Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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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…
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…
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…
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…