Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
If you haven’t read the two big Gizmodo stories on the human curators of the Facebook “trending news” box, you should stop and go do that now. They are fascinating: the first one details the working conditions and practices of the people paid to select stories for that box, and the second one alleges that…
Facebook Trending Topics is that special box you see on the right hand side of your Newsfeed that tells you what news is trending. Most people thought it was simply an algorithmic amalgamation of what Facebook users were talking about until Gizmodo reported this month that it’s actually curated by human beings. And some of…
For many of us, Facebook has intertwined itself into our lives to such an extent that it often seems to fade into the background—it’s always there, like the atmosphere, and so we stop thinking about it. But now and then, the giant social network does something that forces us to consider its over-sized influence on…
Illustration: Jim Cooke Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in…
Moderators of Reddit’s popular technology subreddit, which boasts more than 5 million subscribers, are considering banning links from publishers, specifically Wired and Forbes, that force users to disable ad-blocking tools to access their sites. In a message posted yesterday, r/technology moderator “cerq” signaled out Forbes for reportedly serving users malware when ad-blockers are turned off resulting…
Social media firm cuts access to Dataminr, a service used to identify unfolding terror attacks, political unrest ENLARGE Dataminr says it first notified clients about the March attacks in Brussels 10 minutes ahead of news media. PHOTO: GEERT VANDEN/ZUMA PRESS By CHRISTOPHER S. STEWART and MARK MAREMONT May 8, 2016 7:54 p.m. ET 53 COMMENTS Twitter Inc. cut off U.S. intelligence agencies…
Far off in a hidden part of Reddit, a conversation about lipstick is about to turn ugly. The commenters have noticeably girly names, like “PrincessBatman,” “BaroquePrincess,” “KittenBeauty” and (ahem) “MindVagina.” Above them is a banner decorated with a mildly deranged collage, like something a teenage goth would blu-tack inside her school locker. It features…
Jude Milhon, a cyberfeminist who died in 2003, was one of the first women to witness online harassment. Writing in Wired magazine, she urged women to “toughen up”. “Whether we’re set upon by zealots or bigots or abusively correct politicos, we have to learn to defend ourselves,” she said. The year was 1995, and Jude…
Two weekends ago, after Beyoncé released a mythologically forceful visual album that attached the most significant art of her career to the narrative of her husband Jay Z cheating on her with a woman she called “Becky with the good hair,” the fashion designer Rachel Roy—presumably operating of her own volition—inserted herself in that narrative…
Illustration by Jim Cooke Depending on whom you ask, Facebook is either the savior or destroyer of journalism in our time. An estimated 600 million people see a news story on Facebook every week, and the social network’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has been transparent about his goal to monopolize digital news distribution. “When news is…