Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In March of last year, Fusion published an article detailing the ways in which Nextdoor, a social network for neighbors, had become a home for racial profiling. In the “Crime and Safety” forum of many Nextdoor communities, users were reporting people as “suspicious” seemingly based primarily on the color of their skin. Nextdoor CEO Nirav…
July 27, 2016 07/27/2016 11:19 a.m. The Dark Internet Humor of Harambe Jokes By Brian Feldman Share Share Tweet Share Share Email Print Photo: SelectALL/Cincinatti Zoo/Getty Images What is so funny about dead animals? The answer is: Nothing. And yet Harambe, the gorilla who was shot and killed in May by security personnel at the…
It has been more than three months since Gizmodo first published a story claiming Facebook’s human editors were suppressing conservative news content on the site’s Trending Topics section. Facebook vehemently denied the report, but has been dealing with the story’s aftermath ever since. On Friday, Facebook announced another small but notable change to Trending Topics:…
Facebook will no longer employ humans to write descriptions for items in its Trending section, which attracted controversy over allegations of political bias in May. Topics appearing in the Trending section will now appear solely as a short phrase or single word, with an indication of the number of people discussing it on the social…
A Texas-based former porn star who says her career was ruined by years of online harassment is suing Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for $1 billion in federal court. As the Daily Mail first reported on Wednesday afternoon, Paree La’Tiejira—who appeared in over 40 adult films under the alias Lady Paree—filed a lawsuit in the Southern district…
As of 2014, Twitter estimated that as many as 23 million of its 271 million users were bots, or automated accounts taught by code to Tweet according to the desires of their creators. For example, you might see that one bot posts a photo from NASA’s Cassini mission every hour, while others recycle politicians’ old…
There’s an ongoing conversation about race and racism on social media — but white people are missing most of it. A Pew Research Center report released Monday asked Americans who identified as black, white, and Hispanic about how much they post about race, and how much content they see about it. Pew studied “social media…
Using Facebook is a trade. You get a way to socialize over the Internet, and the company gets to rent out your eyeballs to advertisers. But today Facebook signaled that it thinks millions of people are cheating on that deal by using ad-blocking browser extensions. The social network says that it will start tweaking…
Facebook can’t win the war it started on ad blockers last week. So say Princeton assistant professor Arvind Narayanan and undergraduate Grant Storey, who have created an experimental ad “highlighter” for the Chrome browser to prove it. When you have Facebook Ad Highlighter installed, ads in the News Feed are grayed out and written…
By Andrew Bosworth, VP, Ads & Business Platform As more and more content has shifted to the internet, online experiences have improved dramatically, becoming more immersive and intuitive. But many digital ads haven’t kept up. We’ve all experienced a lot of bad ads: ads that obscure the content we’re trying to read, ads that slow down…