction: identity as a construct in contemporary social media spaces makes for pretty rotten social spaces.

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We’re algorithmically manipulated. We’re surveilled. We’re encouraged to speak rather than listen. We’re stuck engaging in visibility strategies, whether we admit it or not, in order simply to be acknowledged and seen within a social or professional space.

Our digital identities do not – and at the level of technological affordances and inherent structure, cannot – create a commons that is actually a healthy pro-social space.

The key changes we can make in the short term (without requiring sites to relinquish their business models) are to teach social software to forget, to give it predictable security properties, and to sever the financial connection between online advertising and extremism.

Orwell imagined a world in which the state could shamelessly rewrite the past. The Internet has taught us that people are happy to do this work themselves, provided they have their peer group with them, and a common enemy to unite against. They will happily construct alternative realities for themselves, and adjust them as necessary to fit the changing facts.

Finally, surveillance capitalism makes it harder to organize effective long-term dissent. In an setting where attention is convertible into money, social media will always reward drama, dissent, conflict, iconoclasm and strife. There will be no comparable rewards for cooperation, de-escalation, consensus-building, or compromise, qualities that are essential for the slow work of building a movement. People who should be looking past their differences will instead spend their time on purity tests and trying to outflank one another in a race to the fringes.

Obviously, in this situation whoever controls the algorithms has great power. Decisions like what is promoted to the top of a news feed can swing elections. Small changes in UI can drive big changes in user behavior. There are no democratic checks or controls on this power, and the people who exercise it are trying to pretend it doesn’t exist

On Facebook, social dynamics and the algorithms’ taste for drama reinforce each other. Facebook selects from stories that your friends have shared to find the links you’re most likely to click on. This is a potent mix, because what you read and post on Facebook is not just an expression of your interests, but part of a performative group identity.

So without explicitly coding for this behavior, we already have a dynamic where people are pulled to the extremes. Things get worse when third parties are allowed to use these algorithms to target a specific audience.

any system trying to maximize engagement will try to push users towards the fringes. You can prove this to yourself by opening YouTube in an incognito browser (so that you start with a blank slate), and clicking recommended links on any video with political content.

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This pull to the fringes doesn’t happen if you click on a cute animal story. In that case, you just get more cute animals (an experiment I also recommend trying). But the algorithms have learned that users interested in politics respond more if they’re provoked more, so they provoke. Nobody programmed the behavior into the algorithm; it made a correct observation about human nature and acted on it.

Digital Social Networks, particularly Facebook and Twitter.

Makes an interesting point about homogenisation in Facebook and Twitter (i.e. people are a binary of friend or not friend, categories that collapse all different categories.

Interestingly, both Facebook and Twitter have taken steps to address this recently.

Trump-Russia sock puppets posing as "Bernie bros" targeted women and black men with harassment on Twitter when they expressed support for Hillary Clinton.

2 April, 2017 - International Fact-Checking Day Lesson plan and several how-to guides.

Nice talk and nice use of social media

Useful: Zuckerberg's article is here available outside the Facebook silo.

This "continuing dialogue" also seems to be further embraced on a bigger scale and globally due to influences like social media and bloggers.

Maybe that distance is a good thing?

The data Facebook collects, and what they do with it.

This sounds a lot like current complaints of the interwebs, particularly social media. Everyone's a critic!

This reminds me of Hume: "A good palate is not tried by strong flavors; but by a mixture of small ingredients, where we are still sensible of each part, notwithstanding its minuteness and its confusion with the rest" (835).

Anyone can praise or blame based on the most obvious and strongest characteristics of something. Taste is only at play when one is able to praise or blame based on the subtle and intricate details of the thing under review.

Black women using technology to advocate for their erasure.

black women are being erased from the discussion. Race in general plays a role on how much a topic is spoken about. This case was not even mentioned or discussed until black women started the talk.

Researchers at University College London have discovered a Twitter botnet of more than 350,000 accounts created in 2013, and dormant since then. They've also found another one with more than 500,000 accounts.

never mind that fake news is neither new (forgery, quackery, and conspiracy theorizing are not recent inventions) nor exclusively right-leaning. The new form it has taken in readily sharable social media, however, has made it easy for conventional media to excuse themselves from responsibility for how the election was covered.

"Fake news" was a small factor, compared to mainstream media treating Trump as a legitimate candidate, and sensationalizing hacked emails that contained nothing significant.

The meaning of the term "fake news" and the dilution of that meaning.

It doesn't have to be just student feedback about the operations and mechanics of the course, or as a replacement for a course survey tool. You can also use the platform as a way to engage students on the content relevant to the learning outcomes of the course. And use the platform to connect learners with people in the field of study.

Did Media Literacy Backfire?

Media literacy asks people to raise questions and be wary of information that they’re receiving. People are. Unfortunately, that’s exactly why we’re talking past one another.

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Addressing so-called fake news is going to require a lot more than labeling. It’s going to require a cultural change about how we make sense of information, whom we trust, and how we understand our own role in grappling with information.

Tweets deleted by public officials and candidates.

Lindy West's thoughtful and amusing goodbye to Twitter. She concisely describes Twitter's good and bad sides. Then she leaves me wondering if any of us should be using it.

I quit Twitter because it feels unconscionable to be a part of it – to generate revenue for it, participate in its profoundly broken culture and lend my name to its legitimacy. Twitter is home to a wealth of fantastic anti-Trump organising, as well, but I’m personally weary of feeling hostage to a platform that has treated me and the people I care about so poorly. We can do good work elsewhere.

I’m pretty sure “ushered in kleptocracy” would be a dealbreaker for any other company that wanted my business.

Selling user data should be illegal. And the customer data a company is allowed to collect and store should be very limited.

Under the guidance of Jared Kushner, a senior campaign advisor and son-in-law of President-Elect Trump, Parscale quietly began building his own list of Trump supporters. Trump’s revolutionary database, named Project Alamo, contains the identities of 220 million people in the United States, and approximately 4,000 to 5,000 individual data points about the online and offline life of each person. Funded entirely by the Trump campaign, this database is owned by Trump and continues to exist.

Trump’s Project Alamo database was also fed vast quantities of external data, including voter registration records, gun ownership records, credit card purchase histories, and internet account identities. The Trump campaign purchased this data from certified Facebook marketing partners Experian PLC, Datalogix, Epsilon, and Acxiom Corporation. (Read here for instructions on how to remove your information from the databases of these consumer data brokers.)

Trump's campaign used carefully targeted negative ads to suppress voter turnout.

With Project Alamo as ammunition, the Trump digital operations team covertly executed a massive digital last-stand strategy using targeted Facebook ads to ‘discourage’ Hillary Clinton supporters from voting. The Trump campaign poured money and resources into political advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, the Facebook Audience Network, and Facebook data-broker partners.

“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” a senior Trump official explained to reporters from BusinessWeek. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.”

100,000 personalized collections of lies.

Parscale also deployed software to optimize the design and messaging of Trump’s Facebook ads. Describing one such test, the Wall Street Journal reporter Christopher Mims writes that “one day in August, his campaign sprayed ads at Facebook users that led to 100,000 different webpages, each micro-targeted at a different segment of voters.” In total, Trump’s digital team built or generated more than 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content.

Donna Zuckerberg on replying to writers who are being harassed.

Helpful responses:

• "You're doing great work."
• "I'm sorry this is happening to you."
• Signal boost, if that's what they want.
• Support from old friends.
• Help from close friends and coworkers.

Less helpful:

• "That's horrible." (They already know.)
• "I reported the account." (She feels this doesn't accomplish anything. I think you should always report such accounts. You just don't need to tell the victim about it.)
• "What has this country come to?" (This sounds like you never noticed racism and sexism until recently.)
• "Hopefully it will stop soon." (The idea that the harassers have moved on to someone else is not a great comfort.)

Unhelpful:

• Don't ask, "What did you expect?"
• Don't suggest the victim should avoid writing about particular topics.
• Don't assume you know how they feel.
• Don't criticize them for showing the threats. (If there's some reason it bothers you, mute or unfollow.)

Hypothes.is nicely bridges the worlds of social media and formal education.

Twitter may be a platform that mostly lives in the public, but it isn't a public platform. It's also one of the reasons I have my own site.

http://digipo.io/doku.php<br> The Digital Polarization Initiative<br> "The primary purpose of this wiki is to provide a place for students to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in their Twitter and Facebook feeds. It's like a student-driven Snopes, but with a broader focus: we don't aim to just investigate myths, but to provide context and sanity to all the news – from the article about voter fraud to the health piece on a new cancer treatment."

http://phys.org/news/2016-12-pro-trump-bot-colonised-pro-clinton-twitter.html

http://politicalbots.org/?p=787 Bots and Automation over Twitter during the U.S. Election

http://politicalbots.org/ An international research group studying political bots.

The Web has become an insidious propaganda tool. To fight it, digital literacy education must rise beyond technical proficiency to include wisdom.

• Double-check every claim before you share.
• Be wary of casual scrolling.<br> Everything you see affects your attitudes.
• Don't automatically disbelieve the surreal (or unpleasant).
• Do not exaggerate your own claims.
• Be prepared to repeat the truth over and over.
• Curate good resources, and share updates to them.
  • It will reinforce the previous information.
  • it will boost search engine rankings of the collection.

A survey of voters asked if they remembered seeing a headline, and if so, whether they believed it was true.

It may come as no surprise that high percentages of Trump voters believed stories that favored Trump or demonized Clinton. But the percentage of Clinton voters who believed the fake stories was also fairly high!

familiarity equals truth: when we recognize something as true, we are most often judging if this is something we’ve heard more often than not from people we trust.

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if you want to be well-informed it’s not enough to read the truth — you also must avoid reading lies.

An analysis of links among "fake news" sites and mainstream news sites and social media.

There’s a vast network of dubious “news” sites. Most are simple in design, and many appear to be made from the same web templates. These sites have created an ecosystem of real-time propaganda: they include viral hoax engines that can instantly shape public opinion through mass “reaction” to serious political topics and news events. This network is triggered on-demand to spread false, hyper-biased, and politically-loaded information.

Steve Bannon, founder of Breitbart News and the newly appointed chief strategist to Trump, is on Cambridge Analytica’s board and it has emerged that the company is in talks to undertake political messaging work for the Trump administration. It claims to have built psychological profiles using 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters. It knows their quirks and nuances and daily habits and can target them individually.

Boy, we have problems:

• Fake news. (Bad, but not as bas as...)
• Extremist propaganda (increasingly, from government)
• Disinformation created to cause chaos and distrust.
• Tracking of individuals to create personalized propaganda.
• Google, Facebook, etc. merrily amplifying it.

This is our internet. Not Google’s. Not Facebook’s. Not rightwing propagandists. And we’re the only ones who can reclaim it.

This is our nation, and our world.<br> It is up to us to reclaim it.

The fact that people are reading about these fake news stories and realising that this could have an effect on politics and elections, it’s like, ‘Which planet have you been living on?’ For Christ’s sake, this is obvious.”

It's only obvious once you realize how many people are exposed to bullshit daily, and how many people are stupid enough to listen to it.

If you aren't an idiot, and you don't associate with idiots, you can spend all day on the web every day and rarely see any of this shit.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of Web sites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers.

http://warontherocks.com/2016/11/trolling-for-trump-how-russia-is-trying-to-destroy-our-democracy

Another group, PropOrNot, is supposed to be releasing their study on Russian propaganda tomorrow, 25 November. [Update: PropOrNot apparently labelled so many sites as "Russian propaganda" that it is practically a piece of disinformation all by itself. Maybe they're Russian. :) http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-propaganda-about-russian-propaganda

The users of a subreddit devoted to Donald Trump have been a big hassle for Reddit moderators

“At this point, I think reddit is a lost cause because of the admins inability to take action on the group while simultaneously being overwhelmed with dealing with the individual,” a moderator told us. “No other subreddit has been able to be used [as] a platform for harassment for this long in Reddit’s history. And it’s likely going to be what kills it.” Said another: “The social experiment has run its course.”

The names and pseudonyms of multiple sources in this story have been omitted to protect their anonymity due to credible threats.

Interview with a man who has run several fake news sites since 2013.

Well, this isn't just a Trump-supporter problem. This is a right-wing issue.

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We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.

Journalism faces an 'existential crisis' in the Trump era, Christine Amanpour

As all the international journalists we honor in this room tonight and every year know only too well: First the media is accused of inciting, then sympathizing, then associating -- until they suddenly find themselves accused of being full-fledged terrorists and subversives. Then they end up in handcuffs, in cages, in kangaroo courts, in prison

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First, like many people watching where I was overseas, I admit I was shocked by the exceptionally high bar put before one candidate and the exceptionally low bar put before the other candidate.

It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth.

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The winning candidate did a savvy end run around us and used it to go straight to the people. Combined with the most incredible development ever -- the tsunami of fake news sites -- aka lies -- that somehow people could not, would not, recognize, fact check, or disregard.

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The conservative radio host who may be the next white house press secretary says mainstream media is hostile to traditional values.

I would say it's just the opposite. And have you read about the "heil, victory" meeting in Washington, DC this past weekend? Why aren't there more stories about the dangerous rise of the far right here and in Europe? Since when did anti-Semitism stop being a litmus test in this country?

Paul Horner publishes fake news that is often shared widely. He claims that his stories are intended to be taken as satire like The Onion.

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.

My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

this is not exclusive to Facebook and Twitter, or just during this election. We suck at understanding history or considering the future when we adopt new technologies -- this is often intentional. We need to make sure we are this critical when any new technology comes along, and work hard to understand the historical motives and ideology behind the tech, as well as get better at exploring possible dystopian futures brought on by each technological tool

https://iheartmob.org/<br> http://www.troll-busters.com/<br> http://wmcspeechproject.com/

HeartMob, TrollBusters, and the Women's Media Center Speech Project provide support for people being harassed online.

But as managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, Brooke Binkowski believes Facebook’s perpetuation of phony news is not to blame for our epidemic of misinformation. “It’s not social media that’s the problem,” she says emphatically. “People are looking for somebody to pick on. The alt-rights have been empowered and that’s not going to go away anytime soon. But they also have always been around.”

The misinformation crisis, according to Binkowski, stems from something more pernicious. In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly.

The problem is not JUST social media and fake news. But most of the false stories do not come from mainstream media. The greatest evils of mainstream media are sensationalism, and being too willing to spin stories the way their sources want them to.

But a former employee, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, disagrees and says his old boss is being "more than a little disingenuous here."

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"There's an entire political team and a massive office in D.C. that tries to convince political advertisers that Facebook can convince users to vote one way or the other," Garcia-Martinez says. "Then Zuck gets up and says, 'Oh, by the way, Facebook content couldn't possibly influence the election.' It's contradictory on the face of it."

Mike Caulfield says Facebook's feed algorithms are far from its only problem. The entire site design encourages sharing of items that users haven't inspected beyond reading the headline.

People are definitely losing jobs and opportunities based on their social media presence. Distasteful photos should not even be taken let alone shared online.

Facebook hasn’t told the public very much about how its algorithm works. But we know that one of the company’s top priorities for the news feed is “engagement.” The company tries to choose posts that people are likely to read, like, and share with their friends. Which, they hope, will induce people to return to the site over and over again.

This would be a reasonable way to do things if Facebook were just a way of finding your friends’ cutest baby pictures. But it’s more troubling as a way of choosing the news stories people read. Essentially, Facebook is using the same criteria as a supermarket tabloid: giving people the most attention-grabbing headlines without worrying about whether articles are fair, accurate, or important.

This is a modern update to a classic confidence game—find a risky scenario with limited possibilities, bet on every single combination, and then hide your failures.

Today, all possible outcomes can be posted to any website that allows accounts to be set to private, or that isn't likely to be noticed. After the fact, the incorrect results can be deleted before making the account public.

This post points out that this trick could be used to "predict" election results, making it appear that they were fixed ahead of time. So it's potentially very dangerous.

23 suggested improvements for Twitter, mostly related to dealing with harassment. (13 Feb 2016)

“Among millennials, especially,” [Ross] Douthat argues, “there’s a growing constituency for whom rightwing ideas are so alien or triggering, leftwing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.”

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“I don’t see sufficient evidence to buy the argument about siloing and confirmation bias,” Jeff Jarvis,a professor at the City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism said. “That is a presumption about the platforms – because we in media think we do this better. More important, such presumptions fundamentally insult young people. For too long, old media has assumed that young people don’t care about the world.”

“Newspapers, remember, came from the perspective of very few people: one editor, really,” Jarvis said. “Facebook comes with many perspectives and gives many; as Zuckerberg points out, no two people on Earth see the same Facebook.”

Stephen Downes on why he's quitting Facebook.

Facebook has me going both ways. They make me pay money in order to allow people to read my content, and then they throw advertising at the people who are trying to read that content. And now they're tightening the screws.

And even as it clamps down on content, Facebook favours the wrong people, siding once again with the bottom-dwellers of the internet.

Sounds like a very quick summary of what Ben Thompson was saying two weeks ago. But, in this case, it’s from “the horse’s mouth”.

From his interviews with former trolls employed by Russia, Chen gathered that the point of their jobs "was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person."

"Russia's information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history," Chen wrote. "And its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space."

I can even annotate folks comments WITHIN threads.. hmm Yet it will all pop up here.. as opposed to being linked to the actual post.. hmmm

Testing the amazing hypothes.is on FB.

Where is the Facebook shareable link for this video? I would like to hit share, for it to look pretty and for you -hypothes.is- to earn and retain new subscribers?

(If I share this via youtube, the funnel flows to youtube. Do you have a dedicated "landing page" with simply this vid? I'll reply here if I find a "pretty" way.. Thanks Guys!)

Automated posts from social media accounts pretending to be real individuals are being used to influence public opinion. (The Chinese government uses regular employees to post "real" messages at strategic times.)

Ellison, Nicole B., and Yuehua Wu. 2008. “Blogging in the Classroom: A Preliminary Exploration of Student Attitudes and Impact on Comprehension.” Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 17 (1): 99–122.

Harvard researchers estimate the Chinese government fabricates 488 million social media posts each year. This is only about 1 in 178 posts, but they are made in strategic bursts, with the intent to distract. The posts are made by government employees as an additional job duty.

It's the same propaganda we get in the West.

This book is on my list. It seems to echo the thoughts in American Girls.

Jon Udell on productive social discourse.

changeable minds<br> What’s something you believed deeply, for a long time, and then changed your mind about?

David Gray's Liminal Thinking points out that we all have beliefs that are built on hidden foundations. We need to carefully examine our own beliefs and their origins. And we need to avoid judgment as we consider the beliefs of others and their origins.

Wael Ghonim asks us to design social media that encourages civility, thoughtfulness, and open minds rather than self-promotion, click-bait, and echo chambers.

Reasons Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have dominated the Web over blogs and independent sites:

• People prefer a single interface that makes it easy to flip or scroll through the new stuff. They don't like visiting a dozen different sites with different interfaces.
• Most people don't want to deal with site structure or complex editors, let alone markup languages or servers.
• Facebook quickly became a friends-and-family network, which pulled in more of the same.
• Following and unfollowing should only require a single click.
• Retweets and mentions introduce new people to follow, even if you aren't looking for them.
• Reposting should be easy, include obvious attribution, and comments should be attached.
• RSS readers had the potential to offer these things, but standard ways of using it were not widely adopted. Then Google Reader pushed out other readers, but was nevertheless shut down.

Let go of the idea of people reading your stuff on your site, and develop or support interfaces that put your readers in control of how they view the web instead of giving the control to the people with the servers.

learning code = computer science? I guess, but I also wonder if my need to learn code has come more from a desire to communicate on social media more effectively.

Most research is too expensive to really gamify. Many researchers are publishing to either get or keep their jobs. The institutionalization of "publish or perish" if anything has already accomplished the "gamification", Academia.edu is just helping to increase the reach of the publication. Given that research shows that most published research isn't even read, much less cited, how bad can Academia.edu really be?

Given his following discussion, I can only imagine what he thinks of big publishers in academia and that debate.

They must have changed this, as pretty much anyone with an email address (including non-academics) can create a free account and use the system.

35 million users is a lovely number, but their engagement must be spectacularly bad if only 8 million texts are available.

This is the first time in a long time (maybe ever) that I've felt sympathy for the downfall of traditional journalism. Social media as a kind of echo chamber is really scary and almost sounds like a science fiction story.

Fascinating to think about the simultaneously democratic and demagogic potential of social media from #ArabSpring to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.

Sequencing calls to action from liking to commenting.

So social engagement increases brand loyalty.

Seems like that could be a key to Medium's success.

Awareness of a user's lifecycle from exploring to adoption to megauser is key.

And references to Granovetter, with his famous 1973 article. This [article on sports media and Twitter](http://www.cabdirect.org/abstracts/20143219270.html sounds contextually relevant.

Alice Maz on communication failures due to different cultures of conversation and values.

Most people value feelings, shared perspectives, and social status. They see correction as an attempt to knock them down a peg. Nerds value facts, logic, and the sharing of information. A genuine nerd shares information with no intention of knocking anyone down, and prefers being corrected to remaining misinformed.