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“When the country’s most venerable paper found itself in President Trump’s crosshairs, new considerations ensued – and instinct kicked in. New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg offers this exclusive, behind-the-scenes look.” Those five words – the facts speak for themselves – continue to be the driving principle of The Times’s coverage in the Trump …
Erin Egan, Chief Privacy Officer – “As part of Data Privacy Day, we’re introducing a new education campaign to help you understand how data is used on Facebook and how you can manage your own data. We’re also announcing plans to make your core privacy settings easier to find, and sharing our privacy principles for …
New America’s Public Interest Technology team – Digital Deceit – The Technologies Behind Precision Propaganda on the Internet: “Over the past year, there has been rising pressure on Facebook, Google and Twitter to account for how bad actors are exploiting their platforms. The catalyst of this so-called “tech-lash” was the revelation last summer that agents …
Farnam Street: “We spend hours consuming news because we want to be well informed. But is that time well spent? News is by definition something that doesn’t last. And as news has become easier to distribute and cheaper to produce, the quality has decreased. Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves questions about what we …
The difficulty with talking about the technology industry is that it’s increasingly hard to define. “A tech company can be a giant data-mining operation turned advertising platform, like Facebook or Google. But it can also be a design-heavy producer of phones, computers and software. But it can also be a design-heavy producer of phones, computers …
Brad Berens, Chief Strategy Officer. Center for Digital Future: Facebook needs a Surgeon General’s warning – “The social media giant has changed its Newsfeed product to emphasize meaningful interactions, but different experiences on Facebook won’t make its users any happier. It’s hard to decide whether Facebook is more like beer, doughnuts or tobacco, but whichever …
BBC Trending: “…Misinformation, spin, lies and deceit have of course been around forever. But what Buzzfeed’s media editor, Craig] Silverman and others uncovered was a unique marriage between social media algorithms, advertising systems, people prepared to make stuff up to earn some easy cash and an election that gripped a nation and much of the …
BuzzFeed: “Last week, Facebook said its News Feed would prioritize links from publications its users found “trustworthy.” The company is overhauling News Feed amid ongoing criticism of its platform, which has come under fire for enabling foreign manipulation of US elections, giving rise fake news, and making people feel bad. Facebook plans to determine whether …
Facebook Blog Series: “For the next topic of our Hard Questions series, we decided to confront an issue that has been top of mind for many of us here, including myself: What effect does social media have on democracy? As someone who has worked for over 14 years in digital civic engagement — the last …
Anatomy of an online misinformation network. Chengcheng Shao, Pik-Mai Hui, Lei Wang, Xinwen Jiang, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia (Submitted on 18 Jan 2018) arXiv:1801.06122 [cs.SI] – “Massive amounts of fake news and conspiratorial content have spread over social media before and after the 2016 US Presidential Elections despite intense fact-checking efforts. How …
Twitter Public Policy News Release: “…As previously announced, we identified and suspended a number of accounts that were potentially connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA). Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the United States who followed …
“The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and mobile security company Lookout have uncovered a new malware espionage campaign infecting thousands of people in more than 20 countries. Hundreds of gigabytes of data has been stolen, primarily through mobile devices compromised by fake secure messaging clients. The trojanized apps, including Signal and WhatsApp, function like the legitimate …
