"Here are a selection of statements based on examples from a Facebook training document and real-world comments found on social media. Most readers will find them offensive. But can you tell which ones would run afoul of Facebook's rules on hate speech?"

"Now that Google, Facebook, Amazon have become world dominators, the questions of the hour are, can the public be convinced to see Silicon Valley as the wrecking ball that it is? And do we still have the regulatory tools and social cohesion to restrain the monopolists before they smash the foundations of our society?"

"A handful of people working at a handful of tech companies steer the thoughts of billions of people every day, says design thinker Tristan Harris. From Facebook notifications to Snapstreaks to YouTube autoplays, they're all competing for one thing: your attention. Harris shares how these companies prey on our psychology for their own profit and calls for a design renaissance in which our tech instead encourages us to live out the timeline we want."

"Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks alarmed by a race for human attention"

"That Facebook post about a super-secret conspiracy mainstream media doesn't want you to know about? It could soon be accompanied by a link to actual reporting repudiating those claims. Facebook began rolling out a new initiative to debunk fake news Thursday that automatically serves up related links from reliable sources for stories that have been flagged by fact-checkers as potential hoaxes."

"More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they're on the brink of a mental-health crisis."

"How a children's toy can be an identity marker for adults"

"Object Lessons is an essay and book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things, from faiths to intentions, saiths to teenagers."

"Plastic surgery, private jets, toddlers in designer clothes, magnums of champagne - Lauren Greenfield's 500-page photo collection, Generation Wealth, shows all of that. But this book isn't just about people who are wealthy, it's about people who want to be wealthy."

""Consumers have been confronted by fake news, fake online reviews, fake phishing emails, fake applications that install malware, fake accounts on social media platforms-and the list goes on," explained consumer psychologist Kenneth Faro, Ph.D., who worked with Origin/Hill Holliday on a new study that explores how the fake economy is affecting brands. "There's one big learning here, and it's the fact that we are seeing the emergence of a new consumer need-the need for truth." Faro recommends that brands view this need as an opportunity, not a challenge. "Valuing 'truth' can be a differentiating brand platform and a point of view that brands can stand for and rally consumers around," he said."

"Things can make people happier than experiences, a study finds, depending on the kind of happiness being measured"

"Below are some ideas, lessons, and resources to use in the classroom. You'll want to adapt them to suit your needs or cater them to meet the ability level of your students."

""A man with a conviction is a hard man to change," Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schacter wrote in When Prophecy Fails, their 1957 book about this study. "Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point … Suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before." This doubling down in the face of conflicting evidence is a way of reducing the discomfort of dissonance, and is part of a set of behaviors known in the psychology literature as "motivated reasoning." Motivated reasoning is how people convince themselves or remain convinced of what they want to believe-they seek out agreeable information and learn it more easily; and they avoid, ignore, devalue, forget, or argue against information that contradicts their beliefs."

"Continue reading the main story "

"Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton."

"The videos demonstrate the process of facilitating group learning about media literacy. Students are prompted to think critically about all media messages by asking questions such as: * Who produced this media message, and for what purpose? * Is the information credible, how would you know? * What techniques were used to communicate this message? * Who might be the target audience? * Who might benefit or be harmed by this message? * How might other people interpret this message differently? As shown in the videos, teachers respond with evidence-based prompts such as: "What makes you say that and where is that shown in the document?" These literacy principles are often preceded by content questions that encourage students to analyze media documents, including: * What are the main messages here about… (fill in the blank)? * What bias or point of view do you see here? * What information is left out of this message and why? Project Look Sharp developed these materials after assessing how some teachers present media documents to illustrate key points rather than to engage students. The videos include running annotations that explain how to conduct discussions about media messages using the constructivist methodology. Teachers will learn how to shift their practices from predominantly delivering facts to engaging students in rigorous analysis, application of key knowledge, and reflection on their understanding of the mediated world they live in."

"Nearly 30 years before President Trump's press gaggle last Friday, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman authored '"Manufacturing Consent", a book that radically redefined mass media's relationship with the state.  Now, in the age of fake news and alt facts, Democracy Now! co-founder Amy Goodman and animator Pierangelo Pirak have teamed up to give new life to the world renowned linguist and media analyst's famed work. "

"Last month, a headline at Paste Magazine asked: "Did Neil Postman Predict the Rise of Trump and Fake News?" Sign up to the new-look Media Briefing: bigger, better, brighter Read more Colleagues and former students of my father, who taught at New York University for more than 40 years and who died in 2003, would now and then email or Facebook message me, after the latest Trumpian theatrics, wondering, "What would Neil think?" or noting glumly, "Your dad nailed it." The central argument of Amusing Ourselves is simple: there were two landmark dystopian novels written by brilliant British cultural critics - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell - and we Americans had mistakenly feared and obsessed over the vision portrayed in the latter book (an information-censoring, movement-restricting, individuality-emaciating state) rather than the former (a technology-sedating, consumption-engorging, instant-gratifying bubble)."

"That itch to glance at our phone is a natural reaction to apps and websites engineered to get us scrolling as frequently as possible. The attention economy, which showers profits on companies that seize our focus, has kicked off what Harris calls a "race to the bottom of the brain stem." "You could say that it's my responsibility" to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, he explains, "but that's not acknowledging that there's a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain." In short, we've lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us."