Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
YouTube canceled its top star’s show on Tuesday over his anti-Semitic jokes, complicating its efforts to court television advertisers while also retaining its edgy video stars. YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, distanced itself from its most popular creator—27-year-old Felix Kjellberg, who goes by PewDiePie—after The Wall Street Journal reported he made anti-Semitic jokes or showed Nazi imagery in…
Let’s face it: most of us are more distracted and more frazzled than ever. We are prisoners to our phones: tweeting our every thought, or snapping our every emotion, or Facebooking our every fantasy, feeling or family moment. We scroll, click and swipe our days away, better connected than at any point in humanity —…
Palmer Luckey (AP Images) DALLAS — After being basically in hiding for 117 days, Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey spent his first full day back in the spotlight getting grilled by a feisty lawyer who tried to “make fun” of the fact Luckey had no college degrees. Luckey took the stand here in the northern…
.entry-header Jonathan Albright, a professor at Elon University in North Carolina, is an expert in data journalism who has worked for both Google and Yahoo. He specializes in media analytics and social networks, and he has created a network map or topology that describes the landscape of the fake-news ecosystem. Even if Facebook and Google…
In my exploration of “fake news”, I’ve found some troubling things. And it’s not just the rightwing news network that’s worrying. I’ve recently gone back and taken a preliminary look at the leftwing media ecosystem, trying to map the hyperlinks between these sites – so I’m not trying to establish causation or assign blame as…
.entry-header One of the themes that has emerged during the controversy over “fake news” and its role in the election of Donald Trump is the idea that Russian agents of various kinds helped hack the process by fueling this barrage of false news. But is that really true? In a recent story, the Washington Post…
Perhaps I found myself in the viral content world because I made the careless mistake of taking an arts degree at university. For over half a decade afterwards, I was lucky enough to work as an actual journalist for a few quasi well-known publications. But after years of trying, I gave up pursuing work with…
The 2016 election took place under the spectre of a bubble. Not the subprime mortgage lending bubble that shaped the 2008 election, but the “filter bubble”. Tens of millions of American voters gets their news on Facebook, where highly personalized news feeds dish up a steady stream of content that reinforces users’ pre-existing beliefs. Facebook…
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a 2016 “Innovation Hub” event in Berlin, Germany.Image: Kay Nietfeld/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images Facebook is promising yet again to tackle the spread of misinformation in your News Feed.”We value authentic communication, and hear consistently from those who use Facebook that they prefer not to see misinformation,” Adam Mosseri, the vice president of…
When Mark Zuckerberg defended board member Peter Thiel’s $1.25m donation to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign this week, the Facebook CEO emphasized that support of the candidate did not necessarily constitute “accepting sexual assault”. But part of Thiel’s 1995 book The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus suggests that he may sympathize more with…