Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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…
Writer Ariana Lenarsky was scrolling through her Twitter feed at 6:08 P.M. last night when she says she came upon a tweet from new_order_1488, a Neo Nazi account. “‘New Article: The United States Was Founded as a White People’s Republic’ on NEW ORDER website,” it read. The hashtag #WhiteAmerica followed. Racist and white supremacist content…
There’s been much ado in media circles this past week about the prevalence of “fake” news on social networks and what, if any, effect that had on the outcome of the U.S. election. Stories from big players like InfoWars and The Blaze as well as cookie-cutter outlets like Occupy Democrats, WorldNetDaily, The Other 98% and…
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong.Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch AOL announced a sizeable round of layoffs on Thursday. Recode’s Kara Swisher reported 5% of its global workforce, or 500 employees, will be affected. In a memo sent to staff obtained by Business Insider (which you can read in full below), AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said the…
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images You may not remember Milo Yiannopoulos, the failed London tech entrepreneur who adopted a white-nationalist persona beloved by scores of 20-year-old white college bros convinced political correctness is the reason no one will sleep with them. If not, that’s understandable — his public visibility took a bit of a dive…
Can the presidential election result be blamed on failed algorithms? Facebook had taken the brunt of that claim in the days of shock following Donald Trump’s election. Then, on Monday, Google stumbled into the fray, and by the end of the day, it’s own mini-outrage produced a significant change in how Google does business. What’s…
cache hit 276:single/related:d53046d7f2be3c86400086ed9e28a465 empty Ars Technica Live #3. Filmed by Chris Schodt, edited by Jennifer Hahn. In our third episode of Ars Technica Live, your intrepid hosts Annalee Newitz and Cyrus Farivar talked to journalist Sarah Jeong about online harassment. Jeong is the author of The Internet of Garbage, a book about how companies and…
The Google Pixel and Pixel XL are two of the most impressive Android handsets money can buy. Google’s first ever, iPhone-grade rivals, the Pixels are supposed to offer buyers the same premium features as Apple’s smartphone. Whether it’s design, hardware, or software experience, the Pixel is probably one of the best smartphones Android fans should…
storytext 5 stunning stats about Netflix Netflix is once again a Wall Street darling after reporting strong earnings and solid international subscriber growth. But could that make the red hot company a takeover target in the rapidly changing media world? Source: Why Disney should buy Netflix instead of Twitter – Oct. 26, 2016
There are few things hotter in tech right now than artificial intelligence. You’ll hear people with titles like “chief experience officer” and “thinkfluence concierge” talk about “neural networks” and “machine learning” and “natural language processing.” Alexa, Siri, Cortana … the Google Assistant? The idea is, you can talk to your computer as if it were…