Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The fake news problem we’re facing isn’t just about articles gaining traffic from Facebook timelines or Google search results. It’s also an issue of news literacy — a reader’s ability to discern credible news. And it’s getting harder to tell on sight alone which sites are trustworthy. On a Facebook timeline or Google search feed,…
Photo: Adrian Ramirez/Getty Images/EyeEm It would be almost rude to close out the year without another flare-up regarding the exchange of human remains on Tumblr, the premier social network and microblogging service for the discussion and exchange of human remains. Last year, it was “Boneghazi,” in which a self-styled witch admitted to, apparently, collecting bone…
For over two and a half years, Jake Beckman has been waging a war against clickbait. The flashy headlines peppered with teasers and exclamations tend to obscure the legitimacy of an article, rendering it into nothing more than a question and answer, a latent pique of curiosity that sometimes never manifests further than a headline….
A few years ago, the software start-up GitHub faced an uncomfortable truth: It could be a pretty unpleasant place. It was 2014 and the company was growing rapidly as a hub for programmers to collaborate on coding projects. But as its user base grew, so too did its problems. A GitHub developer, Julie Ann Horvath,…
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,…
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…
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…
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…