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 significance of the "Billie Jean" when it came out was do to the fact that the song was about a person being told that they are some kids father.

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.

Businesses aren't "burdened" by Obamacare.

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.

...

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

...

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.

...

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.

...

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."

...

"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."

prescient words ....

So what does it mean now when our President-elect is a star of television reality show?

The Dust Never Settles

Note that Trump is already engaged in a war of words with the New York Times, which has vowed to redouble its efforts to keep our leaders accountable. Trump doesn't like that, apparently. http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/the-new-york-times-tweets-reply-to-trump-comments-on-coverage-1.12612278

We can make the leap from the radio that he is talking about to the social media in our lives today. Perhaps no matter the age, some form of media is shaping the way we think and interact with the world, as we shape the media. (Some would argue it is only one way or the other -- it shapes us or we shape it, but I suspect it is both)

Not always the best way to start an essay. But this rhetorical stance certainly sets the stage for what Murrow is talking about and why he is articulating his thoughts

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.

Everything listed here is important. Are we skipping too quickly past what is commonly called media literacy? Does choosing appropriate images include these considerations--for example, who made the image, for what purpose, with which viewpoints included or excluded, etc.? http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/five-key-questions-form-foundation-media-inquiry

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.

AT&T shouldn't be allowed to merge with Time-Warner. A merger only increases their monopoly. It would do nothing to increase quality or competition in the high-speed Internet market, It will motivate them to give unfair advantages to entertainment from Time-Warner. It will give them too much control of news sources.

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

I worry that the industry has no idea how much research already goes on, or how vital it is to fund.

Maybe my fears are unfounded, but the stakes are high. Startups are the very tip of the iceberg, floating by virtue of work that was done by other people long ago. If people forget we need to fund research now, we’re going to feel it decades later and not know why. Imagine where we’d be without the government-funded research of the 60s!

-- Vi Hart

eleVR is a research team that experiments with immersive media, particularly virtual and augmented reality.

They are NOT a startup.

“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.”

...

“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.”

This is great, because Freedom of speech just makes the people in the country even more free, because they can say what they want to.

This is pretty good for salvadorians who want to practice their english, if they are choosing to learn it. It is also nice for the visiting americans, to read the news if they can't read/speak spanish.

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."

Q&A session with Alan Kay, June 2016.

société du spectacle

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!)

"The BBC Domesday Project was a pair of interactive videodiscs made by the BBC in London to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book and published in November 1986. It was one of the major interactive projects of its time, and it was undertaken on a scale not seen since."

"In 1983, a BBC Television producer named Peter Armstrong wondered if it would be possible to harness the Domesday philosophy to modern Britain. With the large user base of microcomputers in British schools (helped by a government subsidy) it was feasible to ask schools around the UK to survey their areas to produce a database of how Britain looked to the British in 1986."

"...the original Domesday book is still readable after (at the time) 925 years while our 15 year old one is not ... unless you have the original computer/videodisc system and it still works of course."

"The first visible manifestation of a reappearance of the BBC Domesday Project was achieved in a project called CAMiLEON, which was a research project that investigated emulation as a digital preservation strategy and was based at the Universities of Michigan and Leeds. [CAMiLEON web site ... with supreme irony this is now only available via the internet archive]"

What could educators do to better prepare students to interact with digital media that leverages tech to go far beyond what paper and pen affords (tools, skills, etc.)?

As per the linked post:

Using Snow’s essay as a jumping off point, I want to consider a problem that’s been on my mind a great deal since joining the MIT Media Lab five years ago: how do we help smart, well-meaning people address social problems in ways that make the world better, not worse?

Not to defend Ethan, but he’s typically quite explicit about such thing. At least, he doesn’t evade responsibility.

From his about page (also in narrative version in the Do Not Track doc):

Those annoying pop-up windows? My fault, at least in part. I designed a vertically-oriented popup window that included navigation tools and an ad for inclusion on webpages at some point in late 1996 or early 1997. It was intended to be less intrusive than inserting an ad into the middle of a user’s homepage. I won’t claim responsibility (irresponsibility?) for inventing the damned things, and I disclaim any responsibility for cascading popups, popups that move to the top, and those annoying “bot” windows that open different popups every few minutes. Still, the fault is at least in part mine, and I’m sorry. :-)

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.

What Amber explained was exactly what I’d feared: through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted.

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.

When I ask students to post on Youth Voices, I'm asking them to participate in mass media. It's a big jump for some who do very little by friend-to-friend communication.

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.

Check out this sketch from Saturday Night Live that mocks the news media for being uncritically in love with then candidate Barack Obama. There first and second questions for him are whether he is completely comfortable or if they can get anything for him.

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.

We need to recognize different values and think that people value land entitlements, family and community, the elderly, connectivity. If we value these, we will want to hear these things reported all the time. Marketing will follow suit. Perhaps marketing will be the first to move...

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.

Calendar of education Twitter chats, with US timezone selection EST, CST, MST, PST. Click on a chat for more information.

Twitter is rumored to be planning to increase maximum tweet length to 10,000 characters. They want to attract people who don't already use Twitter, and they want to keep users on Twitter for longer periods of time.

If these extended tweets are hidden until clicked, this doesn't bother me. But other recent changes are obnoxious and insulting. Much more of this will make Twitter useless.

• filtering your timeline
• displaying tweets out of order
• making a chain of replies hard to find

Kathleen Fitzpatrick has recently addressed this issue, suggesting implicitly that scholarly societies can mobilize their extant communities in this regard.

Word not fungible

Disney mediated experience

There might be a better term than 'blind' for this. It seems like the content itself, and the users using it, are the things that are blinded. To be blind is to be disabled -- and Instagram and other corporate services are far from that.

These corporate platforms are like walled gardens, or cult leaders, creating propaganda and structures that blind and bind behind closed doors. They are the oppressor, the users the oppressed. And all at the demise of the health of the Internet. By blocking external hyperlinks, they are actually committing a crime against the rest of the Internet, cutting off the very thing that makes the Internet powerful. Let's start calling it what it truly is, an externality, a cost on people who did not choose incur that cost.

Great questions!

Wow. Blaming "the stream" of social media for ISIS! How does that square with the celebration of social media as democratizing force in the Arab Spring?...

A shorter, cuter, and more appropriate distinguishing tag for hypothesis micro-blog-posts just occurred to me: "hyp" -- short for hypothesis, and reminiscent of both "hype" and "hip". :)

Hypothesis might make a fine alternative to Twitter.

• Is anyone using hypothesis in this way yet?
• What would be a good tag to distinguish "tweet" Notes?<br> (I guess it would be cute to use "tweet" as the tag.)
• When there's not a specific webpage involved, what would be the best URLs on which to attach such a Note?<br> (I suppose any page of your own on a social media site or blog would do. I also see that we can annotate pages on local servers.)

The BBC is open sourcing their experimental HTML5 Video Compositor. "This is an experimental JavaScript library for playing back dynamically modifiable edit decision lists (EDLs), and applying WebGL shader based effects."

https://github.com/bbc/html5-video-compositor

Petition to MSNBC and CNN: Stop promoting Donald Trump

Huge follower counts on YouTube and social media DO NOT easily translate to income. And those followers expect you to be "real" -- so they are hostile to advertising and sponsored content.

Do you own a business? It might pay to offer a salary to the producers of a YouTube channel that reaches your target audience -- in exchange for low-profile "brought to you by" links and mentions that won't offend that audience.

https://twitter.com/JBUshow<br> https://twitter.com/gabydunn

During depression, you are likely to find your own past happiness hard to tolerate. It may be worse if that "happiness" was a put-on.

Social media may or may not be a contributing cause of depression. But it is generally not good for someone who is already depressed.

More consolidation in the LMS market?

http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-twitter-users-can-generate-better-ideas

A description of both social bookmarking in particular and most social media practices generally.

What? Who says VR has to be "just wandering around in a world"? You don't have to give the viewer full mobility, or any mobility. You can put their point of view where you want, and disallow interaction with the scenery -- which makes the experience precisely a 3D immersive motion picture. And I'm sure scripted stories can be told while giving the viewer some interaction with characters, and much freedom to move around -- that's just trickier. You'd plan for all the characters in various locations to push the story in a particular direction, or one of several directions, regardless of what the viewer does. The more you let the viewer affect events, the more it becomes a game, rather than a story.

We make the tools. Then the tools make us.

"Careful With That Axe, Eugene" -- Pink Floyd

Memorization of poetry and epic stories is rare in Western culture today. But musicians, comedians, and stage actors work largely by memory What are we missing, if anything? Verbatim memorization of long texts might be nothing more than a waste of brain power. Or if memorization is worthwhile, then books and computers can be used toward that goal, with advantages over oral transmission.

To some degree, the Internet already has revolutionized literature, art, education -- and government and international relations. It's just a slower revolution than some might have hoped. Written language and the printing press are comparable. Telegraph, telephone, movies, radio, and TV rarely approached their potential to accomplish something beyond business or commercial entertainment.

How to appeal if your content is taken down on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Instagram, or Flickr. https://www.twitter.com/censored

Interview with OTOY founder and CEO Jules Urbach. https://twitter.com/julesurbach

Annotations should have “pingbacks”, too. But the most important thing is how to process those later on. We do get into the Activity Streams behind much Learning Analytics.

I have studied in my International Marketing course here how social media is a cultural institution in society and has an extremely powerful influence on societal structures regarding preferences, levels of acceptance of products/technology, and how consumers are influenced to use them.

Interesting thesis.. Media is known as one of the most influential institutions in society today... is he blaming media?

Article focusing on the work of Tego Calderon and other Afro-Caribbean activists in Puerto Rico.

The “social”, with an embedded emphasis on the data part of knowledge building and a nod to solidarity. Cloud computing does go well with collaboration and spelling out the difference can help lift some confusion.

this is fascinating to me - i had no idea of his connections with education. Makes me wonder about Tesla's thoughts on education now. And how he'd feel about filmstrips, which are in essence super cheap motion pictures.

If the academy rejects Place I'd advise social media companies to hire her. Damn. Understanding: so high!

I would hire Place as a social media product designer. This paragraph reflects deeper thinking about social media than most people I know who create the platforms.

It would be worth interrogating what it is about "the nature of Twitter" that makes this so.

I think it has to do with the intersection of a number of things:

• 140 character limit
• Broadcast and re-broadcast that de-couples the Tweet from the authorial context
• Sub-tweeting and shaming as attire and slacktivism

I'm sure that's only the surface.

"Unmediated"?

That depends on where you're looking. Here we have a poet, with their own history and an established dialogue with race, transcribing in a completely different medium than the original text, surrounded by controversy. How in hell can this be said to be "unmediated"?

leveraging social media, making annotation social

I find Taboola to be so awful that I question the judgment of these people for ever having used it.

The absolute worst incentives. Engagement generates reach? This network is going to amplify the people who already participate the most. This is absolutely upside down. This is rewarding the powerful with more power.

Would like to know more about the Cold War ideas referenced above.