Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The Washington Post on Thursday night promoted the claims of a new, shadowy organization that smears dozens of U.S. news sites that are critical of U.S. foreign policy as being “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” The article by reporter Craig Timberg – headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say” – cites a report by…
Here are some takeaways from the news about “fake news”: false stories propelled Donald Trump’s presidential victory, undermined the peace deal in Colombia, and contribute to ethnic violence in Myanmar. Facebook is to blame, with Twitter and Google distant abettors. Whatever you think of these conventional conclusions, fake news is causing us to close this…
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.AP Photo/Ben Margot Digital Content Next (DCN), a US trade body that represents premium online publishers, has sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, calling on the two companies to do more to tackle the fake news being discovered and shared across their sites. The letter,…
Photo: Getty On Monday, a woman identifying herself as a former writer for Facebook’s trending section took to Twitter to criticize the social media giant, saying the solution to the site’s current fake news problem is the editorial team it fired with “no grace, no notice, no care” earlier this year. “As a…
Annemarie Dooling, the director of programming for Vox Media’s Racked.com, is an online communities expert who has worked with Salon, AOL and The Huffington Post. She is on Twitter (@TravelingAnna). Updated November 22, 2016, 3:20 AM All discussion on the role that social platforms played in the election has centered on the type of content…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Say what you will about the merits of Facebook’s Internet.org and Free Basics — it’s pretty cool that they’re building a huge, solar-powered, laser-shooting drone to deliver it. But a “structural failure” that occurred on the Aquila’s first test flight may be more serious than Facebook made it out to be:…
Flickr/Tim Regan Earlier this week, a post written by programmer and teacher Bill Sourour went viral. It’s called “Code I’m Still Ashamed Of.” In it he recounts a horrible story of being a young programmer who landed a job building a website for a pharmaceutical company. The whole post is worth a read, but the upshot…
Anant Goel, Nabanita De, Qinglin Chen and Mark Craft at Princeton’s hackathon (Anant Goel) When Nabanita De scrolled through her Facebook feed recently, she felt afraid. There were so many posts with competing information and accusations about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton that she didn’t know how to begin deciphering the fearmongering from the reality. The…
Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter. Snapchat filed papers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission before last week’s U.S. Presidential election, one of the people said, asking not to be identified as the details are private. The company…
Eagles are waging war against drones, knocking them out of the sky Eagles are no fans of drones.Image: Mark Kolbe/Getty Images By Johnny Lieu2016-11-18 05:25:33 UTC While we all look forward to the prospect of pizza being delivered by drones, not everyone is loving the flying gadgets. Birds of prey don’t particularly like them. At…