Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Added by PressForward
Hyperpartisan political Facebook pages and websites are consistently feeding their millions of followers false or misleading information, according to an analysis by BuzzFeed News. The review of more than 1,000 posts from six large hyperpartisan Facebook pages selected from the right and from the left also found that the least accurate pages generated some of…
(Amy Cavenaile/The Washington Post; iStock) The Intersect ran a little experiment a few weeks ago: During the work day, we’d check in with Facebook each hour, on the hour, and record which topics were trending for us on the platform. The resulting daily pop-up newsletter gave us some interesting insight into the world according to…
Tensions between Facebook and the news industry boiled over this week when the social media corporation censored a Pulitzer-winning Vietnam war photo, because it featured a naked child and violated site “community standards”. The dispute over the “napalm girl” image, which a Norwegian writer published in a post about historic warfare photography, ended Friday when…
Illustration by Angelica Alzona In December 2015, readers at women’s site xoJane were enthralled and filled with all-caps rage by Rachel Brewson, a self-described “giant liberal” who boldly declared her love for a Republican named Todd. She described, in rapturous terms, how the couple’s political disagreements fueled an ecstatic third-date bipartisan fuck-fest that soon flowered…
Image: AP Facebook unceremoniously fired at least 15 editors from its trending news team on Friday, as Quartz first reported. The decision to eliminate humans came three months after Gizmodo’s reporting revealed the inner workings of the trending news group, including allegations from former curators that their colleagues suppressed conservative news. Now, as Quartz reported,…
Moderator Megyn Kelly waits for the start of the Republican presidential primary debate in Des Moines. (Chris Carlson/AP) Facebook announced Friday that humans would no longer write descriptions for its Trending topics list, handing over even more responsibility to the already-powerful algorithm. But just days after the policy change, Facebook’s algorithm chose a very bad, factually incorrect…
There are two ideas that people on the internet love to hide behind when they get in trouble, despite the fact that they have absolutely no understanding of what those ideas actually mean. The first is freedom of speech, which countless assholes have used as justification for death threats, rape threats, and other things that…
Facebook announced yet another tweak to the algorithm that governs its users’ News Feeds yesterday. The social network has introduced a new tool that allows users to flag a post as “a false news story.” The move follows a few other attempts by the platform to better delineate different types of content. For example, in…