Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo As it blocks ad blockers, Facebook is asking its users to help control the ads they see on the site. SAN FRANCISCO — Digital ads pop up online so frequently and ubiquitously that many people are using software to block them. But if you try to stop ads from showing up on Facebook’s desktop…
Draymond Green.(Photo: Thomas Shea, USA TODAY Sports) HOUSTON – Draymond Green says he accidentally posted a graphic crotch shot on his Snapchat account, the latest misstep for the Golden State Warriors’ All-Star forward. Green initially wrote on Twitter that his account had been hacked after the photo was posted Sunday, but later said the mistake…
[This is a joint post with Grant Storey, a Princeton undergraduate who is working with me on a tool to help users understand Facebook’s targeted advertising.] Facebook announced two days ago that it would make its ads indistinguishable from regular posts, and hence impossible to block. But within hours, the developers of Adblock Plus released an…
Screengrab via YouTube Steven Universe storyboard artist Lauren Zuke has left Twitter and deleted her account after days of harassment from an aggressive subsection of Steven Universe fans. “I decided I don’t want to be accessible to thousands of people who think because I work on a TV show that I owe them myself all…
Normani Kordei, a member of the girl group on the rise Fifth Harmony, sat for a lighthearted Facebook Live interview earlier this month. Within a week, she had been chased off Twitter by a mob spewing racist insults. “I’ve not just been cyber bullied, I’ve been racially cyber bullied with tweets and pictures so horrific and racially…
Dear Boss, I have a conundrum. A co-worker of mine has said some pretty awful things on social media, and I don’t know what, if anything, to do about it. I work with this person occasionally. When I was new and had to ask him a few questions about a project, I googled him to…
In 2015, then-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to filter out abusive and hateful replies to President Barack Obama during a Q&A session, sources tell BuzzFeed News. According to these sources, the May 2015 #AskPOTUS town hall came out of Twitter senior leadership’s frustration with the fact that platforms like Reddit had become home…
For nearly its entire existence, Twitter has not just tolerated abuse and hate speech, it’s virtually been optimized to accommodate it. With public backlash at an all-time high and growth stagnating, what is the platform that declared itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party” to do? BuzzFeed News talks to the people…
I don’t normally post about politics (I’m not particularly savvy about polling, which is where data science has had the largest impact on politics). But this weekend I saw a hypothesis about Donald Trump’s twitter account that simply begged to be investigated with data: Every non-hyperbolic tweet is from iPhone (his staff). Every hyperbolic tweet…
On January 16, 2013, Deadspin published an exposé of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o’s fake dead girlfriend. The next morning, reality TV personality Donald Trump tweeted his congratulations. Fourteen minutes later, Deadspin tweeted back “Go fuck yourself.” This is the story of that tweet, as told by those who lived it. Barry Petchesky, Deadspin staffer:…